Above, Ford advert appropriates the hyper-loop, heavily identified with Elon Musk and Tesla, in their messaging.
Last week Ford rolled out the new F-150 pickup EV.
This week, the Auto major announced aggressive targets for EVs – 40 percent of sales by 2030.
Total acknowledgement of the ongoing light speed shift – but is it enough?
Advance orders of the F-150 are over 70,000 as of May 26, a week after the announcement. Orders for the Tesla Cybertruck passed a million this week.
At least some of the Cybertrucks are supposed to be built in the Austin area. Jeff Roberts has been tracking the construction of the Tesla Gigafactory Austin since last July, when he had breathless coverage of them pushing dirt around. It’s impressive how big and busy a site it is now:
5/6ths of a mile long and 1000 feet wide!
And they are putting up other large buildings there as well.
Another note about the “terafactory” video: Undoubtedly most of the many vehicles parked near the worksite and all of the construction equipment is combustion-powered. Early doubt-mongering about RE development included nonsensical arguments about it being physically impossible to bootstrap RE with RE. We don’t need RE infrastructure to be built with morally pure RE: It’s perfectly fine to use old tech to design and construct new tech.
What matters is the long-term steady state which will more than compensate for the CO2e spent in the early years of development.
Report today that Tesla Superchargers are arriving at the Terafactory construction site. 🙂
Sweet.
Let’s cross our fingers and hope Ford got this right. Their range figures may be conservative – the top tier 300 mile claim is supposedly with a 1000 pound load.