Despite the year-on-year increase in sales, the proportion of purely electric cars in relation to vehicles in circulation is still negligible. However, there is no doubt that over time the nature of transportation will be the opposite of what it is now, and gasoline and diesel vehicles will only account for a few percent of all vehicles in circulation.
However, its realization depends little on the regulatory side, despite the European Union’s efforts to phase out fossil fuels from transportation. This process is more comparable to the potential exchange of the Earth’s magnetic north and south poles.
That is, there are too many unknown factors for accurate predictions, but at one point, which could be a more advanced battery technology for electric cars, the change could happen very quickly.
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| Ford F-150 Lightning on the road (Credit: Ford) |
The current state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery packs, such as those used in Tesla models, are not suitable for almost completely converting transportation to electric, not because of the range they can provide, but because of their high manufacturing costs and slow charging. This is well illustrated by the fact that Norway, which is outstanding in the transition to electric transportation, is in the top ten in the world in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Thus, the regularly cited outstanding Norwegian electric car sales have no significant global significance.
Real gains in purely electric car sales will only be possible when the manufacturing costs of electric cars, including their built-in battery packs, are significantly below the production costs of traditional gasoline or diesel cars and charging electric cars to almost 100% with a fast charger becomes possible in at most two minutes.
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| Ford F-150 Lightning charging (Credit: Ford) |
In the latter case, the construction of a parallel infrastructure also becomes unnecessary, as traditional gas station networks supplemented with electric charging columns can take over the role of charging electric cars on the road, while oil and gas companies like MOL can increasingly transform into energy service companies operating their own power plants year by year.
In any case, until the realization of the electric car Canaan, it is worth getting the most out of the currently available technologies, for which the extremely popular and continuously increasing production number Ford F-150 Lightning in the United States is a perfect candidate.
One of the most significant limitations of the general use of electric cars is that their recharging requires continuous advance planning over longer distances, which is obviously not available in nature when camping in the wild.
It is obviously possible to put a larger generator and a dozen diesel cans on the pickup bed, but it is quite unlikely that an average Ford buyer would have a generator and a forklift that would be very useful for loading it.
In such cases, it may be more worthwhile to resort to a much more practical solution for charging, such as using a quad bike with a built-in generator. A quad fits perfectly on the Ford F-150 Lightning bed and since it is a wheeled vehicle, it does not require four people or a forklift to lift it onto the bed. This can be comfortably done with the help of a foldable ramp.
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| Ford F-150 Lightning in nature (Credit: Ford) |
A quad sweetens relaxation in nature, as opposed to a pickup with limited off-road capabilities, a quad is a perfect tool for transportation and exploring the beauty of the surroundings among trees, in a stream bed, or on a sandy beach.
This quad, equipped with a generator capable of generating electricity adjusted to the performance of its own gasoline engine and prepared for charging electric cars, can also be operated remotely from the central display of the Ford F-150 Lightning. From there, the speed of the quad engine connected to the pickup with a charging cable can be controlled, but the fuel level and engine temperature of the quad used in generator mode can also be monitored.
Developing such a quad specifically ideal for the Ford F-150 Lightning would not be far from Ford, as it has previously collaborated with the Taiwanese company KYMCO, for example, a limited series of MXU 500i quad bikes was also made for the F-150 SVT Raptor.
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| KYMCO Ford F-150 SVT Raptor Limited Edition MXU 500i (Credit: Ford) |
Obviously, this quad with a negligible engine power compared to the pickup could only partially charge the Ford F-150 Lightning batteries in long hours. However, when camping in the wild, when there is plenty of time for charging and for this purpose the quad’s gasoline engine can run at low speed all night long remotely controlled by the pickup and equipped with a muffler on its exhaust, the presence of a charging option at any time can provide security for using the purely electric Ford F-150 Lightning for nature trips.
And although purchasing a quad specifically optimized for the Ford F-150 Lightning represents a significant financial expense solely to increase the usefulness of the electric pickup for nature trips, a quad equipped with a built-in generator and thus capable of delivering its engine power in the form of electricity through a charging cable can be a very versatile and useful tool in everyday life as well, especially for owners of larger properties.
A quad can be connected to many different pushable or towable tools, from lawn mowers to leaf blowers to snow blowers, which can be operated through its generator, so the tools connected to this quad do not need to have their own internal combustion engine.
(I wrote this concept for an article for the Future Factory website, where it was published in Hungarian on April 11, 2023. The English translation for this blog was made with ChatGPT, so apologies for any possible grammatical errors.)