That photograph is not the truck discussed in the article. The article (misleadingly, in my opinion) ran a 4-year-old photograph of a F-150 Lightning test model when it was wrapped up like that. And yes, that photo looks just like the current generation F-150.

They should’ve just run an article with other graphics, to avoid the confusion.

The Ford CEO has stated that they’ve learned a lot of lessons about reducing the bill of materials (specifically significantly reducing the sheer weight/quantity of wires and harness) from mistakes made with the Mach E and the F-150 Lightning. If they can pull off making it use less stuff and require less labor to build, I can believe that they can get things down in price.

Sustainable aviation fuel doesn’t need to come from biomass feedstocks (even if those are by far the most popular). There are pathways for purely synthetic hydrocarbon production, but most sustainable fuel comes from organic sources (crops, organic waste, or fossil fuel sources). Even some of the synthetic methods tend to still get stuff like syngas from processing coal or natural gas.

Still, developing the processes and the scale to bring prices down is important, and can be built upon with an eye towards replacing the biofuel feedstocks with CO or CO2 feedstocks, and can still spur on demand for more renewable energy (without the risk of the return on investment collapsing).

He said that governments had, through ICAO, targeted a 5% emission reduction by 2030 by using SAF. However, he cautioned: “To be blunt, there is no path to meet that outcome.”

The 2050 goal seems far enough away that success or failure can be hand waved away, from the perspective of the goals being announced in 2021. But they set a goal for 5% by 2030, and it is concerning that we haven’t seen sufficient advancement in scaling up production of sustainable aviation fuel.

I’m most interested in fuel production being an energy sink for excess solar power. If we can set up a system where we overbuild solar electricity capacity far more than what we’d need on any given day, but divert some of it to storage (for use at night) and use some of it to produce chemical fuels with stored chemical energy, a large enough operation might be able to support demand for solar panels without jeopardizing the grid with too much waste electricity (and the economic side effects of producing something fleeting that nobody wants to pay for in that moment).

This whole Hyundai/Kia platform is basically crossover SUVs at car height. I see Hyundai Ioniq 5s and Kia EV6s all over my city and they’re basically the same height as Camrys and Accords and Priuses, just with a hatchback type rear door.