Posts Tagged ‘Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover’

Followup: Ford F-150 Lightning EV Suffers Drastic Range Decrease In The Rare Weather Event Known As “Winter”

Tuesday, December 6th, 2022

Remember the post on how Alex Jones horribly misrepresented a video on Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover’s trouble with a Ford F-150 Lightning EV pickup truck? Well, there’s a follow-up:

It turns out that it isn’t just towing that drains the F-150 Lightning EV’s battery at an alarming rate. In mild winter weather (37°F), he found the Lightning using up 120 miles of estimated range in a mere 60 or so miles. “Towing nothing! It’s just cold outside! What!?!”

Teslas can suffer from the same problem, but even by that standard, the Lightning loss of range seems pretty extreme.

This is yet another example of why our urban elites decreeing that everyone should drive EVs to phase out gasoline-powered cars is foolhardy. EVs may be adequate for an urban commuting environment for people who have garages in which they can recharge them overnight, but is deeply unrealistic for people who need to do lots of driving in a single day, or need to haul around a lot of equipment or a trailer, or just any country driving in general.

And the F-150 Lightning EV seems unsuitable for, well, just about any real pickup truck tasks. Unless you live in Hawaii, southern Florida or the Rio Grande Valley, and even then there are better options.

Sidenote: At the end of the video, Hoover replaces the Lightning with…a Hummer EV! I thought the Hummer brand had been sold to China a decade ago, but evidently that deal fell through, and GM has evidently kept the brand dormant until recently.

It’s more than a little ironic that a 9,000 pound behemoth (the battery alone weighs more than a Honda Civic) with a nameplate treehuggers used to treat as synonymous with evil now counts as “green.”

Important Lesson: Don’t Trust Alex Jones

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

Alex Jones is one of those gadfly media personalities that gets lumped in with regular conservative media, partial to smear said media (“Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, they’re all lunatics!”) and partially because sometimes Jones exposes some of the same holes in The Narrative that sane people do (Flu Manchu vaccines come to mind). He’s more of a loony libertarian fringe figure than a traditional conservative.

Jones gets lots of things wrong, and many of his ideas are crazy, as indicated by the whole Sandy Hook trial. No one should mistake his views for mainstream conservative thought. That said, I think it is a grave mistake to push Jones off social media like YouTube and Twitter. Let him be wrong, and let people point out he’s wrong.

Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover is a car YouTuber (“Welcome to Hoovie’s Garage, the dumbest automotive channel in all YouTube!”) who buys, drives, and pays to have repaired various interesting cars, some of which he later resells. I think he popped up in my YouTube feed because I watch a lot of Top Gear/Grand Tour videos.

Today’s lesson in why you can’t trust Alex Jones comes from the intersection of these two.

Act I: Hoovie goes in with a friend to buy 50% of an all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck. Overall he seems pretty pleased with the truck, which has plenty of acceleration. Video linked rather than embedded, as most of it is peripheral to the discussion.

Act II: Hoovie tries to use the Lightning to tow an old Ford Model-A truck on a lightweight aluminum trailer, and find outs that the range while towing is absolutely horrible. “I used 90 miles of range in 30 miles!”

I wouldn’t ding a car manufacturer for towing eating up that much range in, say, a Tesla car or a Prius. But towing a trailer is one of the primary use cases for a big pickup like the Ford F-150. Moreover, it’s a use case that other large gas or diesel powered pickup trucks handle pretty well.

Act III: Alex Jones finds Hoovie’s video on the Lightning and then proceeds to Alex Jones all over it:

It’s a pretty bad look when you’re commenting on the video in real time and just making shit up that isn’t there. Hoovie didn’t say it couldn’t get above 25 miles an hour, or that it lacked torque, he said it had range problems when towing.

There are real concerns about the ability of electric vehicles to replace gasoline-powered transportation, especially under the pressure of irrational green mandates. But if Alex Jones was rational, he wouldn’t have to make up crazy shit that people didn’t say to make his point.