Do you have data to back that up? 100 miles is pretty significant for a work truck, especially if youre assuming you wont be able to charge it at the turnaround point and get ~200 miles
... what proportion of american pickup truck drivers are hauling a fifth wheel camper or horse trailer across country where this wouldn't have practical range? Based on my observations it's a tiny fraction of pickups on the road.
Most people seem to be driving pickups empty 99.99% of the time, just so they can move furniture, some 4x8 sheets, or bags of sand/cement when the exceptional need arrives, all locally - which a BEV is perfect for.
>>pickup truck drivers are hauling a fifth wheel camper or horse trailer across country
You would not get a ICE F-150 for that anyway... you would get as F-250 or F-350 for that kind of hauling.
F-150 is for Utility hauling for small campers, or Utility trailers and general work, not for 5th wheels, and horses *except maybe one of the small single horse trailers.
Plenty of people use half ton trucks like that. Sure it's a little harder on equipment and you have to put up with internet commenters taking cheap swipes at you over safety (the heck is the point of having a tow rating if everything up to that rating isn't fair game?) but the trucks handle the job nicely enough.
It should be fantastic for towing heavy stuff relatively short distances (less than 150 miles). Electric motors make 100% of their torque from 0 RPM. This is why freight trains are powered by electric motors, with diesel engines merely generating electricity.
For all practical purposes a motor operating at full load under hundreds of RPM is stalled. Motors let out the smoke (or have to throttle back) if you do that too much. The operating speed range of a motor is not infinite. For really high torque applications that also demand high speed you are going to see 2spd gear boxes for the same reasons your power drill has a 2spd gearbox.
While this truck may or may not (I haven't looked at the specs) have a gearbox expect to see trucks with a gearbox (especially as we start seeing electric commercial vehicles). A simple gearbox consisting of two shafts, four gear and a dog clutch or one planetary and a dog clutch is going to be cheaper, lighter and offer less kludgy performance than over-specing the motor.
Range will suffer greatly and non-Teslas have terrible charging infrastructure. Even Tesla owners have horror stories of trying to tow a trailer and not being able to make it no the next charger.[1]
MotorTrend tried towing a car with a Rivian R1T. It reduced the maximum range from 314 miles down to 175 miles.[2]
Both range and charging infrastructure will improve over time, but it's not quite there today.
Cities are really not that dense. Harrisburg to Pittsburg is over 200 miles along the highway. From Albuquerque you could only get to Santa Fe or vice-versa, and then you're stuck. You'd be trapped in Salt Lake City or Denver too.
Range is the problem. 100 mile range for a small tow, and with the lack of fast chargers… it’s not enough for a lot of use cases. We need trailers to start having batteries or something :)
Probably not cost effective. You need a lot more hardware than just a ball and hitch to ensure there is no jackknifing or other weird unpredictable behaviors. A lot of work goes into ensuring trailers almost never push forwards against their hitches (trailer brakes are in a large part a thing to solve just this problem)
I bet you could get a fifth wheel hitch to play nice though if the software was tuned correctly
