I had the exact same thought. When the truck (I think I can call it a truck) got to a flatter grade of road, the driver continued driving hesitantly. So I strongly suspect it was a driver struggling, and not the vehicle itself.
I can understand it. It might be uncomfortable to drive, or unusual. Maybe the electric motor doesn’t give the same feedback a driver would expect from a combustible engine and that makes a person cautious about how much acceleration to give it. I’m not sure that’s really a video showing that the vehicle can’t handle a slope.
That strike me as odd. When you send a new vehicle on a road test, you give it to an experienced test driver. This vehicle and its power behaviors should not have been new and unfamiliar.
The only way your explanation makes sense is that either (a) the vehicle has never been driven before by anyone, or (b) Tesla chose inexperienced test drivers for their new showcase vehicle’s first road test because…reasons? (Possibly reasons associated with ketamine abuse.)
Was that a formal road test? It didn’t look like that to me in the video.
What’s funny is that a Tesla web site was touting this as proof that the Cybertruck was “handling the obstacle with ease”.
Here is an Instagram page, where reportedly some guy named “Stretch” arrived at a place where the Cybertruck was being tested, and whoever they are, they were the one who got in the truck to test it.
Based on that, I can’t help but conclude that this wasn’t an “experienced test driver” performing an official road test. It was some guy who arrived at a place where they were testing, was allowed to try them out, filmed it, and that’s what was uploaded.
Well, they’ve made the point that they’re not a conventional car company, so maybe letting some rando do your road test seems like a good idea to them.
So based on the article it does sound like that hill it was going up was known to be particularly difficult, and it may be that from a different camera perspective, showing the difficulty of the terrain, it might have looked better.
Still one quote in the article did leave me scratching my head.
Cybertruck had its suspension set to what appears to be its highest setting, and it handles this obstacle with ease, with the person taking the video even wondering “is it even on?”
If the performance of a vehicle is such that you can’t tell whether or not its actually running, that wouldn’t suggest to me that it performed well.
Can anyone explain to me how this comment could be seen as supporting the notion of the Cybertruck easily overcoming obstacles?
(In fact I suspect that the “is it even on” was not directed at the cyber truck but was an overheard comment about something else, for example some other onlooker trying to figure out if his camera was actually recording.)
That’s also how I interpreted it. I’ve driven a hybrid vehicle before for work (I don’t own a hybrid or EV) and when it switched to electric mode it was eerie how quiet it was.
Some electric car manufacturers put fake engine noise in the cars, both for safety purposes (to warn pedestrians of an oncoming car, specifically kids) and also because the silent vehicle can be seen as unattractive to consumers.
Since 2020, EVs in the US have been required to make noise (at least 56 dBA at 2 m) when traveling at speeds under 19 mph. So all manufactures add fake noise, although not necessarily sound to mimic an engine. It’s a little odd that the article doesn’t mention this and says consumers can turn it off.
The noise is probably disabled in the test version of the Cybertruck.
It always makes me laugh. Way, wayyyyy back when I as in HS (early '80’s), I had a teacher that laughingly insisted that battery-powered cars would never work in the US because macho guys would never get over not being able to make VROOOM, VROOOM noises with the engine .
Well, it’s hard when you put responsibility for being hit on the pedestrian. There are plenty of ways we could make things safer for pedestrians, both seeing and blind, but that would require sacrifices or changes to driver behavior. Can’t have that!
Well I mean I’m pretty sure I heard that blind people specifically raised this issue as EVs started to become more commonplace. Imagine getting along your whole life (or as long as you’ve been blind) and navigating the world and all of a sudden cars and trucks become silent. I mean they’re already down one sense, that takes away another.
Yeah, I agree completely that the noise is a good thing, given the state of roads, pedestrian access, and vehicle characteristics. It absolutely saves lives, and blind people are among the biggest beneficiaries.
It’s just unfortunate that this is the response left to us. The onus is on pedestrians.
Personally, I would want there to be noise for pedestrians even if we fix everything else. A bit of redundancy isn’t a bad idea when dealing with safety.
They’re not that quiet, at least in my experience. There are 3 or 4 Teslas in my neighborhood, and the army of Amazon vans are mostly electric.
My hearing is not that good, and I can hear them coming from the (I guess) the road noise. Although in theory, the streets are 25 mph so maybe I’m hearing the generated noise. The Amazon trucks make a kind of whine, which I guess may well be a generated noise.
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