Even if Mercedes’ actions actually did “infringe on the terms the rental car company accepted when purchasing the vehicle”, that’s not their problem. They didn’t agree to those terms and were not a party to that agreement.
So you mean if I travel abroad, say in the USA, a country with which I have never personally agreed anything, in particular concerning speed limits, and rent a car, I can infringe all speed limits and the rental company will come up for the fines? Don’t you think that if I use their product to do something illegal and the the aggrieved party sues them, that in that case they could transmit the liability to the perpetrator?
May I borrow your car when I am in your country?
Yeah, that’s a crappy analogy that isn’t at all similar.
OK, IANAL, but I have the impression neither are you, so let’s call it a day and a hijack and give it up.
Is there any information on the type and capability of the CT’s rear axle(s)? Do electrically driven wheels have any analogue to semi- or full-floating? I’ve been curious about the weight carrying ability, assuming these are intended to be used with gooseneck/5th-wheel trailers.
While I don’t care one way or another about Musk or his antics, I would worry about the move-fast-and-break-stuff development methods employed by his other companies. Being an early adopter of an unproven towing product would frighten me away, even though I like the look of the truck.
Your pics show the big 3 + Toyota. While there’s scant difference in these half-tons, as they’re little more than overgrown cars, there are significant differences at the 3/4 ton level. One manufacturer (Ram) uses coil springs instead of leaf, and it has a significant ride difference when unloaded. This is the basis for our choice for our last 2 trucks.
I meant visually, and in terms of basic construction. They’re all body-on-frame style and have virtually identical silhouettes. You’d have to pay close attention to the shape of the chrome details and headlights to distinguish them.
Which should be expected since they’ve become highly optimized for a particular ecological niche over roughly the past century. But they seem trapped in that niche also, and haven’t been able to make radical changes. Maybe that design really is the best possible one, but I doubt it. And the different form factor of an EV drivetrain and supporting components suggests that a change is in order.
The Cybertruck should be great as a truck (except for long-range towing). We’ll have to see how that works out in practice, though. It has great specs, but specs aren’t everything.
Yeah, a good example is the separate cab and box design. It makes sense commercially so manufacturers can sell the same chassis as a pickup, a box van, an RV, or whatever. But it makes trucks floppy, banging and crashing over bumps, and the lack of chassis rigidity causes failures over time and makes them handle poorly.
Unfortunately, the trucks that avoid this are unibody, which is less strong and genrrally limits towing and other really rugged uses.
The cybertruck achieves the stiffness of a sports car with a semi-monocoque design that really is the best of both worlds. The Rivian has a fixed bed, but they went for a single piece sheet sheet all the way from the tailgate to the roof of the cab, making repairs incredibly expensive.
Aside from the $42,000 battery repair mentioned, I just saw another video of a guy who got rear-ended in his Rivian, bending the tailgate and the corner of the truck a little. The tailgate would not close, so he had to repair it. It was just body damage, but it cost his insurance company $37,000 to fix it.
For all the talk about truck drivers ot wanting a cybertruck the way it looks, They sure as hell aren’t going to a buy a truck that costs $30,000 to repair a dinged tailgate.
The Rivian looks like a truck, but needs to be cared for like a delicate expensive car. A Cybertruck looks weird, but it has all the aspects of a real truck: Power, strength, durability, etc.
I know which one I’d pick if I wanted a work truck. The Cybertruck, and it’s not even close. The Rivia males a fine adventure vehicle for rich people taking their E-bikes to the park, but it shouldn’t be on a job site.
Given that they have four-wheel steering, they can’t have a single rear axle. Though it probably is reasonable to wonder about the weight capacity of the split axles. It probably isn’t as much as a solid axle, but is it enough?
Though it also depends on the sort of trailer it’s hauling. I think that most trailers designed to be hauled by a pickup (as opposed to a semi) are balanced so the weight is very close to the wheels, so the truck doesn’t need to support much weight.
Stability concerns dictate that a fair amount of load needs to be ahead of the trailer wheels (implying that the vehicle takes some of that load). I don’t know the fine details, but here’s a quick demo of the stability problems with a load that’s too far back (i.e., less than 60% ahead of the wheels):
The Cybertruck has a payload of 2500 lbs, and a tow rating of 11,000 pounds. Both numbers are at the top of its class. The rear axles appear plenty strong, at least on paper. The Rivian’s payload is 1764 lbs.
The term for how much weight a trailer imposes on the hitch is ‘tongue weight’. I couldn’t find a tongue weight max for the Cybertruck, but an F-150 has similar towing ability and cargo capacity, and a tongue weight limit of 900 lbs. A mid sized Airstream trailer will have a tongue weight of about 500 lbs.
Tongue weight has to be considered when figuring out cargo weight and capacity. A Rivian has 1764 lbs of capacity. If it is pulling a trailer woth a 500 lb to gue weight, that only leaves 1264 lbs for everything else: passengers and cargo. Four people and luggage would max it out.
Lots of great detail in this video with Sandy Munro and a bunch of technical/design leads at Tesla:
They apparently are not using power-over-Ethernet or similar tech due to noise issues. Still, the signal wires are a relatively small portion of the weight savings.
They call their comms tech “Etherloop.” I Googled that, but I don’t think what came up is related. Probably just an internal term. However, it hints at the idea that they may have a ring topology, rather than star, which is more common for Ethernet. Or at least daisy-chained elements.
The power controllers are very impressive compared to previous generations. 48v doesn’t just save wiring mass; it also makes PCBs smaller and more efficient, as well as needing smaller ICs.
They confirmed that they are making their own motors for power steering, etc. They have an interesting approach to redundancy: the front rack has two motors (so one can fail), but they aren’t individually capable of the max required output. The max output is only required in parking lot situations, though (rotating the wheels in place on dry asphalt, basically), whereas at speed (when the redundancy matters), a single motor is more than sufficient. So not much waste in this regard, and the motors split the load most of the time. The rear steering only has a single motor, but <10 degrees of steering, so it doesn’t need as much (and isn’t too important if it fails).
Lots of other details in there; worth a watch if you like technical stuff.
In news of the competition, Ford just announced that they are cutting F-150 Lightning production in HALF, citing low demand.
In more positive news, Dodge announced the RAMCharger, a new electric truck with a battery as big as the Lightning. It’s a pure electric with a fully electric drive train, but they also decided to leave the V6 in it, purely as a range extender. This makes it a true series hybrid, which I’ve always thought was an excellent architecture, giving you the full ability of an EV with no range limits, at the cost of keeping an engine and gas tank…
The RAMCharger has a range of 1100 km…
If you are going to build an EV truck on an old platform, you might as well keep a small engine for extra range.
Something like this is probably needed to sell electric trucks that do real work like towing.
There’s no need for a convoluted and irrelevant analogy. If you rent a car, there’s an agreement with the rental company that you can drive the car, and put gas in it. That’s all. You can’t remove parts, add parts, or modify it because it’s not your car. If you disassemble and reassemble it, it has lost value, and that loss is felt by the rental company. All of the above is true if you (the renter) are a person, or a corporation like Mercedes. All of the above is true if the manufacturer is Tesla, Ford, etc.
Unsurprising. There are exactly 3 of them on my local dealer’s lot, the same place I bought my original F150, and the most expensive one sells for $98K + etc.
Your 4 people must be much bigger than my 4 people.
1264 / 4 ~= 315 lbs per person for their body and their luggage sounds like bunches to me. Me plus my standard loaded suitcase only comes up to 175 & my wife similarly equipped comes up to 125. Add in some snacks for a road trip and we’d get close to 315 lbs for both of us combined. 
Other than that quibble, great last few posts by @Sam_Stone and others about the real practicalities and numbers and features. It is interesting.
Assuming the damn thing is fast like a Model S, I might get one. It’s been years since I had an urban assault vehicle.
‘Luggage’ was a poor term. I should have said cargo. I was thinking about our family trips: Three people, two dogs, bicycles, sometimes dive gear, sometimes ski gear or camping equipment. The kind of ‘active lifestyle’ use case the truck was designed for. Also, if you get the kitchen unit it adds another couple hundred pounds.
Don’t get me wrong - the Rivian has perfectly adequate capacity. I was just using it to point out that there are times where the extra capacity of the Cybertruck could be useful.
In the work place, an example might be pulling a snap-on trailer or a bobcat on a trailer or a horse trailer, four workmen, and a bed full of tools.
Also, I have no idea why I capitalized RAM. It’s the Ramcharger.
that is one very optimistic reading of this truck
a less optimistic reading could be:
You might as well keep:
the V6 engine
and the radiator,
and the gearbox,
and the exhaust,
and the cat and whole EGR system
and the airbox / filter MAP sensor
and the waterpump and assorted piping
and the oilpump
and other stuff (belts and pulleys) that will need maintainance and wear out
you actually “duplicate” complexities and purchase and maintainance cost … plus that stuff has to weigh a couple of hundret kilos and brings your EV’s range down, … 
Well-put. I was stuck in “fatcat urban poseur” mode, was focused on your trees, and so totally missed your forest. Thank you and I agree w your point completely.
OTOH, if that is the “price” of persuading the vast majority of current pick-up truck owners to buy them, it’s money & effort well-spent. The sales evidence shows that the US (& Canadian?) truck-buying public is not culturally ready for EV trucks; they might be ready for electrically-augmented ICE trucks. Which is what that vehicle amounts to.
If you don’t feel like watching the video (I haven’t) here is a summary from The Autopian.
The most interesting part to me is that they quote one of the engineers regarding the ethernet loop, “it’s time-sliced. It looks a little bit more like a Token Ring network in that regard.” Gigabit token ring, but still pretty funny to me, as CAN bus and Token Ring were being developed at the same time.
To keep things period appropriate, the main ECU should be based on an IBM AS/400, though I suspect the processor that runs the steering wheel is considerably more powerful than the early AS/400.
Series plug-in hybrids make sense as a transitional technology, for those folks who want an electric car but need more range than any practical electric car can give them. But electric range is improving all the time, through better batteries, more chargers, and quicker charging, and if you don’t need the extra range from the gas engine, then it makes all kinds of sense to leave it off entirely, because a gas engine, even a small one, has lots of weight, complexity, and parts that can fail. Electric engines are much simpler, lighter, and more reliable.