I’m very excited about Edison Electric’s work truck conversion kits. You keep the body of the truck and put a small diesel generator, a battery pack, and an axle with electric motors. So you can convert existing vehicles to be very efficient, and they claim 8,000 lb ft of torque. So instead of buying a brand new hybrid tow truck or whatever, you do a swap for half the cost and get all the benefits.
And this is okay for /fuckcars because we all agree we’ll still need work and delivery trucks.
Well the engineers at Edison are also one of the end users of the trucks. One of the reasons new tech often sucks is because the designers/engineers/managers are just collecting a paycheck and don’t care past the advertised specs. They don’t care about real world use and don’t think they’ll even be in the company for all that long anyway.
I feel like that can be a good explanation for boring new tech like B2B middleware or enshittification schemes or whatnot, but I feel like folks working at something like an EV startup would tend to be true believers and thus excited about their jobs.
A lot of tech is terrible because the designers aren’t the users. You can be sure that if every engineer and manager at Tesla was forced to drive them daily, they’d have a lot more safety factor built in. Simple things like doors that worked in the event of a power failure or built in fire suppression to give the occupants more time.
The fact that Edison is being built by people from a logging company that operates away from parts warehouses means it will be designed with “In The Field” fixability in mind and wont have anything tied down to an internet connection.
I’m very excited about Edison Electric’s work truck conversion kits. You keep the body of the truck and put a small diesel generator, a battery pack, and an axle with electric motors. So you can convert existing vehicles to be very efficient, and they claim 8,000 lb ft of torque. So instead of buying a brand new hybrid tow truck or whatever, you do a swap for half the cost and get all the benefits.
And this is okay for /fuckcars because we all agree we’ll still need work and delivery trucks.
I hope it works better than this did!
Well the engineers at Edison are also one of the end users of the trucks. One of the reasons new tech often sucks is because the designers/engineers/managers are just collecting a paycheck and don’t care past the advertised specs. They don’t care about real world use and don’t think they’ll even be in the company for all that long anyway.
I feel like that can be a good explanation for boring new tech like B2B middleware or enshittification schemes or whatnot, but I feel like folks working at something like an EV startup would tend to be true believers and thus excited about their jobs.
A lot of tech is terrible because the designers aren’t the users. You can be sure that if every engineer and manager at Tesla was forced to drive them daily, they’d have a lot more safety factor built in. Simple things like doors that worked in the event of a power failure or built in fire suppression to give the occupants more time.
The fact that Edison is being built by people from a logging company that operates away from parts warehouses means it will be designed with “In The Field” fixability in mind and wont have anything tied down to an internet connection.