Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k
fireweed@lemmy.world 3 days agoFor urban environments I 100% agree, but e-bikes and public transport can’t help farmers* get their produce to market. I don’t know much about this truck, but if it can fill a similar niche as the Japanese kei truck, I think it’s great to provide people who actually need a pickup with an alternative to the F-150+ behemoths currently available stateside.
*Yes there are some urban farms that totally could operate via ebike/other form of micro mobility, however most farms, even small ones, are located >10 miles outside urban centers, usually in areas only accessible by roads and highways that are currently very dangerous for non-motorized transportation modes. Fixing this problem would take decades and hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars even if the government were fully on board with the transportation network and/or land use changes necessary to allow for a true car-free society (which of course they aren’t). I’m not such an idealist as to poo-poo a significant short-term improvement to the “oversized working vehicle” problem.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Agreed. Whether everyone should be driving everywhere is a completely separate problem. In the short term, people need replacements for current ICE vehicles, and an inexpensive truck that runs on electricity is fantastic while we figure out the rest of the issues.
I’m guessing eventually farmers won’t need trucks, they’ll need bots that fulfill that need instead.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I don’t think that tractors will ever go the way of the dodo and when you have proper logistics, say a reasonably dense S-Bahn type rail network that can also handle shipping individual containers, a tractor and a trailer is all you need as you only have to haul to the next logistics hub and there’s no truck load even 100 year old tractors can’t tow: When you can pull a plough through soil torque isn’t something you need to worry about, 20 horses at 5km/h go vroom.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
It’s hard to guess the future, but I imagine once we have automated farming, things like tractors will look a lot different. Right now, farmers need versatile equipment for a variety of tasks (plow, till, plant, etc), whereas an automated farm would probably prefer dedicated machines for each. The farmer would become more of a mechanic/planner than the one directly running the equipment.
I don’t know how far out that is, but I imagine once we get reasonable self-driving cars, farming will be the next up.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Modern tractors already self-drive on the field, fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis, that future is already there. You don’t plant or fertilise at the same time as you plough so it makes sense for those things being attachments, not integrated machines. The reason combine harvesters are dedicated machines is because they do so much in one go it doesn’t fit into a (sensibly sized) attachment.
You could also have drones distribute that fertiliser but you can’t work the soil with them, and you already have a tractor to work the soil with so you can just as well use it to apply the fertiliser. There’s also tons of odd lifting and transporting jobs on farms, that’s why there’s forklift attachments. You’ll need something with torque, low ground pressure, PTO and attachment points and well that’s a tractor.