I wonder how expensive it would be to scrap pretty much everything but the battery and chassis and then build a decent vehicle around it. I’d rather have a smaller EV than that, but I bet the range would be pretty great on that with a lighter build that isn’t fugly and stupid and prone to failures.

Very. It's a lot more complicated than just a battery, it's a complex management system that, despite the reputation of Tesla for manufacturing details and their CEO for...well, himself, is very impressive. You'd need to keep or reinvent most of that to avoid cell failures (and fire).

If you're really serious about a small DIY EV, look into the kits that are available to modify existing ICEs into EVs. Not quite the power level, but they do work pretty well if you don't mind the complexity of the work in strip down and rebuild. And often times they do use used/refurbished Tesla batteries in their makeup.

I’m very excited about Edison Electric’s work truck conversion kits. You keep the body of the truck and put a small diesel generator, a battery pack, and an axle with electric motors. So you can convert existing vehicles to be very efficient, and they claim 8,000 lb ft of torque. So instead of buying a brand new hybrid tow truck or whatever, you do a swap for half the cost and get all the benefits.

And this is okay for /fuckcars because we all agree we’ll still need work and delivery trucks.

I hope it works better than this did!

Well the engineers at Edison are also one of the end users of the trucks. One of the reasons new tech often sucks is because the designers/engineers/managers are just collecting a paycheck and don’t care past the advertised specs. They don’t care about real world use and don’t think they’ll even be in the company for all that long anyway.

I feel like that can be a good explanation for boring new tech like B2B middleware or enshittification schemes or whatnot, but I feel like folks working at something like an EV startup would tend to be true believers and thus excited about their jobs.