Until one of the teardowns does some actual testing here, all we have to go on is what the designers said. And what they said was ~30%. I guess we’ll just have to wait for third-party confirmation.
Okay. And that’s something unique to Tesla? For decades we’ve been subjected to concept cars that never remotely had a chance of making it to production in any form. Somehow we’ve internalized that it’s ok for them to parade around this bullshit and that it’s the normal state of affairs.
And here we have what should by all rights be a pure concept car–one that’s even wilder than what other companies usually come up with–and it actually shipped in something approaching the original version!
So sure, I’ll deduct a few points for it not being quite as exoskeletonny as it was originally claimed, and deduct a million points from everyone else for never shipping any of their concepts.
I don’t think we’re going to get 3rd party numbers; I’ve never seen anything like that in a review, and even Munro’s teardown videos don’t get that technical.
But I may have missed the 30% claim. Do you have a cite for that? I’m wondering when it was made.
Elon Musk is a unique brand of bullshitter, yes. I do remember everyone raking GM over the coals when the Volt was advertised as a pure series hybrid where the engine wasn’t even connected to the wheels. Then the production model came out and it was nothing like the concept. They deserved that grief because, ugh, what a load of shit. And Tesla deserves this grief. “Everyone does it” isn’t a great excuse, but man, Tesla does it a lot more than anyone else.
eta: (Yes, the engineers get massive credit for converting Elon’s napkin drawing into a production vehicle. Car nerds can and should rejoice whenever that happens as opposed to us just getting driving appliance #234325. I just wish it wasn’t this monstrosity that Elon drew on a napkin, and I wish the engineering constraints he put on his teams were things I actually cared about. C’est la vie. I’m not the market for this thing anyway so my opinion counts for squat.
The accomplishment doesn’t mean I’m not going to point out obvious bullshit when I see it.
And yes, I know he didn’t actually draw it on a napkin.)
Have you seen how thin a typical car body is? A car fender weighs only 5-10 lbs. A hood might weigh 15-20 lbs. If they aren’t on the car, you can easily bend and twist them with your bare hands.
Is the claim that the Cyberteuck is a conventional unibody design with non-structural pnels? That’s not what Wards says:
There’s a fairly fine line between unibody and semi-monocoque or exoskeleton, but the difference lays in the fact that the Unibody gets all its strength and stiffness from the chassis, while the semi-monocoque gets its strength from a combintion of the chassis and a stressed skin. As a Tesla engineer says, there’s a lot of overlap between exoskeleton and unibody, but the difference is that if you take all the body panels pff a unibody car, it will drive just fine. If you remove the body panels on a Cybertruck, it will not, because the body adds significantly to the structure. Especially in the back. The front gigacasting makes the front more unibody, but the back really needs the stressed skin for strength, and this is where traditional trucks fall down, because ladder-on-frame makes for a flexy vehicle. The cybertruck is super stiff because of the body.
The Cybertruck’s panels are 3mm stainless steel. A typical car body is 0.7mm aluminum or steel. Why would Tesla add all that weight to the truck if it did nothing? And how can the Cybertruck be lighter than a Rivian despite being much bigger and having a much heavier body if the body does nothing for the strength of the truck?
I think you’ll find that this thread isn’t really the place to share critical thoughts about Tesla or Musk. It’s a thread to celebrate Musk’s engineering genius.
the trick in engineering was how do you take the strength that’s there and incorporate it into the needs you have for the vehicle this sail panel which goes from the C pillar back out to the rear it adds like 25% of the torsional stiffness of the vehicle
But you kmow, there are already multiple threads shitting on everything Musk. Can those of us who want to talk engineering do so without the incessant Musk bashing in just one thread?
Just another example of Sam either lying or being so careless with his quotes that it doesn’t matter which and why the board is a worse place with him here.
The entire point of this discussion is that the previously claimed benefits of the design have not manifested in the current design of the car so Sam linking to an article talking about the benefits of the original concept to justify the current design is an oversight that I don’t care what the justification is, it actively worsens the board.
It’s time for the mods to step in and severely restrict the conversations Sam is allowed to be in because this constant misinformation just clogs up the boards with useless tangents debunking him over, and over, and over again with no attempt at reform.
If you want to accuse another poster of lying, take it to the pit. This is totally inappropriate for this thread. I didn’t give warnings after midnight, but I’ll look at this again in the morning.
Feel free to report his posts. Include enough details to help a mod who hasn’t read the thousand posts in this thread to understand what the issues are. But this is also completely inappropriate to post in this thread.
Doug DeMuro reviews the Cybertruck. He spends 40 minutes, but doesn’t show anything about it that hasn’t been seen in other videos. I think his overall take on it is correct though (paraphrasing): It is the coolest car out now, and it doesn’t matter that it is ugly, it can be cool and ugly. Towing doesn’t matter, payload doesn’t matter, range doesn’t matter, only cool matters. People are upset that their TRX or Raptor R have been upstaged by an electric car from a California company (and they didn’t buy those trucks to tow or haul either).
Though it’s not exactly a review in the traditional sense. More about the vibes of the Cybertruck.
He makes some of the same points that DeMuro did. Towing, payload, etc. are fine. But that’s not why people are buying them. He points out (as has come up in various threads) that ~2/3 of truck buyers basically never tow. And the expected audience is probably even less likely (first-time truck buyers).
One interesting thing that came up is just how few people he encounters have even heard of the thing. We really do live in an online bubble compared to most. Also, 100% of people, when guessing the price, guessed higher than the actual price. Probably doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but clearly people are slotting it into the supercar or full custom mental categories, when really it’s a high-end but still mass-market product.
He does wonder how we’ll treat it once there are millions on the road. It absolutely stands out like a supercar does now. But Bugattis and the like are only made in the hundreds or low thousands. This may end up being more like the PT Cruiser. Though it’s still far more unusual compared to a baseline car than the PT Cruiser ever was (especially since that was a throwback to cars from the 40s or so, whereas there was nothing ever like the Cybertruck).
Anyway, mostly an endorsement, and he still has his Cyberbeast on order (this one was a loaner). Lots of caveats and such in the video, but Brownlee is generally pretty good about presenting a balanced picture.
If one chooses to view the built-in tonneau as simply a trunk lid with a novel closing arrangement, sort of the trunk-equivalent of gullwing or suicide passenger doors, the vehicle takes on a very different feel. Like e.g. gull-wing doors, the tonneau is simply a styling choice around a trunk. And an unusually capacious trunk to boot.
Once you make the mental shift about the bed being a trunk the CT becomes a bulky hulking 4-door sedan. Rolls Royce makes bulky hulking sedans that impress by their size and visual heft as well as their brand cachet. Blinged-up (or even box-stock) Escalades, Suburbans, Navigators, and some Hummers serve the same niche now for folks who can’t swing a Roller.
It was a throwback style to the mobster-mobiles of the 1930s, and quite different from any other contemporary car. The intent was to suggest a big bruiser of a person, all thick legs and neck, with a small head on top. Think thuggish bodyguard or mob enforcer. It worked, and arguably has driven most of the styling on most cars and many pickups for the last not quite 20 years. The brutalist look took awhile to catch on, but it’s still going strong and the Next Big Thing in styling has yet to emerge.
The CT-viewed-as-a-sedan certainly takes the brutalist look and turns it up eleventy, with a large dose of retro-future-SF-cool to boot.
Might variations on that theme be that Next Big Thing? Stranger things have happened in the car biz.
Tying back to the reviews, once we decide the CT isn’t a real truck, all its drawbacks as a truck disappear. And it’s a far better car by contemporary standards than were the last set of not-quite-trucks, the Chevy El Camino and Ford Ranchero generations running from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s. Which vehicles sold a heck of a lot of units at the time.
You actually kind of had me until this last bit. The El Camino was an affordable vehicle for someone who knew they would be semi-regularly toting some crap around, but didn’t want a full-size pick up. The cybertruck is both expensive and a freaking behemoth, exactly what they didn’t want.
I didn’t mean to suggest the CT & the El Camino filled the same niche. As you say, they don’t.
I meant only that both were nodding in the direction of being a truck, while still mostly being passenger cars with odd-for-a-car styling. And IMO the CT is a better sedan than the El Camino was a coupe.
I was the age to be eagerly awaiting my license during the Ranchero / El Camino heyday. Various neighbors and friends of Dad had them. Lots they could do, lots they could almost do.
YMMV of course, and I do see your point that the El Camino was not that nerfed as a “real truck” by the standards of the day. Unlike the CT which will (probably) suck lots more as a “real truck” than did the El Camino.
IMHO the Cybertruck isn’t comparable to the concept cars of mass-production automakers like GM. It’s more like a limited-production specialty vehicle for a niche market, regardless of Musk’s grandiose claims. And IIRC the Volkswagen New Beetle was a whimsical concept car that went into production pretty much unchanged. The Chrysler Turbine was kinda in between. It was ultimately never sold, but after building 5 concept prototypes, Chrysler did a limited production run of 50 for a public testing program.
It remains to be seen how ‘niche’ it is. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the #1 electric truck soon - but electric trucks themselves may be niche products.
As for concept cars making it to production from the big three, the most surprising one was probably the Plymouth Prowler, which looked almost exactly like the concept car and was quite radical:
Who heard of bringing an open-wheel hot rod into production? Unfortunately, it was kind of a lousy vehicle. If it had performed like it looked, it might have been a winner. I liked the little matching trailer it could tow to pretend it was practical.
