I visited a Cybertruck fan who currently owns a 3. He has 1:18 scale diecast replicas of both. The doors are tight-fitting. To open them requires a small suction cup.
Even I, a curmudgeon in my 70s, know that Sanrio is emphatic that Hello Kitty is not a cat. And in fact has a cat for a pet.
Hello Kitty, Say “hi” to Goofy and his best friend’s dog Pluto.
(And if you attempt to tell my teenage daughter that My Melody isn’t a bunny she’ll rip your lips off.)
As my wife owns a Tesla and happens to be hell on tires, I have some insight here. In no way do you have to go to Tesla for a tire replacement. But I can imagine that for most people, the path of least resistance is pressing the ‘roadside assistance’ button on the display. Especially if the tire damage is such that the car isn’t driveable to a tire store.
Does pretty well on some difficult off-roading:
Looks like they’ve made good progress in dialing in the traction control.
Hell’s Revenge looks scary but is quite easy to navigate for a fully locked 4x4 vehicle … just don’t look back 
and (all?) AWD EVs have traction control - which is the equivalent of being locked (iow: they don’t suffer from open diff’s (all power going to the wheel with least traction)
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on a different topic (and 700+ posts into the CT thread) I feel mildly embarrassed to ask: does the CT come with a moodroof (like the die-cast model seems to indicate)?
The AWD system still needs to be tuned for the environment. I’ve seen plenty of AWD systems fail to fully lock the slipping wheel. Not so critical if you’re stuck in some mud or snow, but when you need as much power going to the wheel with traction as possible, you need it to work as if it were locked. Plus you lose half the torque vs. a locked diff, which might not be enough. Anyway, supposedly the CT does have locking diffs, but they weren’t enabled initially. I assume they got those working here.
The CT does have a fully glass roof, like the model (and all of Tesla’s other vehicles). Doesn’t open, though.
Is anybody seriously talking about, or actually already doing, one electric motor per wheel with no AWD / FWD / RWD, no diff’s, no gearing, no nothing? Just direct electric drive at each wheel?
Rivian has a quad-motor model that’s pretty much that. Though I think it still has gearing to lower the RPM. No differentials, though.
Occasionally I see proposals for quad-motor setups with wheel hub motors that are truly direct drive. That’s a lot of unsprung mass, though. And probably less torque than if you had a gear reduction.
The tri-motor CT has a motor for each wheel in the rear. The front still has a locking diff. So, halfway there.
Fully independent motors have the problem that each wheel only gets 1/4 of the total torque (or power). Not a problem when you have traction. But possibly an issue when you’re on a 45 degree incline and only one wheel has traction.
Seems to me the right answer is to have a quad-motor setup like Rivian, except that it can optionally lock the axles together. No differential, just a hard coupler. Would be uncoupled most of the time, but lock if you really needed the extra boost (i.e., so that both motors can drive a single wheel).
Yeah, that’s sure the tradeoff. Being able to couple the total installed HP of the vehicle to any one single wheel is sometimes what you need in extreme off-roading. But is mechanically complex and heavy. The opposite extreme, limiting yourself to 1/4th of the total at each wheel, can leave you real short except when you have good traction on all four corners.
If electric motors produce all their torque at 1 rpm it shouldn’t matter if the truck is at a 45 degree angle. Aren’t we talking over 100 hp per wheel?
I would expect a recall at some point over the side windows. If the truck is wrecked and the passengers need to exit it they won’t be able to with those up-armored windows.
Front-back, sure. But left-right should be fairly simple. Electric motors have such fine positional control that you don’t need a clutch or anything, just a coupler that slides along a splined shaft. The drive motors handle the alignment and a little actuator slides the coupler over.
Yes, but it might still not be enough. Most EVs don’t have multiple gears, so they need to adjust things so that the max RPM corresponds to the max speed. That limits the bottom-end torque. On ordinary ground, you may be limited by traction anyway. But when rockclimbing, it could be that 50% or more mass is on one wheel. So that wheel can (potentially) take a lot more torque than it ordinarily would.
The Cybertruck motors are about 280 HP each. The Rivian motors produce about 210HP. So even without a locking diff, that’s quite a bit for one wheel.
Consider though that at a 45 degree angle, the vertical force vector is 70% of the weight. Which means that accelerating against that is equivalent (in torque) to accelerating at 0.7 gees on flat ground.
The CT (and Rivian) can do that… but only with all the motors going. And they don’t have further gearing to trade RPM for torque. Even applying 10 horsepower to the right wheel would be more than sufficient at these speeds, but that’s not possible at zero RPM when only one wheel has traction. Traction itself isn’t the problem–double the weight on a wheel and you also double the capacity to take the torque (due to friction being linear with force). But that doesn’t help you if the torque isn’t available.
Coupling the motors left-right would be a relatively easy way to double the torque. And for models with a single motor per axle, having a locking diff vs. traction control means not losing half the torque. But you’ll still be limited at times.
I don’t expect Tesla (or anyone) to offer an actual transmission with a low gear, but maybe they could have a fixed low-gear model for those that don’t care about top speed. Limit it to 90 mph vs. 130 and you can get about 45% more torque at the low end.
Right. Traction control is not perfect, but getting better. It sucked in my Pathfinder but is better in my 4Runner.
The 4 runner takes it a step further with the ability to turn what they call A-trac. They call it a heavy duty version of traction control. You have to be in 4LO to use it. It works quite well. My model 4Runner also has a locking rear dif in addition to the two different traction control features. If you lock the dif, though, it turns off A-trac control. Of course it doesn’t need it for the back, but they could leave the front on.
And yes, even with all that and snow tires I been stuck in the snow in my own driveway and had to winch it out.
Yes, but you live in the high country. I’ll stay down here along the front range where we get weather and mountains, but not the worst of it, and as far as possible from Colorado Eastern and Western plains that might as well be Kansas!
Denver gets nailed once in a while with a foot or even more. I lived there for 15 years. The difference is that it melts.
I’ll have snow until June. Summer is August 3rd at my house (All the snow should be gone).
Yes, but Monument hill normally protects us in Colorado Springs from the worst of the storms that hammer Denver.
And I spent about three summer breaks living in Leadville - one year it freakin’ snowed on THE FOURTH OF JULY.
Back to Cybertrucks through. I think it’s fine as a new generation test-bed, but over and over again, it seems like a vehicle in search of a market, rather than a vehicle made for a market. And I’m… skeptical if it will ever be profitable on it’s own, even after economies of scale and improved production means come about. I know Elon brags about all the pre-orders, but once the initial rush is done, the costs to maintain, repair or eventually replace it seem to speak against a lot of sequential buyers.
Which is why I mentioned upthread I think it’ll run for a few years at most, then Musk’ll declare he’s learned all he can and start boosting his “next big thing”.