Chris Ashley's F-150 Lightning Towing Adventure

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[00:00:25] Or tap the banner to be such a good episode. As you know, because I've been promoting it for like a week now. Chris Ashley was nice enough to let us use his F one 50 lightning towing story from the SMR podcast on this episode. So this isn't the full episode. This is only I would say this is about 80% of that actual episode.

[00:02:43] then I would highly suggest listening to barbecue and tech hosted by Chris Ashley and Rod Simmons.

[00:02:46] There's gonna be some good information coming up.

[00:02:49] I got a little preview of what's coming.

[00:02:52] I can't tell you because that would violate a friendship

[00:02:56] but I will say I'm excited.

[00:02:58] I got goosebumps even talking about it.

[00:03:00] Some cool stuff going on over there at barbecue and tech.

[00:03:04] So I'm gonna put links in the show notes. North Carolina just became a country. I was thinking to say I didn't hear what you said. I completely teamed you up. I think this next one's got to be my favorite. Speaking of hauling trailers are What are a resident? Mr. Ashley had a I think it was your first major road trip with your truck and then on top of that

[00:04:27] you were pulling back a

[00:05:20] you had to travel. And I had to go to the country.

[00:05:21] So I was like, you know what?

[00:05:23] You know, this is my, I have never,

[00:05:25] I haven't gone on a long trip yet with the truck.

[00:05:31] And I'm going to do this.

[00:05:32] And I said, not only am I gonna learn how my truck

[00:05:36] handles a long trip, but I said,

[00:05:39] I might as well just double down and, yeah, figure out,

[00:05:42] okay, let's see what all the hype is around towing.

[00:05:44] Now, having picked up a smoker Thursday evening. That way I could stay home with mom and my wife was off on Friday and so I could just leave late Thursday. Doesn't impact mom too much and I was gonna get down to Tennessee probably like two in the morning two

[00:07:00] three in the morning and then I was gonna rest up leave first thing in the

[00:07:02] morning and head on out. So of course every one of them working, they were bright. And I just pulled in, plugged in, charged his own up. And was like, took the bubble wrap off it, everything.

[00:08:22] Yeah, I was like, oh, okay.

[00:08:23] I was like, what? Okay.

[00:08:25] Got in, lady next to me was, the actual navigation system. And it actually was pretty identical to the route that the about a route planer planned. So I was like, okay, this is pretty cool that it's pretty spot on.

[00:09:42] So jumped in the truck, headed yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy how fast they charged. And I think I think that's the biggest thing that a lot of people are not realizing some of these charges out there are ridiculous. And my truck is twice the size of rods car. So it has a lot of battery

[00:11:02] capacity.

[00:11:03] And it would have still would a 350 how hundred miles per hour. Yeah, I don't know how to answer that question, but I can tell you that the longest charge I well, anyway, the longest charge I had was about an hour. And so and literally even with that, I'm sitting there thinking like, okay, I'm

[00:12:20] going to get this nice break.

[00:12:21] I'm going to catch me a little these or no, I don't, I really don't have the time

[00:12:25] by the time I go to the bathroom, get my just do the same thing at your house. And so, yeah, and that's exactly what we did. He pulled out his, no, we used his oven, but it was the same concept. Yeah, I plugged in, ran it through his house, pushed it out the window, put a pillow in the window because it was cold. And yeah, and I was at 50% when I got there around, I think it was around two o'clock

[00:13:43] in the truck, headed on down the road. And so now I'm heading towards Nashville. And so my goal was to get to Nashville, charge up and then pick up the trailer that I bought

[00:15:06] and then bring it and he was so new. He was like, I don't know if it's charging properly.

[00:16:20] He was like, yeah, I've been on here for like,

[00:16:22] I think he said an hour and I'm at like 80%.

[00:16:26] And I was like, you, you mind if I, you know, get a little juice from you guys, they're like, yeah, no problem. We got a 240 volt here. So I plugged in and just let it charge while we did all the paperwork and then, you know, picked up the trailer, hooked it up. And yeah, about, I was, but

[00:17:41] that, you know, that whole experience looking for another charger to kind of fulfill my

[00:17:44] plan, put me about two hours behind. But I was like, yeah, no a deal. I just said I'll give it a good, you know I'll take it all is now that I'm pulling this trailer and I'm losing range I'm gonna take it all the way up to like a good 90% And I'll go get something to eat went next door got some Casey Diaz and then jumped into truck and you know Rehooked a trailer was on my way back. So the story gets interesting So of course now the what the truck does is it says hey

[00:19:03] I'm reducing your range because you have a trailer hooked up said I was going to have, but I get there. So I, so when I get there, I, this place was another, this was like a parking lot with a, had a Walmart and a Costco. So I pull in, I could, I didn't have to disconnect the trailer, which was really cool. So a couple

[00:20:22] of people see the trailer and, and then, you know, they ask me questions the buffer, but whatever, we should be okay. So right around the point where I have like 60 miles of range left, I'm noticing that my buffer is now not 12 miles anymore, it's 11 miles. And I'm like, hmm, that's odd. And then I go a little bit longer, and it's now 10 miles of buffer.

[00:21:41] And I'm like, mm, okay.

[00:21:45] Go a little bit further, nine miles, I mean, as far as I'm trying to find America's concern. But once I left Johnson City and went down towards Nashville, not so prevalent. And I talked to the guy outside. He was like, yeah, unfortunately, for whatever reason, the homeless are damaging the charges at that station that that with three of them were broken. And so he's like to keep messing with them. And he goes, I don't know why.

[00:23:00] And so I don't know if they're trying to get copper or whatever, but they just keep

[00:23:03] messing with them.

[00:23:04] So there probably would I find a place

[00:24:22] I drop my trailer, I go inside, ask the lady, she's like, man, no problem., sorry, I said a message in the morning saying, you know, how's it going? Are you at Toby's house? Or are you on the road and go ahead, Chris. Are you back? Yeah. So, so yeah, so I drive around and I'm like my last ditch effort was a hotel. It was an embassy suites.

[00:25:41] So I was like, yeah, I call them up.

[00:25:43] It's like, do you guys have an EV charging?

[00:25:44] And they're just like, yeah, we definitely have EV charging.

[00:25:46] And I was like, you know, you get that gut feeling, but drive past that, pulling the parking lot. And I'm like, I can't when I went down this hill, it was crazy dark. No lights, no nothing. I was like, that's not for Walmart, you know, shopping center, but I've turned in.

[00:28:20] It says turn right here.

[00:28:22] I turn in, start going up a long hill and then it starts to get a little brighter, brighter and brighter.

[00:28:27] And then I go took the lady at the hotel's information. I'm going to send her something. But I brought the trailer back and this parking lot was empty, large. I didn't even have to disconnect a trailer. I'm happy plugging in, charging and I was like, all right. And I'm still pulling this massive trailer. And as I'm, so I'm basically approaching my friend's house. I'm about 15 miles away. And the truck like went from having like a 12 mile buffer down to no buffer and probably like it was,

[00:31:02] I could see it happen right in front of my face.

[00:31:05] I went up this mountain.

[00:31:07] Like all the 18 willers were struggling. I don't know if it has the same issue that Tesla has when it gets the total zero. So she was like, she was a little hesitant, but she was like, you know what, go ahead. So I plug into like a regular outlet. The truck tells me, yeah, you'll be charged by next Thursday. I was like, Oh God, this is so bad.

[00:32:21] So what I'm like, boy, I was, I'm just going to sit here as long as I need to, to get to

[00:32:26] again, to get to disrupt the business. You know what I mean? Because they already let me plug into their regular outlet, but I'm like, at least we can park it so that, you know, it's not as disruptive as it could have been. So, and right before that, right before you got there, there was a hotel behind me. I was like, come on, let's roll these dice. There's no way this is not gonna work out for me.

[00:33:41] I go out there, they have one, and I mean one lonely,

[00:33:46] little charger there, and there was a four-dealer ship. So I rolled up to the four-dealer ship and, uh, he was like, yeah, we have one charger. It's, and this is another thing. Why are dealerships having super slow chargers? You make no sense. You're promoting your all switching to selling electric vehicles. You know, and you have these terrible

[00:35:02] chargers. It's like terrible marketing. Get the fast chargers,

[00:35:06] get faster chargers there. It doesn't believe how cheap that was. You talk about a deal. Excuse me. She's like, I have to charge you $60. I was like, that's perfectly fine, man. And she was like, I was like, how long am I, you know, before he gets there? Oh, he'll be there within the hour. I was like, what? Well, where am I? Let's go in Maryland.

[00:36:23] There was a dude that I told you that story with a Tesla driver ran out of

[00:36:26] charge. He was there for 11 hours before he got a tow truck. in backwards, we get in it and funny because the truck's like fighting you not to go on neutral because you have to turn it on. And then as soon as you turn it on, but you got the door open, it immediately puts the car back in park. So you kind of got to fight with it, like stop doing this. And it puts the, it tries to put the car in park when you open the door. And then when you also, it immediately throws on the parking brake.

[00:37:42] So it's like, you're not going to damage me.

[00:37:44] It was like, I was driving I don't want to fight with us all the way back, because essentially what I needed to do at this point was map out myself. The truck was unreliable on predicting the predicting its distance. So I'm talking to Rod the whole time, because he called me like, you know, you're on the road, man, I never got off the road. And so I'm telling

[00:39:00] what's going on. He's like, you know, super concerned. But, you

[00:39:05] know, we got to do once I got to this house, you know, it was

[00:39:07] a wrap, everything was fine. So I back with a truck saying, Hey, could you just and definitely monitor your range? Because he's using. Yeah, he's using an F 150 V8 engine gas truck, typically gets 14.2 miles to the gallon. He towed it all the way back from where Chris trailer made it back up here, no problem. And I made it back. You know, I took a nap, got up in the morning, you know, took about three hours and had it on back without issue. Yeah. It was just as easy going back as it was coming down. No issue at all. I have zero hesitation to take another trip in my truck

[00:41:42] because it just worked out so well.

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[00:44:04] Stravaganza, you might be hearing some more about that soon. So do me a favor, go check out the SMR podcast, go check out BBQ and Tech, check out the

[00:44:11] Tech John, that's the podcast that Rob Dunwood does with Terence Gaines and Stephanie Humphrey,

[00:44:17] also another one of my favorite podcasts.

[00:44:20] So I listen every single week and last but not there, it started getting a little bit hairy. Like, you know, Chris did not lose his optimism, but it must have been very stressful to go

[00:45:45] through all of that.

[00:45:46] So please do me a favor.

[00:45:48] Email your thoughts.