Here Come The Clean, Quiet, Non-Stinky EV's

The night before yesterday, I woke up a few hours earlier than I had planned to. I imagine many other others in my neighborhood may have awoken at the same time, for the same reason: because an extremely loud pickup truck was parked at the curb and revving. Honestly, it was rattling my windows. 

I don't know whether the truck's driver was intentionally altering people's sleep patterns. I don't know whether his truck has been modified to be that loud, or if it has a broken muffler. I suspect the second, because the truck is usually dirty and full of tools and the driver doesn't look well-off enough to have a budget for a fancy, intentionally-noisy exhaust.

Later that day, yesterday, the Ford F-150 Lightning, the first all-electric pickup truck from Detroit, was officially released, and deliveries to paying customers began. And, yesterday, it occurred to me that it's going to be much harder to wake people up with a loud engine, when EV's replace ICE vehicles. 

And they will replace ICE. Not as soon as some of us would like, but a lot sooner than many people think. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, says that he expects Ford to produce about 200,000 F-150 Lightnings in the first 12 months after yesterday launch. He also says that Ford's combined production of all its EV models to be at a rate of around 600,000 per year by the end of 2023, and 2,000,000 by the end of 2026. 

By 2035, or sooner, new ICE vehicles will be somewhat rare. If a pickup truck driver or a motorcyclist wants to wake up his neighbors in the middle of the night, it will be much harder for him to do so. He'll have to find some other way of dealing with his frustration and hostility -- like maybe talking to somebody about how he feels, which might actually help him feel much better.

If he feels bad about waking people up, then the new electric vehicles will be a relief. 

Those who are already used to being in EV's all the time already assure us that they now hate the stink of internal combustion, the stink they hardly noticed before, the stink most of us hardly notice, because it''s always there. 

The noise is also always there. 

It's not as if an electric motor is entirely silent, but an electric vehicle is quiet enough that you can't wake up your neighbors with it. The absence of the stink, of the noise, of the pollution -- startling changes are coming faster than some of you think. In some neighborhoods they're already here.

Rivian, Electric Vehicle Manufacturer

There is a community of electric vehicle enthusiasts on the Internet -- we refer to electric vehicles as EV's, and we call conventional vehicles ICE, which stands for internal combustion engine -- and next to Tesla, the EV company which which is generating the most excitement in the EV community may be Rivian. Rivian was founded in 2009, and it hasn't sold any vehicles yet. The R1T,

a pickup truck, and the R1S, an SUV, are scheduled to go on sale in 2021, or at least that was the schedule. I don't know whether the coronavirus pandemic will delay the debuts of the R1T and the R1S.

Some of you may be thinking that it is taking Rivian an awfully long time to actually start selling, but the thing is, it generally takes a very long time for large automotive companies to get started. For example, Tesla was founded in 2003. The Tesla Roadster and Model S, both made in relatively limited quantities, were introduced in 2008 and 2012, respectively. The Model 3, Tesla's first truly mass-produced vehicle, was first delivered to buyers in 2017.

Speaking of Tesla, Rivian has been making headlines by hiring former Tesla employees, but, according to this story from electrek from July 2019, Rivian had by that time hired more employees from McLaren, Ford and Faraday Future, an EV startup which has been having financial problems.

Speaking of Ford, Rivian has received a large financial investment from Ford, which has announced that it plans to manufacture electric trucks of its own using Rivian's platform. That same platform will also be available to other automotive manufactures who want to make their own EV's around it.

Speaking of large investments in Rivian, Amazon has invested over half a billion dollars in the company, and committed to buy 100,000 of their vehicles by 2030.

I'll give you a moment to shake off being stunned by the news that Amazon signed a contract to buy 100,000 vehicles from one company. Yeah, Amazon is big.

All set? Okay, onward -- obviously, Rivian is also moderately big solely by virtue of that deal with Amazon, and the deal with Ford is also huge, both for the money involved and for the fact that Ford will be building electric Ford trucks based on Rivian platforms. But another big factor in the excitement in the EV community about Rivian is that some people who write or make videos about EV's full-time have seen Rivians up close at car shows and been very impressed, and a privileged few have taken test drives and been very, very impressed, and some have announced that they're going to buy their own Rivians.

Suggested retail price? Something like $65-75,000 and up, depending on the options. Wait, wait, come back! Remember I just told you about Amazon committing to buy 100,000 of these? Is Amazon known for losing money? No. You save a lot with an EV, compared to ICE, in fuel and maintenance costs. A lot. And more, the more miles you drive. Before you just walk away, saying that EV's cost too much, without actually doing all of the math including the expenses of running an EV compared to running an ICE vehicle, ask yourself again, very seriously: is Amazon known for losing money? And while you're at it, look into all of the other large companies, and governments and so forth, who are buying EV's. (Not to mention all the utility companies building huge solar and wind installations.) Oh, they're all schmucks? Yeah, sure they are. They're the schmucks.