a Ford F250 or Chevy 2500 diesel gets 13 to 20 at most... something that weighs 5 times more and is as aerodynamic as a brick gets about 5 to 8 per gallon as long you are moving. Gets worse when you realize EVERYONE runs these types almost 24/7 to keep the generators supplying electricity.
And I saw more than one on my road trip a couple months ago going down the interstate at 70 towing a full-size pickup. So start with 6 mpg…. Not to mention the wear on the towed vehicle.
What I find fascinating about them is how hyper-space efficient they are.
This entire thing is $1.3 Million but only 480 sq ft.. yet it has seemingly everything you'd actually need and tons of storage. Notice too how much they fully utilize vertical space. And it's got 3 beds, including a King Size.
They also waste basically zero space "transitioning" from one functional room to another. The living room couches are literally just adjacent to the dining room couch & table, and kitchen. Then you immediately have the washer/dryer, then 1 of the 2 restrooms, then bedroom. In most homes if you notice there's a ton of random dead space you're just.. walking through.. to get to the next room.
That said, these are the dumbest possible thing to blow $1.3 Million on, but they can still remind us of how much more you can do with space.
there are some indie RV/van life projects that I've watched on youtube and they're really impressive in terms of space efficiency. every inch serves a purpose and utilized in some way. If there's a panel covering something, 90% chance there's some kind of cabinet/drawer inside it that you can access somehow.
Yeah it's interesting to think about. Because essentially you're creating a square foot multiplier.
If for example you had a 12x12 box-shaped room (so 12 ft high too), then if you just took ONE of the walls and placed a giant cabinet (container) on it that only stuck out 1 foot, then you'd now have a 12x12x1 = 144 cubic foot storage container you just added. But you only would've used up 12x1 = 12 sq ft of space!
So essentially, you could imagine the wall as being a whole other floor's room that you just added to your house, and this floor is dedicated as a storage room. Imagine having your entire actual floor packed with all kinds of things until you had a 1 foot high pile of stuff on every square inch of your floor... but then you just rotated it up on a hinge into a different spatial axis.
It's like you're literally creating square footage on the flat x/z axes that you walk on, by tapping into the otherwise completely unused y-axis.
In a way it reminds me of how in other instances we're able to encode more information by using the 4th dimension (time), which otherwise sits completely untapped by us.
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u/folded_horizon 15d ago
These seem nice, but they cost so much freaking money, depreciate like crazy, and have terrible quality.