Ford Invests $500 Million In Electric Pickup Truck Maker Rivian (cnn.com) 67
Ford is investing $500 million in electric pickup truck maker Rivian, saying the two companies will work together to develop a new battery plug-in vehicle for Ford. CNN reports: Company executives said Ford will still move ahead with its own electric vehicle development efforts, including a plug-in version of the Ford F-150 pickup. They said the vehicle it will develop with Rivian will be an addition to its future lineup. Ford has announced plans to spend $11 billion transforming the company in coming years, including a move toward electric and self-driving vehicles. It said Wednesday that this $500 million investment is in addition to that $11 billion effort. It also said the joint effort with Rivian is in addition to Ford's plans to work with Volkswagen to develop a number of vehicles, including electric ones.
Rivian has yet to start production of its electric trucks. Its first vehicle, a high-end electric pickup truck with planned range of more than 400 miles on a single charge, will be available in late 2020, the company says. Rivian has nevertheless attracted significant investment from many deep-pocket investors, including a $700 million investement from Amazon announced in February.
Rivian has yet to start production of its electric trucks. Its first vehicle, a high-end electric pickup truck with planned range of more than 400 miles on a single charge, will be available in late 2020, the company says. Rivian has nevertheless attracted significant investment from many deep-pocket investors, including a $700 million investement from Amazon announced in February.
Lusting for a Rivian (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have seen the Rivian truck protoype it inspires vehicle lust. Just everything is nice about it. It's got loads of space and arrenged suitably for both a commuter car, shopping trips, hauling, and offroad use. it even has a Frunk.
I've wondered for a long time why, given the low torque 4 wheel advantages of electric drives along with the regenerative breaking that EV were not designed for off-road use.
The problem is it costs about 2X their less sexy but equally practical competitor.
John snow, you know nothing (Score:4, Informative)
2) It looks like a cheesy 1980s straight-to-VHS film concept of what a "future" truck might look like.
Sadly for you it's shape is the holy grail of offroad shapes. Since there is no front engine nor axle the wheels are the most cab forward I've ever seen. Why is that a miracle? because the single most limiting spec on every offroav vehicle is the take-off angle. It determines what size tree trunk or rock you can climb over. Or what V-shaped stream ditch you can cross. This is spec is precisely why (most) SUVs are not offroad vehicles and a Jeep Renegade is. The Jeep isn't even this cab forward so it has to make up for it with a crew/cargo limiting highway unsafe short wheelbase.
But having a good front takeoff angle is useless without a matching rear. And this one has a really unusual jetson looking rear end. That's not stying as you assume but take off angle.
The next most important spec besides locking differential (no need on EV) and 4 wheel drive, is low end torque. And EV's are better than anythng else.
Finally for extreme off roading one wants a low center of gravity. Again the EV wins over the engine class.
Except:
1) I don't need a truck as I don't haul around a bunch of shit or go offroading.
Yet. FTFY.
What you might not need is a dedicated offroad vehicle. This one isn't a compromise on luxury like a jeep is. It's something you could drive every day for years. As your family grows, as you do some home construction or haul yard waste or your mountail bike or go to the ski area. Take long road trips or carpool with 5 people to work. Haul your kids hockey gear or run your cunsulting bussiness office on the road out of.
then finally you use it for some off road trip or you move to New Mexico or upstate new york and you have to go up your icy dirt driveway.
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Why do you need a pickup truck to run a "cunsulting bussiness office" or to carpool with 5 people?
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I car pool with my wife. She has a laptop bag, purse, and lunch bag. I have a laptop bag and a lunch bag. Now, add three more people with similar baggage and the space of a truck starts to make a lot more sense.
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But a minivan makes even more sense.
Comfortable seating for 7, more storage than most pickups, covered storage, better gas milage, reasonable towing capacity (for some models), no step up to enter (key for kids, older people, or just when your hands are full), typically $30k cheaper for similar use cases. Heck, even for most trades a minivan is a better option than a pickup since the interior storage space is much more flexible.
As for off roading, in my decades of owning Jeeps and taking them off road in th
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As for off roading, in my decades of owning Jeeps and taking them off road in the Rockies, I was always surprised at how often I'd reach the end of the trail to find a family in a minivan that had no problem getting there.
If that family wasn't in an AWD Astro, then there was a road there. It may have been dirt, but it was still a road.
Re:John snow, you know nothing (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly for you it's shape is the holy grail of offroad shapes. Since there is no front engine nor axle the wheels are the most cab forward I've ever seen. Why is that a miracle? because the single most limiting spec on every offroav vehicle is the take-off angle.
There is no such thing as a take-off angle. There are only approach and departure angles, and center clearance. As you increase the wheelbase (distance between front and rear wheels) you reduce the approach and departure angles, but you also decrease the clearance in the center, and increase the risk of high-centering. This is why Jeeps are able to clear obstacles that larger, longer vehicles have trouble with.
A longer wheelbase produces a vehicle which is more stable on the road, and it also provides more area between the wheels in which to put mass. The further mass is from the center of the vehicle, the greater the polar moment of inertia, and the more energy it takes to turn the vehicle. EVs with at least a motor per-side can do torque vectoring to make the vehicle turn more easily, so there's no handling drawback, but it does affect center clearance.
The next most important spec besides locking differential (no need on EV) and 4 wheel drive, is low end torque. And EV's are better than anythng else.
They don't have more torque than a diesel with a slush box. In fact, the diesel often has more torque. The only things that EVs unquestionably have over ICEs are efficiency of operation, and precision of control. EVs have much better traction control, torque vectoring and the like, because they have such instantaneous response. There's no waiting for mechanical components to backlash, or load, or whatever. They just go.
As hub motors become more feasible (I just saw news about some wheels with hub motors which do not increase unsprung mass because of their unorthodox design) EVs will make more sense off road, because of their special abilities. A gasoline vehicle can't move three wheels forward at different rates while moving one wheel backwards in order to cause the vehicle to rotate, but an EV with four hub motors can do that. It's even conceivable that we will start to build off-road wheeled vehicles with no steering mechanism, that depend solely on torque vectoring for steering like a tank does. It would produce excessive tire wear on road, but it would be fine in the dirt. Eliminating failures of the steering mechanism would be a big win off-road. But substantial advances in battery technology also have to occur, in order to produce sufficient off-road range.
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As hub motors become more feasible (I just saw news about some wheels with hub motors which do not increase unsprung mass because of their unorthodox design) EVs will make more sense off road, because of their special abilities. A gasoline vehicle can't move three wheels forward at different rates while moving one wheel backwards in order to cause the vehicle to rotate, but an EV with four hub motors can do that.
Also, with hub motors, you can mount each wheel on an electrically-powered jack, allowing each to be independently positioned vertically, and potentially with maximum lift of several feet. With no crossing axles, you can also recess the centerline. For additional flexibility, mount each wheel jack on an extendable arm, allowing the vehicle's stance to be widened or narrowed as needed. With some weight management, you could even "walk" such a vehicle over obstacles if you need to.
Delivering power mechan
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It may have a weird shape, but that angle of attack and angle of departure would make it great for off-roading, although the limitation would be tire size and clearance.
Best photos of it (Score:5, Informative)
The Rivian website is a CSS abomination with hardly any photos of the damn truck. But here's a site that really shows it off well
https://jalopnik.com/rivian-r1... [jalopnik.com]
Notice the nifty gear tunnel, the frunk, the huge cab floor space, and the recessed spare that is not located under the truck (dumb for offroad) nor on the back (dumb for city).
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That's the worst possible place for a spare.
Now you have to unload all your cargo if you get a flat.
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Re:Best photos of it (Score:5, Informative)
Except if you live in a region that sees a lot of rain and snow. Like Ontario. My spare tire carrier was so rusted that there was no way to get it to drop the tire. I had to get the truck on a lift, use an angle grinder to cut away portions of the holding mechanism and then, eventually, resorted to a crowbar to crack the entire assembly just to drop the tire. And of course, the years of accumulated water, salt, snow etc. had corroded the wheel so much that there were spots I could poke holes with a screwdriver. Whenever I see a vehicle with an underbody spare, I shudder because in Canada, unless that spare is dropped and cleaned up each year, that driver is gonna be in a nasty surprise if they ever need that spare..
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My spare tire carrier was so rusted that there was no way to get it to drop the tire.
I have a Ford Escape and the spare tire carrier is so rusted it doesn't hold the tire firmly to the bottom of the trunk. I hear the tire rattling back there everywhere I go.
I used that spare tire a few years ago. Lucky it wasn't rusted too bad by that point.
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Right? They're a little off-putting to me too. But I think if I needed a pickup truck I could learn to live with that styling. I didn't like the original look of the front of the Tesla Model 3 but they changed it slightly and it grew on me. Besides, Rivian is trying lots of cool ideas out with the truck, so I think that's pretty cool.
The only thing about an electric pickup truck is the Cd must be awful. Most people don't need the bed of a pickup very often, if ever, but they're paying the drag penalty 100%
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Less space than a nomad.
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suitably for both a commuter car, shopping trips
As a European I find this hilarious. I did see someone in a Dodge RAM try to go shopping with it in a European city once. After I parked, went in, did my shopping and came out, he was still doing laps around the parkinglot looking for 2 spots next to each other so he could fit his "suitable" car in :-)
Mind you there's no denying that I would want one for a trip to a hardware store. But even Ikea these days offers trailers to take your stuff home and it's not like you can't get a towhitch on a small hatchbac
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Folks, if you manage to live your life with a Smartcar, good on you. If you live your life with a 3500 series dually, good on you too. If you live in downtown Toronto, a Smartcar might be great. If you live in a rural area with vast open land barely any traffic, and never have to go into the city, a truck isn't a problem. If you live in a rural area, you probably have a
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I've wondered for a long time why, given the low torque 4 wheel advantages of electric drives along with the regenerative breaking that EV were not designed for off-road use.
Just driving on a lumpy road can eat up 15% or more of your economy because you're wasting energy moving the suspension up and down. Off-road activity uses much more fuel per mile than does on-road. An off-road vehicle is usually operated far from charging stations.
Electric quads and dirt bikes make sense, you can reasonably recharge them from a solar array or generator. But full-size off-road vehicles don't make sense, because you can't. It takes too much generator.
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good points but I'll note some balancing points too.
1. Just driving at highway speeds (unlike off road) also eats up 15% of your mileage
2. idling an engine off road, which may be a lot of time, can eat up gas but not electricity
3. in principle, shocks could be regenerative, though not now of course.
But the big one is that for very rugged terrain you measure off road events more in time than distance since speeds are so much less. If you are going less than 10 miles per hour then a 400 mile cruising rang
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1. Just driving at highway speeds (unlike off road) also eats up 15% of your mileage
Yeah, I was saying, on top of that. The bumps alone can decrease mileage by 15%. Using RPMs outside of the sweet spot and frequently changing acceleration will consume even more.
2. idling an engine off road, which may be a lot of time, can eat up gas but not electricity
You idle big rigs, not off-road vehicles, many of which are open-air.
3. in principle, shocks could be regenerative, though not now of course.
That's been tested, the only reasonable way to do it at this point is hydraulically, and it involves a lot of added complexity.
goofy (Score:2)
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I agree, the front looks like they tried way too much, but the sides are actually very nice.
It wasn't fords Idea (Score:2)
What about their Jeep? (Score:2)
I thought the big deal with Rivian, initially, was their all electric competitor to the Jeep Wrangler they were developing? They said they expected to sell some to the U.S. Park Service, I believe?
I've also seen them hawking the EV pickup truck recently, but Tesla is working on a pickup of some sort too .... I'm thinking a Jeep would be a much better seller. There are millions of Wranglers sold and a fairly large subset of those owners are people who bought theirs in SPITE of it being a rather unreliable
Self-driving vehicles (Score:2)
Can we please stop wasting money on that and concentrate on electric vehicles first?
That's like if Intel tried making better CPUs in the 1980's while at the same time trying to invent GPUs two decades in advance.
No, we're going to do both at the same time... (Score:2)
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In other words, both, half as fast with half as many resources.
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Can we please stop wasting money on that and concentrate on electric vehicles first?
The resource overlap for these two are minimal. We as a species are capable of researching on more than one thing at a time. Just throwing money at problems doesn't solve them.
That's like if Intel tried making better CPUs in the 1980's while at the same time trying to invent GPUs two decades in advance.
It's exactly like that, which is why the FPU co-processor was a thing that existed back then which were paired with CPUs and major companies like Intel and AMD developed them side by side at the same time.
GPUs in the 80s were a thing too. But let's assume you're a millennial and therefore talking about dedicated graphic accelerators a
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And where is Atari now? They haven't been relevant SINCE the 80s.
I don't know, where is Aristotle now? The fact that he's not around doesn't make your reply anymore of a worthless Strawman fallacy.
But since you really suck at this whole following a conversation, let's assume you were serious. By extension: Atari is no longer relevant, so GPUs are no longer relevant in gaming rigs? I mean that's where you were going with this right?
The OP's point may have been silly and self defeating, but your response is just outright dumb.
Ford invests almost as much... (Score:1)
i found Rivian's website, and... (Score:3)
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wanna know what i HATE about the newer pickup trucks? all those god damned double cab (4 door) pickups with the little bitty short bed, yeah, try hauling a bunch of eight foot long pieces of plywood or lumber in that,
Most people don't haul stuff in their pickups, nor go off-road. That's why most pickups are in non-lifted 2wd configurations with short beds. If you want to be up high you have basically two choices, pickup or van. Most minivans don't have high seating positions any more, and most vans compromise visibility badly, so that leaves pickups.
I for one don't see the point of owning a pickup with a short bed. And I tend to live where roads are poor, so I don't understand buying one that's 2WD either. I enjoy being
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That is great for you. Being 6'3" I cannot fit in a single cab. I need a double cab or something so I can push the seat back far enough so I can comfortably utilize the gas/break/clutch pedals. That is because they make single cabs too small so they have smaller doors for crash ratings. Less door size, less steel to strengthen. Also has to have a bench seat as those center consoles are getting too darned big and tall.
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I'm with you on this. My truck is a regular cab 4x4 with a 6.5' bed. I find the 6.5' bed to be the right size (with the gate down I get 8'+ and it is easier to park around town). The Rivian would be fine I guess, but only if there is a hatch between the bed and the back seats so you can get 8-10' boards in there. I couldn't discover if that was the case from their web site...
Trucks that seat 11 people and have short beds are not trucks, they're SUVs. If you wanted an SUV you should have just bought tha
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to me a pickup truck was a single cab (2 door) and no room behind the seat except for maybe a jack and lug-wrench, and a 8 foot long bed in the back
I've got a quad cab F350 with an 8-foot bed. I can haul lumber and take the whole family along to help me load and unload. Of course, it's a bear to park, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's all about tradeoffs. I need the passenger capacity, the towing capacity and the cargo capacity, often all at the same time. So, I have a ridiculously-long truck that doesn't turn.
Ford Ranger EV (Score:2)
This isn't Ford's first venture into EV territory for a truck. Read about the Ford Ranger EV [wikipedia.org]
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What I don't get, though, is that why do they have to invest in Rivian at all?
At this point in "the future is very likely electric vehicles", why doesn't Ford already have a prototype all-electric F-150 design of their own? I get that there may still be some head scratching on battery systems or other specific advanced components. And maybe the prototype is nothing more than a Frankenstein monster of a gas F-150 stripped of its power train with a Tesla power train bolted on.
I mean if it were me, that $500
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At this point in "the future is very likely electric vehicles", why doesn't Ford already have a prototype all-electric F-150 design of their own?
They just got a piece of one, so they effectively do. They have no reason to do it themselves, since startups are doing it. If none of them were, then they probably would. As it is, it's easier and also probably cheaper just to buy someone.
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I don't think it's at all easy to buy a complete design for a vehicle unless you're planning on building a completely new factory and manufacturing process for it.
Whatever innovations Rivian has, my guess it's a lot more work to figure out how to mass produce that design within Ford's existing manufacturing process than it is to just adapt the power train to existing vehicle and tweak its design. There's much more than goes into mass-producing a vehicle, especially when you consider all the other engineeri
Terrible Exterior Design (Score:2)
If your target audience is truck buyers then the front of your truck has to look like Grizzly Adams and not something from a Jetsons cartoon. Truckers want a truck that exudes ruggedness.
I am not saying that it's a smart criteria for purchasing any vehicle, but too many people consider the image a vehicle conveys as a higher priority than practicality or functionality.
That Explains... (Score:2)