It’s finally time to put our Ford F-100 “Chargezilla” EV-swap project truck to the ultimate test! I take it to David’s – Happy Yak Ranch – for the firewood challenge. It’s pretty simple. Drive up into the Rocky Mountains to a piece of property where a wildfire destroyed a small forest, and bring back as much firewood as possible.
The old forest-service truck returns to the forest in its new form. Huge thanks to our partners: Legacy EV, 101 Motors, Fox Shocks, and Happy Yak Ranch.
Chargezilla truck is a 1965 Ford truck that rides on an F-250 chassis with an F-100 body. It used to have a dump-truck gasoline engine and a 4-speed automatic. It now has brand-new Hyper9 electric motors and refurbished Tesla batteries.
David and I put on some gloves and start to load 10-foot logs into the back of the truck. We want to stack it high! The rides on its old leaf springs, but the FOX 2.5 shocks are brand new and tuned specifically for this project. The truck squats but hauls about 2,500 lbs of firewood back to the ranch.
How do we know it’s hauling 2,500 lbs of load? We took the truck to the scales to verify.
After the job is done, I drive back home to Tumbleweed Ranch. I drive 29.2 miles and calculate my energy usage. The empty truck registers 2.28 miles/kWh. This is a very respectable efficiency. Our GMC Hummer EV gets about 1.6-1.7 miles/kWh on our highway commutes.
Please check out the other Chargezilla episodes on Youtube.
