moveinon
Senior Member
I hear discussions on here about buying new trucks and their price now and thought it may be time for a different discussion around that. I am clearly biased but I think in less than 5 years that gas and diesel trucks will be something of the past and expect resale values to drop precipitously for them in just the next few years. Electric trucks from a variety of brands are about to hit the market in the next few years. At least one off road ready truck is already for sale. Tesla expects their truck to go into production next year, Ford is now converting a plant to produce electric trucks and VW is expanding substantially their electric car manufacturing plant and is considering trucks. I can speak from some experience now that I have owned a Tesla for a year. As best I can calculate it cost $567 total to drive my car last year (and part of that was all weather floor mats), I spent more than that on gas for my truck before the end of March. The Tesla has hugely more power, better stability, more traction, many times more towing capacity and a lot more low end torque than my truck. In the two fleets that use Tesla cars they have had very little repair and maintenance (one is even only on its second set of brakes) and all these cars now exceeded 500,000 miles (except one that wrecked). A electric truck should have no maintenance for 5 years except rotating tires and changing windshield wipers. My Tesla goes between 310 and 340 miles before needing to be recharged depending on hills and weather which would not be enough for my truck and camper. But if the new electric trucks have the towing and load capacity that is projected and get comparable mileage to the current gas and diesel trucks with reasonable pricing I think our current trucks are done for and certainly anyone buying a new truck now can expect to take a substantial loss upon sale as there just is no comparison on the performance side between an ICE truck and an electric truck both on road and off. Manufacturers are not quite there yet but they certainly are racing in fast. Two, three years maybe. And who of us with a FWC wouldn’t love to have a whole engine compartment available for storage and a huge built in battery system for camper electric. What do you all think? Would you still buy an ICE truck or wait and see what happens with electric?