5 years is about my guess too how long any car or truck is useful without infrastructure, maximum. I just think it is more work to get that 5 years out of internal combustion.
Still, local electric generation is useful for many things including keeping your starter batteries charged.
Always amazes me how many self reliance people are anti solar. Proof of propaganda.
I'm not at all anti-solar, just using an EV for what an ICE vehicle is better equiped to do is bizarre.
Yes, it is better at everything, especially tasks around farms/countryside. Sure, keep charging the EV slowly when there are clear skies, but even fully charged it will not be the best tool for any job.
It's easy to understand why when you realize that any EV trying to compete in a given ICE category weighs considerably more than the ICE average. And that's after the brilliant engineering done to reduce weight wherever possible. That's the tax for trying to compete with current battery tech, nothing against it.
But these over-engineered vehicles give up maintainability and strength just to keep up. Cast aluminum parts which are hard to diy in case of breaking. You are not welding the frame of your cyber truck back together for instance, if it snaps - the entire thing is cast. It has to be, to compete. You can throw the invincible hilux down a waterfall amd drive away.
EVs are the premier league of compromise, and the tech is barely competative with gov assistance now. It's a dying class of anti-free market manufacturing porn.
The best thing a Nissan Leaf can become for a self-sov homestead is the backup battery for the solar setup. Driving it would be a waste of productive power.
Did you even look at Edison Electric and what they are building?
I want to be as clear as I can that I'm not recommending a cybertruck for anything.
It was just an example, all electric trucks have unique problems due to the fact they end up weighing more. The last thing you need while driving off road is weight.
Basically every built off-road vehicle is heavy as fuck so I don't know where you got that idea. Hummers (real ones), unimogs, rock crawlers, trophy trucks. Plus bigger trucks have more payload and towing capacity.
Survivalism isn't an off-road park. It is main roads rapidly disintegrating into fire road quality.
A 1 ton Edison conversion pickup is a hell of a utility vehicle.
Hybrids weight more in comparison to same class. If you see what the Edison kit includes, you will understand what I mean - you basically get an ICE truck, which is already heavy, and add another 800 lbs (?) in batteries to it. There's no way around that. Still a better option than an EV tho, as you can at least travel further than a full charge would allow.
There are already tests out comparing regular to hybrid trucks in different situations. In perfect conditions it looks a better approach, but the added weight is a drag when you start towing or off road. The edison kit would most likely perform similarly.
