Great idea there @Capn_Carl …
I’m now envisioning a Lexus pickup truck where they tweak the Darth Vader grill so it looks more like the cow-catcher on an old steam engine:
Those things really should have been named cow-deflectors, not cow-catchers.
All expensive pickups are ridiculous. But there’s nothing more ridiculous than buying a hundred thousand dollar lifted truck with all the offroad goodies and an 800HP engine. The truck is too expensive and too easily dinged to take it offroad, and on the street a lifted truck with that HP is dangerous and handles like crap. It’s also hard to get your gear in and out of the bed.
The Cybertruck definitely looks strange, and it’s expensive, but the money went into things that make it a better truck: 4-wheel steering, hydraulic suspension, steel body, retractable hard tonneau cover, drive by wire with variable ratio steering, etc.
Have you ever had to park a full sized pickup in a tight parking lot? Do that in an F-150 then in a Cybertruck. There is apparently a world of difference.
Need to load the bed? In a lifted truck it’s a pain. In the Cybertruck, you lower the suspension all the way down, and reaching over the side of the bed is easy.
Also, if you need a truck for your job, it’s probably because you are hauling stuff. But all that stuff in your bed is ripe for stealing So if you have to stop for groceries on the way home… you don’t. Pretty much everyone I know who uses a truck has had their tools stolen at one time or another. Soma locking metal tonneau that’s harder to break into than the cabin is a real convenience feature for workers who haul expensive stuff around.
My friend bought an 80,000 truck. He was a nervous wreck taking it to the job site, because trucks get banged up on job sites. A Cybertruck can take a beating and be none the worse for wear. That means you can take your $100,000 truck into the bush and not worry about scratching the shit out of your paint.
If Tesla ever does marketing, a really effective ad would be to take a new Cybertruck and new traditional pickup, then run them through some brush, bang into them carrying tools, etc. Then show a closeup of the damaged body and paint of the other truck, and the pristine body of the Cybertruck.
Trucks are advertised for their ‘toughness’. “Built RAM tough!” None of them hold a candle to Cybertruck in that area.
Still, the $100,000 Cyberbeast is a niche truck. If they come our with a single motor truck for $60,000, that might sell to an upscale mass market.
It’s main competition will be Biggest Dick, with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted under the American flag in the bed.
4 wheel steering might help sell cars as it’s a neat trick to pull in a dealership parking lot, but there’s a reason none of the dozens of times it’s been implemented have actually lead to it being a standard feature the way so many other innovations now are. It’s just not that useful given the added expense and wear items it creates.
Light duty trucks have even had 4 wheel steering in the past and nobody cared.
4-wheel steering in traditional vehicles is complex and expensive, and without computers and drive by wire can make the vehicle handle strangely at various speeds.
The Cybertruck’s 4 wheel steering is computer controlled, variable, and even changes direction of the rear steering at different speeds. At low speed, the rear wheels turn in the opposite direction as the front wheels, minimizing turning radius. But above certain speed the functionality changes and the rear wheels turn WITH with the front wheels, giving the vehicle more stability for lane changes and such. The Silverado with 4-wheel steering can do this as well, but again it’s a complex system.
Also, the variable ratio steering eliminates the squirrely nature of 4-wheel steering at high speeds.
All of this is new. No vehicle has had this type of steering before.
Or a fully 48-volt system. Past 4WS systems were either mechanical, hydraulic, or electric. Mechanical and hydraulic were finicky and didn’t work too well. The GM/Delphi Quadrasteer was electric, but needed huge cables and a bigger alternator. So it was an expensive upgrade, and added another complicated system. The CT rear rack uses the same motor as the front racks, all easily running on 48v, and obviously supported by the huge battery.
The past systems on cars don’t make a huge amount of sense since cars already have a decent turning radius. Quadrasteer was a good system aside from the price and the fact that it was an option. The CT system comes stock and should be relatively cheap for them.
Right, the benefit of 4 wheel steering has always been marginal and consumers have voted with their wallets that it’s not worth the expense or hassle.
But this time it’s different because… Tesla did it.
You both may be right, maybe Tesla has cracked the code here and this will be a “must have” feature on light duty trucks once everyone is implementing it the way Tesla has. From where I’m sitting, this screams of a feature that nobody was asking for, and as evidence I point to every time it’s been tried and consumers have responding with an absolute yawn.
It’s just a bit, exasperating, I guess, that things like 4WS and a locking tonneau cover are being hailed as triumphs to consumer demand when the former has always been a failed tech and the latter has been solved for decades by the aftermarket at a reasonable cost.
Thank god for more stability during lane changes though, I’ve always been so worried about losing control during such a high stakes maneuver. It’s all any of my fellow human drivers can talk about 
With a single big engine that does all of the work in driving a car, it’s a royal pain to make the drive wheels steerable. We do it anyway, because front wheel drive has better stability, and we’ve gotten so used to front-wheel steering that there’s a chicken-and-egg problem to change it. But when you can have a separate motor for each wheel, making drive wheels steerable becomes much simpler. The Cybertruck four-wheel steering, as a whole, is probably simpler than a conventional vehicle with front-wheel drive.
Tesla has cracked the code for EVs as a whole, for over-the-air updates, and for a dealership-free model. They weren’t the first to do these things but they were the first to be truly successful at them. So maybe they deserve a little benefit of the doubt.
I don’t think anyone is saying 4WS or the tonneau cover are utterly revolutionary, but they are nice features and Tesla can implement them at lower cost due to all the other things they’ve done with the truck. Making them stock features drives the cost even lower.
That particular option will set you back an extra 20k
The…fluffing…for Tesla in this thread is a little hard to take.
The idea that people don’t take their $100k trucks off-road because the paint is too delicate…is somewhat ludicrous. There are lots of reasons not to off-road a $100k truck. Branches scraping the paint isn’t high on the list and you can get cheap protective film if you’re really anal about it. All the other reasons apply to the Cybertruck too, and in some cases even moreso: e.g. I suspect the unibody Cybertruck is going to have durability issues compared to body-on-frame trucks off-road.
Locking tonneau covers have been around for decades and the cheapest ones cost around $1,000. This isn’t a selling point or a competitive advantage for the Cybertruck unless you’re a clueless yuppie that’s never owned a truck before.
I don’t think this is true. My Mercedes EQS580 has 4-wheel steering, and it has exactly the same speed-sensitive behavior and computer control that you describe, and definitely doesn’t have any “squirrely nature”. And this is an dual-motor/AWD EV, so everything is electric as well.
The Cybertruck architecture doesn’t have a separate motor for each wheel. Clearly the 4-wheel-steering has to be designed to work with the dual-motor architecture of the $100k model.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Tesla a lot and I think they (and Musk) deserve a lot of credit for innovation and pushing the industry forward. But they (also mostly due to Musk, I think) have been developing an irritating habit of entering new markets by making a rushed, impulsive product decision seemingly on the back of a napkin, issuing bold proclamations, and then failing to deliver. The Cybertruck seems to be the latest example here.
The Tesla Semi and its numerous design flaws is another one. The “alien dreadnought” production design for the Model 3, which almost bankrupted the company and resulted in them assembling Model 3s in a tent in the parking lot instead of the defective-by-design factory, also comes to mind.
The Roadster 2.0 (for which they accepted $250k deposits and haven’t delivered shit in what, six years?) is yet another.
And let’s not forget “Full Self-Driving”, which is an outright scam Musk has been charging money for and not delivering for years.
The Cybertruck appears to have been a concept that Musk and the designers rushed together at the last minute based on a promise he made during an earnings call (I saw an interview where they discussed how they came up with the design on a whim just a few months before the November 2019 reveal). As usual with Musk, he made a bunch of claims in the announcement that turned out to be bullshit. Remember, the whole justification for the Cybertruck aesthetic was that it was supposed to be a stainless steel “exoskeleton” that would be cheaper to make than conventional construction. He promised a $40,000 base price and a 500-mile range in the more expensive models.
Now, they missed the original promised ship date by three years, the Cybertruck appears to be mechanically just a scaled-up Model Y with an expensive skin, and the most expensive model has a range of 300 miles, and the cheapest model (advertised at $60k) won’t be available for another year.
Tesla had a great opportunity with the Cybertruck. I think there is an enormous potential market for a midsize electric pickup, along the lines of the Toyota Tacoma, and Tesla was in an excellent position to capitalize on their manufacturing experience and economy of scale, and deliver one at low cost. IMO, they completely blew the opportunity by choosing to pursue this white elephant.
.
Mazda would like a word with you … they claim they had a 626 4wd car doing the same some 40 years ago …
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/a25848439/mazda-626-four-wheel-steering/
Instead of using a purely mechanical setup that required a physical link from front to rear (like in the Honda), Mazda used electronics and a hydraulic steering rack out back to get the wheels turned. At speeds up to 22 mph, the rear wheels on the 626 4WS could turn up to five degrees opposite the fronts for easier low-speed maneuverability and parking. Above 22 mph, the rear wheels turn in the same direction for stability for turning at high speeds.
i think the main reason for not taking a $100k vehicle off-roading is the good chance of rolling it (especially if you are not a very experienced driver)
… and subsequently the insurance noping out - b/c off-roading… leaving you holding the bag with the repair cost.
I did quite a bit of off-roading and you’d be surprised how often people roll their trucks (95% in slo-mo rolls)
I suppose that depends on whether “off-roading” means climbing or descending a steep rocky washout, climbing a sand dune, or driving along bulldozer tracks across the desert or prairie, or traversing a winding dirt road in the mountains that’s in bad shape, or mudding around the edges of a swamp or pond.
I’ve done all those things, although it’s been decades. Very different scenarios, very different risks.
That’s ridiculous. FSD is an actual product that I use almost every time I drive. No, it’s not yet truly self-driving, but it’s the closest thing you can purchase in any car and it works very well, improving significantly year after year. Are we disappointed with the broken deadlines? Yeah, sure. But it’s not remotely a scam. It’s a functional product, easily worth what I paid for (though, IMO, not worth the current price).
Total nonsense. The 48v architecture alone demonstrates otherwise, not to mention steer-by-wire and many other things.
Doesn’t Mercedes-Benz have certification for SAE Level 3 self-driving? What level is Tesla at?
And regarding the whole off-roading thing, how many people even want to do that? My guess is not many.
The thing is, a lot of pickup customers shell out extra for all of the special off-roading features like lifted suspension and extra-large wheels, and then still don’t off-road them. It’s purely an image thing, with no substance at all behind it. At least the image things on a Cybertruck have some substance.
I just meant with respect to the body construction. It’s a die-cast unibody like the Model Y. No exoskeleton! I agree they are trying out some novelties in the components.
Yes, but it’s limited to 40 mph on highways in daylight and clear weather and no construction and clear markings. In short, virtually useless unless most of your driving is being stuck in slow commuter traffic.
Level 2, but that just illustrates how useless the SAE classification system is. You can get level 3 by restricting your system to some tiny sliver of functionality that you can verify works well enough to go hands-free. FSD works at any reasonable speed, on any roads, day or night, in weather conditions that I have trouble with, with crappy California road markings, and even with a reasonable level of construction work. It’s vastly more capable than whatever Mercedes has, with the only limitation being that Tesla didn’t bother to carve out some useless corner-case where they could say “yay, we’re hands-free!”.