When more than one tractor completes the course, more weight is added to the drag, and those competitors that moved past 91 metres (300 ft) will compete in a pull-off the winner is the one who can pull the drag the farthest. When a tractor gets to the end of the 100 metre track, this is known as a "full pull". The goal is to pull a heavy drag along an 11-metre-wide (35 ft), 100-metre-long (330 ft) track, with the winner being the tractor that pulls the drag, or sled, the farthest.Īll tractors in their respective classes pull a set weight in the drag. It's obvious with trains: steam engines are exciting. People start to have trouble separating function and form. It's just like old gear heads that whine about ECU's in newer cars, or people who think steam engines got phased out too early. I can see mechanically inclined people lamenting having to sit at a computer and mess with battery thermal management. Squeezing performance out an EV is more programming compared to the litany of cool things you can do to an ICE: tuning a turbo or cam or rocker assembly or improving exhaust flow. I have an old sports car I like to work on because it's fun. You make the sickest go karts out of pick-and-pull starter motors and old car batteries.īut you take random Top Gear fans, especially college educated ones with less shop experience, and they're probably going to see or hear a consumer electric motor in action and be bored to tears. Any hillbilly drag racer worth their salt knows electric motors are torque kings. Combine that with battery advances and chargers getting built out, and I think we'll see the market quickly shift. I think the downsides of BEV for trucks are low enough that they'll fuel a switchover to most vehicles being BEV, at which point economic factors will make ICE trucks rapidly unattractive. The economics of gas stations make the margins slim already, and cratering demand like that would lead to a feedback loop of closing gas stations, increasing gas prices, and crashing ICE demand. If you assume a more S-shaped adoption curve the percentage would be even closer to 50%. And the percentage of the total vehicles on the road that would be electric would be rising almost 5% a year. I've played with the numbers and assuming a straight linear rise in BEV market share and vehicles generally being used for 20 years, over a third of vehicles on the road would be electric. If you follow that through to what I think is a pessimistic projection that 10% of new vehicles sold in the US are still ICE in 2035, there's a very different issue that will start to impact ICE: fuel availability. And you'll see those that the downsides don't really matter to going electric. People will start to think about how far they actually tow things. But honestly, people will start to realize the bonuses of going electric in terms of lower costs of fuel, and greater power and torque. They aren't completely ready for some use cases, true, but battery manufacturing capacity also isn't ready. It takes products like the Rivian, Hummer EV to sell the folks who weren't sold by the M3P or Plaid. Let's be honest, all the folks who are going to get a Leaf for the fact that it helps the climate don't need to be convinced at this point. Videos and live demonstrations of Rivians effortlessly towing heavy shit or scaling rocky mountains that a stock Jeep wouldn't dream of is one of those things that a scant percentage of the population needs but a large percentage of the population is impressed by. Tech changes as it becomes mainstream and is often unrecognizable to the very early adopters but at some point mass market use cases get implemented at the right cost structure and that adoption S curve swings upward. There are vast swaths of people who derided anybody needing a computer and now they all carry smartphones and live off their laptops. They laughed at LED lightbulbs when they first came out, but now they have LED lighting all under their lifted trucks with LED headlights.
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