I get that some people have use cases for a vehicle that isn’t electric.This might be splitting hairs but the poll in the link gives the option of “plug in hybrid” as a replacement of an EV and I don’t consider a EREV plug in hybrid (Harvester) to be the same as current “plug in hybrids” and there are no current offerings for a plug in hybrid truck.
We owned a Mach-e and Ioniq5, approx 120,000 miles combined in the last 3 years and were overall very satisfied with them. Our needs changed and we need a truck to do “truck stuff” 10% of the time. I almost traded the Mach-e for a Silverado EV, but opted for a gas truck instead because the shortcomings of an EV truck over a gas truck were too much to ignore for our use case. I consider EV trucks to be local only vehicles when doing “truck stuff”. Road trips in an EV in cold weather can be challenging, decreased range, increased charge times, and the greater likelihood of running into a que at DC fast chargers and those concerns are magnified when doing high demand “truck stuff”. EVs are great and vastly superior 90% of the time but it doesn’t make $ense to me to own 3 vehicles to meet 100% of my needs, even if I have to now burn fossil fuel instead of electrons to meet my local needs and believe me I HATE firing up the big V8 gas engine in a 3 ton truck to haul my 180lb butt 30 miles to work.
Enter the EREV, you get all the advantages of an electric drivetrain, you can still meet 90% of your needs electrically and now you have the ICE as a backup to meet the last 10%. So even though I am a proponent of EVs in general, I am firmly in the switching to harvester camp, at least until the truck stuff performance of EV trucks matches gas/diesel.
And not directed entirely at you but can we please stay away from the climate change debate.
I tow, haul, do “truck stuff,” and work on the ranch with the Lightning all the time. I don’t have a boat or travel trailer, but have towed my tractor to job sites out of town and haul water. The few times I’ve done 500-mile or more towing with any truck in the past 15 years are rare enough that I’m willing to spend a few more stops to charge while doing that towing. Last year, I towed a trailer 500 miles across the Arizona desert in summer from LA to NAZ. It only added one extra stop and that was only because there was a fire on the highway that caused us to stop for an hour and I really needed to pee so drove a lot faster than I should have once we got going again.
With road trips, I haven’t seen a wait time at a DCFC in ages. I’ll be doing one of our regular holiday road trips of about 2,000 miles soon. It’s usually a 2-day drive, but this time we’ll stop for a couple of days about 2/5 of the way and then continue on. We may decide to do the trip home in one day, depending on how we’re feeling. The drive includes going through the Sierra Nevadas, snow storms, etc. We’ve never had a problem with the trip in either of our EVs.
It gets wintry here, but not midwest cold. The lowest I have recorded on our local weather station is -15 F, but that was once, overnight, and is an anomaly. So while we get a lot more snow than most cities in the US, we don’t get the bitter cold. Snow is a detriment to range, but not as big of one as cold.
I do consider EREVs and plugin-hybrids to be the same family. It’s just that one finally has a reasonably-sized battery for longer drives.
If replacing an all-gas with an EREV meets your needs, it makes total sense to do it. That 30 mile drive to work will be a lot less gassy with an EREV.