(Nathan Lane played Timon, FTR. Ernie Sabella is who you probably meant.)
Well there’s another one of those pesky regulations the DOGE needs to finish un-regulating with a chain saw.
So which of these is the most probable?
- The Cybertruck is so incredibly well engineered that, through thousands of intelligent sensors, it will not allow itself to be put into drive if it detects that its structural integrity is compromised. And, also, that it’s smart enough to tell that the intent is not just to drive it a few feet away from an accident where, for instance, another vehicle may be on fire.
– OR –
- That the Cybertruck is a piece of shit.
I realize you do not drive newish cars.
Many (most?) newish cars will not drive after a significant accident. The computer refuses to start the engine. Because the car “knows” it’s been damaged, but does NOT have all those sensors to know whether the damage is minor or major, nor whether the intent is to drive it 20 feet out of traffic or for the rest of the day.
Hit harder than x G’s? Deployed more than n airbags? No mo’ go.
So it’s an inert lump until towed to a shop where the computers can be reset & the damage repaired.
As to the CT specifically, the “two dozen error messages” suggests very highly that the car “knew” it had been damaged. The actual damage could have been as simple as a wiring bundle torn away that contained data and control cabling leading to one portion of the battery pack.
If enough of those messages are about battery pack integrity, or even just battery pack monitoring, it makes complete sense the computer will simply refuse to turn on the high current drivetrain rather than the low current display & compute functions. That’s the functional equivalent of refusing to start the engine on an ICE.
Now is the CT a piece of shit? Yeah, mostly. Does this behavior prove that? Not even remotely.
They actually go into this in the video. There are definitely situations where a significant fraction of the total weight of the trailer is suspended from the hitch – going over a steep hill or a big pothole can put the full weight, or close to it, onto the hitch. And, that’s leaving aside dynamic forces from turning, bouncing, etc.
They compared the Telsa with a 20-year-old Ford pickup that had already had its trailer hitch damaged from some other accident, and they couldn’t break the Ford. The loader had actually lifted itself off the ground, so they couldn’t put any more weight on the Ford.
I disagree, even though this may indeed be the world we live in, though I maintain that all of this is due to Elmo’s hurried, haphazard, and defective engineering.
I know that you’re a fan of fancy high-tech cars that do everything for you (or don’t, as their computers see fit). I’m a fan of cars where, when you step on the gas pedal, they go. I appreciate the absence of carburetors in favour of computer-controlled fuel injection, but that’s about as far as I’ll go. People have been fried in their Teslas because they couldn’t figure out how to open the door in an emergency, FFS! “Open Sesame!” and “Alexa, open the door!” are such fun, except when the car is on fire.*
So your vehicle knows what’s good for you better than you do? I appeal to your now-retired airline career with these two very familiar anecdotes: Lion Air flight 610, and Ethiopian Airlines flight 602.
* I’m exaggerating here, of course. The point is that the Teslas has fancy-pants door-opening mechanisms and lacked simple, obvious, mechanical ones because they weren’t “cool”.
When the car knows it’s damaged, it knows it’s not safe to energize. I’m amazed anyone would expect otherwise. You’d rather the lithium batteries catch fire at highway speeds?
No, I am not generally a fan of Whistling Diesel.
But he likes to abuse vehicles for fun. And he did a video where the ass end of a CT hit on a concrete object as it drove off said object, and the whole hitch broke off. It was absolutely abuse, but he pointed out how stupid the Al frame mounting was.
He was excoriated by Tesla fanboys.
So to prove his point, he used an excavator to absolutely abuse the hitch of an F-150. The F-150 was obviously a wreck by the end, but the hitch did not fail.
OK. Ignorance fought. I read the SAE standard pdf and, sure enough, it looks like the hitch should withstand 1.3 x trailer GVW in vertical compression. (The limits on longitudinal compression and tension are, as I imagined they would be, much higher.) I love the SDMB.
Nitpick: 20 year old Dodge 3/4 ton truck. I used to own one from that generation. It was pretty heavily built, but my friend’s Ford built in the 90s seemed to be more heavily built.
Ah, thanks for the correction.
Apparently, all deliveries of Cybertrucks are now on hold because of the trim piece falling off issue:
The cantrail trim is decorative trim that covers the roof ledge of a vehicle.
To be honest, decorative parts have always been a failure on this vehicle.
All this fuss, over something Gorilla Glue could easily fix.
Now I want to see a commercial with a gorilla smashing up a Cybertruck, and Elon comes out to see what’s causing all the racket and gets absolutely wrecked.
As opposed to the smashing success of the rest of the vehicle’s systems?
Sometimes I think Cybertruck must set some kind of record in poor build quality.
Is this true?
Because the one time I rode in my coworker’s Tesla, when I got out I used (what I assume was) the emergency exit handle. he nearly had a shitfit. Told me I could have broken the window. Oops, that would have cost me!
Point being, I just used what I thought was the normal handle. it was right there. It was more obvious than…whatever I should have been doing.
Is that a feature in every Tesla though?
And if your coworker was worried about you breaking the window, I can assume it wasn’t a Cybertruck.
Indeed. He’s one of the “every Tesla owner I know is a liberal” people I mentioned previously. He bought it because it’s a good car. Mostly.
Yes, for years now. And the Muxk won’t fix it because door handles don’t look good, so they must retract and only come out electrically. Which they don’t, sometimes, in an emergency like a crash with fire.
Happened in France too:
And in Germany:
In Canada:
It is getting more difficult to google, when you enter “burning tesla” the search engine is overwhelmed by arson now. But it has happened repeteadly all over the world and the Muxk does not want to fix it. Still waiting for a class action to start some day.