So was the Roadster, and the Model S, and the Model 3. Tesla is where it is because it created markets, not followed them.
There is a definite use case for a cheap electric contractor truck for city and suburban use. For that purpose, the odd look of the Cybertruck may be a benefit, because contractors often use their vehicles as rolling billboards. A truck that draws attention might be perfect, so pong as you don’t give up utility.
Cybertruck is still too expensive to be widely adopted for that purpose, and electric trucks are receiving a lot of scrutiny now because of mileage issues when actually doing work. So it could fail, or it could be a pathfinder for a V2 truck that is cheaper. From what I’ve heard, though, they have orders for every truck they can build for the next couple of years.
But I suspect almost all ‘zero emissions’ trucks will wind up being PHEVs like the RAMCharger. This will be especially true in colder climates.
Maybe, but that’s one area where there is going to be a lot of competition. Ford’s E-Transit, for example. Electric city delivery vehicles are a no-brainer.
Tesla’s Semi is turning out to be quite useful in a role like that. Pepsi is using them in San Fransisco to deliver beverages to city distribution hubs from the plant just outside the city. An electric Semi is perfect for that. For long haul, not so much.
In that vein, electric trucks are going to be a hard sell to anyone who drives them long distances. If your job requires you to tow a trailer to a job site 50 miles away and back, you are going to struggle with an electric truck. But if you are a foreman driving between multiple residential construction projects in the city during the day, along with some light delivery of materials, an ele ctric truck might be perfect.
~150 mi is a fantastic range for a delivery van, considering that it does best in stop-and-go.
I appreciate seeing the Rivian vans in my complex–they’re quiet and don’t smell. They seem to spend about half an hour driving about 1000 feet around the complex, stopping every 100 feet when they get to a new building and then spending a few minutes dropping packages off to multiple addresses. There are several complexes around here and it wouldn’t surprise me if an entire day’s deliveries require under 20 miles of range.
Not everyone lives in dense areas like this, but it still covers a large segment of the population.
Yeah, there are plenty of market niches for vehicles that don’t actually travel far but have to carry loads.
One of my chores back on the farm involved ‘fencing’. You drive the pickup along the fenceline in the pastures, looking for fences damaged by the animals or weather. Then you stop the truck, repair the damage and continue. The truck spends a lot of time idling, but in two hours might only drive a handful of miles. You needed a truck for ground clearance and also to carry tools, fenceposts, a role of barbed wire, etc. It’s also a summer activity. An electeic truck is perfect for that role.
In fact, a lot of people now use small utility vehicles for that work, some of which are electric, but a lot of farmers can’t afford special vehicles for each task and need general purpose trucks. A Cybertruck might be ideal for that. The Rivian seems a little ‘light-duty’ to me. More of a sports adventure vehicle than a working truck.
That’s where I think the Cybertruck is a huge miss. My experience is that there are a lot more contractors (painters, plumbers, HVAC, etc.) that are using vans instead of pickup. A van is fully enclosed in inclement weather & opening a rear door instead of a top one doesn’t get other stuff wet. It also has a larger side & rear area for plastering your name/phone # on. Even more importantly, contractor vans aren’t used as the family vehicle on the weekend in them so you wouldn’t have the lack of range issue when you’re towing your boat or snow mobiles to the weekend house. Making it a van instead of a pickup would have insured more sales for more years than what I expect this will end up getting.
From what I’ve seen, the Rivian van has many advantages aside from low-noise and low emissions. This YouTube video shows the insides of the vehicle. It seems to be designed for efficient use by the driver.
Maybe it’s geographic. Around here, contractors that need rhat much space tow a trailer Vans aren’t that common except for specialty contractors like vacuum services or roto-rooters or other who need large machinery on the job site.
I was thinking of more like handymen, roofers, carpenters, foremen, etc. Not specialty businesses woth traveling machinery.
$3000 so you can sleep in the “tent” on the back of your Cybertruck. Sounds more complicated than a regular tent, it doesn’t look all that roomy, and I’ll bet it sells like crazy.
The self-leveling mode will be convenient when it actually ships (well, if it does, but Tesla is pretty good about non-FSD software features like this).
But the lack of a pass-thru for the rear window make this much less useful than it could be. Having climate control in the tent would be super nice, and it has enough battery to go for days. Alas, there’s no way to get cabin air into the tent.
Would have been nice if the fabric was a little more taut. It’s not worse than any other tent, but for that much scratch, and something designed to match the aesthetic, it doesn’t look as nice as it should.
That thing is better than I thought it would be. Car tents are all crazy expensive. But this has some innovative features:
The tent fits into a box that sits at the top of the bed, so you can still put long items in. It only uses up about 1/6 of the bed. If you get the range extender, it fits under the tent box.
The assembled tent sits above 2/3 of the bed and has its own floor. So you still have 2/3 of the bed available for pther gear whether or not the tent is up, amd you don’t have to sleep on cold steel.
It’s a double-walled tent with the inner tent that looks mildly insulated.
It has a passthrough and cables to plug into the power outlet in the bed, making it a fully heated and powered tent. The Cybertruck has more than enough power to keep the tent heated and powered for probably a week.
It’s got an inflatable frame for fast setup.
I could see this being used for weekend camping teips, or as a place to sleep when working a remote job site for a short time. Slide a table under the tent in the bed and some folding chairs and you could set up a nice tailgate kitchen area under the awning. The whole thing with a camp kitchen and accessories would be less than half the price of Rivian’s kitchen accessory.
It’s a downright frugal way to go compared to a basecamp trailer, that being a small trailer with a sleeping space for two that you can’t stand up in. The Airstream Basecamp is $46,000. There are other similar trailers, but all are over $20,000.
lol, no. You can find scores of car tents that are way cheaper than that. This 5.5’ bed tent is $250, is waterproof, and fits just fine… and there are tons more like it.
I meant the similar factory add-on tents. I have an aftermrket car tent that goes over my hatch, and I paid $350 for it. ut it’s in a different class. It doesn’t have a hard floor, it sits on the ground, it’s not unique to that vehicle, etc.
Honda has a rooftop tent called the Passport. It starts at $2700.
The Rivian tent is $2800.
I’m not thrilled with putting a tent on top of the cab. That is awfully exposed to the elements, and awfully visible. And it isn’t insulated.
You know, I read the actual post about the Basecamp linked by @Maserschmidt - and to be honest, the person writing it is in a pretty pro-CT forum and makes a metric TON of excuses about the difficulties of installing, the cost, the petty requirements about the install, the damage DONE during the install, and the fact that the software to suport it WASN’T EVEN AVAILABLE. And despite the 6 inch think rose colored glasses they applied given all of that, the best they could say is this:
FWIW, at this point my overall take on the Basecamp is similar to my take on the CT in general: it’s awesome and brilliant in many ways but flawed in a few areas. That said, I absolutely love my CT and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it but the jury is still out on the Basecamp because I’m not yet convinced that the brilliant elements outweigh the areas that need improvement.
Again, given the sheer number of difficulties and “minor” complaints in that review, I think they’re working through serious cognative dissonance and efforts to justify it, and even with all the psychological effort involved didn’t quite manage.
I’m not disputing that person’s experience. I’m just saying that it seems like a good concept, and the price doesn’t seem out of line compared to similar offerings from other auto manufacturers.
This is V1. They’ll look at all the difficulties peolle have in the real world and incorporate it into V2.
Any idea what range this uses per time unit? If HVAC is using one mile per hour that’s 35ish miles (70 hrs / 2 for trip there & back home) closer than your camesite needs to be on a holiday weekend for you to get there & back home again
It depends on how much heat you need to heat that tent. Let’s say a 500W heater would keep things toasty in there. 500W for 10 hours per day is 5kW. The Cybertruck battery is 123 kWh, so you could heat the tent for 20 nights.
In terms of mileage lost, the Cybertruck goes about 2 miles per kWh, so a night of heating your tent would reduce the range by about 10 miles.
In other words, a 500W heater will reduce range by about a mile for every hour it is used.