I want to see towing in the mountains here, how far it will really go towing my travel trailer. It will probably need to stop and be recharged so often that a normal one day drive would take a week.
It'll certainly get less than rated range, but you can expect that whatever percentage hit you take in your gas mileage will be about the same hit to range, or somewhat less if you have a lot of stop & go or hills because of regen.
I spent quite some time wondering if Elon wasn’t pranking us with a prop from Blade Runner*, and would shortly reveal the real Tesla Pickup.
Me too! I never actually saw Blade Runner but I was wondering if it was an actual thing from the movie and then they were going to bring the real one out.
Sadly, the need is there, like Musk said in the beginning of the presentation, to electrify pickup trucks to solve the energy problem in the US. Our top three vehicles by sales in this country are all pickups. So, he articulated the need quite well - And then showed us a product that will not meet that need because nobody who buys a Big Three pickup today is going to buy a Cybrtrk or whatever it's going to be called.
The demo of the strength of the glass deserves to be in the Failed Demo Hall of Fame. Like a lawyer should never ask a witness a question he doesn’t know the answer to, a CEO shouldn’t have metal balls hurled at his truck’s windows until he KNOWS the outcome. Especially if the prototype is destined to sit behind him for the balance of the demo event. SAD!
Yep... But clearly the glass that wasn't on the truck itself did not break, so I saw some speculation that they had already tested throwing the metal ball at it several times, and just had the bad luck that the time it finally broke was during the demo. Definitely not one of their finer moments, though.
Maybe Tesla should focus on improving its build consistency, service and part availability, and model 3 production numbers before embarking on its third yet-to-be-released project (the roadster and 18 wheeler truck remember)?
Except they have. They've done a couple of test runs in Gigafactory 3 (China) already, with production slated to start there by year end, and I haven't heard of any problems with build consistency in several months now. "Tesla got a little better at something" isn't news, but if you look at where they are now versus where they were a year, two years, three years ago they've made great strides every year.
My opinion (and I'm obviously a Tesla fan). Ok, ugly. But put a wrap on it.
Lipstick on a pig. Nobody makes a de-uglifying wrap.
a) You can't put a 5th wheel or gooseneck hitch on that bed.
Why not?
c) Can't put a camper over that bed. The haul capacity is also too small for most campers due to the SRW.
Are you referring to fifth wheels, or regular travel trailers? I don't know much about the fifth wheel ones because that's not what I want, but it seems like it should handle a regular ball-hitch travel trailer OK.
The steering wheel isn’t for aerodynamics. That 100% aesthetics. And unusable.
Why?
It'll certainly be hard to pack an air bag in there, but we all "drive" things in the sky with yoke-type steering wheels, I don't know why you couldn't make it work in a ground-pounder. Add some power boost and give it the same travel as most airplanes...
Lets hear some range numbers while it's actually towing... Or did I miss that?
How would you rate that, though? It depends greatly on what you're towing.
Anyone have the Cd number on this thing?
I'm pretty curious about that as well. Tesla normally makes their vehicles super low drag so they can get more range out of smaller batteries. With all those angles, it doesn't look low drag at all... But it does kind of have a stealth fighter look to it, so who knows.
My GF last night said to me "Musk has never once gotten his crap together, so when he says late 2022, that in reality is 2035 to 2040".
Even fanboys give him crap for "Elon Time" but it seems he's learning his lesson. They've already moved up the Model Y release date. This may make it out in 2022.
For us a typical trip is 3 dirt bikes in the truck bed, and then hooked up to our 30' Arctic Fox trailer, full of food, water, propane, clothes etc it is usually around 9200 lbs ready to go, 3 people and our great dane in the cab. We have many roads that have long mountain passes that are extremely steep, no not those 8% grades that some people call steep, but they really aren't. In winter when its just dumped 2 feet of snow, i hook up to the enclosed 4 place snowmobile trailer, which has our 3 long track mountain sleds in it, and I tow them to the extreme mountain trail unloading areas, where we go ride the steep and deep. I doubt that it would ever make it to the riding area, much less make it back to.
Why not?
If i did have one of those, my first stop would be to a paint shop, and have it painted as a shark, it might not look so ugly if painted like a mad shark.
That's a great idea!
What I don’t understand is, there were some really nice Tesla Truck renderings online. What the heck was wrong with those? It’s like the chief designer took a boyhood love of LEGO cars and pinewood derby racers and thought a full scale version would be nice.
Yes. I was kinda hoping for this one, and the invite seemed to indicate something similar:
Elon just confirmed on Twitter that this will be an option:
View attachment 80002
That took at least one person I know from "OMG that is the ugliest thing ever" to placing an order for one in the space of under an hour. Might be cool for Oshkosh.
I hope he equips it with a solar panel if anyone is going to take it into the back country.
Current solar panel technology that could fit on the cybertruck is hardly going to make a dent in Tesla battery capacity. You are looking at a few hundred watts of power at best for 6 hours of good sun a day on a fixed panel into a battery of tens of thousand of watt-hours.
I analyzed this idea on a Model S a while back, and came to the conclusion that even if you covered the entire surface of the car with solar panels, you'd only get about 7 miles of range per DAY if it was parked in full sun from sunrise to sunset. Unless you have a giant, roll-up solar array that you can unfurl in the wilderness (and not under trees), this idea is a non-starter.
