TRUCKLA: The world’s first Tesla pickup truck (1:45 video)
This totally fucking rocks!
Well, that’s something I wouldn’t mind pushing into the quarry.
For those who have more time/interest, here’s the 30 minute video about making the Truckla.
I’ve been a subscriber to this young lady’s channel for quite a while now. She’s smart, funny, curious, ambitious and totally unafraid of missing her mark; a great combo for a science/tech show & host IMO.
This is by far the most ambitious project I’ve seen her undertake (ffs, I couldn’t even afford the base materials for this one :D) but as usual she seeks and finds help in areas where she needs help and they all appear to work their asses off to finish this project.
And frankly, if TESLA is watching, and I know they will, they’d do well to speed up their own pickup timetable and take advantage of whatever momentum this churns up, IMO. I’d plan a small but flashy media campaign to start before the end of this summer, if I were them.
Want!
Thanks for sharing this. I started watching the “making of” video, and I love it. She’s hilarious! I’ll have to finish it after work, though.
Oh, and I also want a Tesla truck. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to be available when my current lease runs out, 
I woulda gone with “El Teslino”.
I was cringing when she started keying the trunk. :eek:
I also need to finish this up after work - I paused it right before she started cutting. I was going to say I’ll be curious how it turns out, but I guess we already know!
I read this as “Truckula,” and for a moment, thought it was the sequel to Stephen King’s “Christine.”
But…cool!
My brain went to the exact same place.
Simone is hilarious and delightful and you should totally check out her Youtube channel. This isn’t at all the sort of project I would have expected from her, but it’s awesome nonetheless.
Also, fuck Brian.
Twitter is suggesting that it should have been Elon Camino.
Grr, that’s not a pickup, it’s a ute.
Most people who drive trucks don’t use much of the capabilities, except hauling stuff every once in awhile. My main want for a truck would mean being far from any charging station or gas station, and you can put gasoline in cans. That’s my only sticking point with electric technology.
I’m as pro EV as you can get, but I agree, this is an issue I wonder about too. I can’t figure out a good way to deal with that, unless there was some way to have a “spare battery” that never counts as part of the main charge. A secondary tank, as it were.
I watched the video (the long one) last night. One of the guys she called in, Rich Rebuilds, has his own channel where he fixes up wrecked Teslas. It’s a good channel if you like general ‘how stuff works’ type videos.
I’ve only seen a handful of his videos, somehow I got drawn in with one (maybe a series) of videos where he was trying to do something to his (swap a battery?) and it resulted in him having to get a ride home a few times because he didn’t have all the tools with him.
It’s worth taking a look at his channel too.
I’ve seen that exact same comment popping up around the internet over the last 12 hours. I don’t know where you are, but Ute is essentially unheard of in the States. 'Round here, I think most people would call that thing ‘a El Camino type car thing’ or ‘one of those car pickups’ or ‘a car with a bed’.
I think the technical name is ‘coupe utility’. Looking online, I see Chevy’s SSR is classed as a pickup (El Camino is a coupe utility). But even being about the size of a car, I believe it’s built up on a truck frame.
I think it’s different for her. I doubt she gets too far from San Francisco on a regular basis and she does actually move stuff around. In any case, she was very specifically looking to get away from a gas engine.
The batteries on EVs, at least on Teslas, are not only an enormous undertaking to change and probably not doable with one person, but they have a footprint about as big as the car. Replacing them involves removing (lifting) the entire body of the car off the frame. It also means dealing with nearly 400vdc.
Perhaps, as they get more popular, they could come up with a way to hot swap one cell, to give you enough juice to hobble to the nearest charging station.
But even in that case, it seems like that would really only be useful so that you could trade that cell with another Tesla driver. This way it’s more like calling someone to bring you some gas.
Like having a second tank, if the battery/fuel gauge isn’t enough to let you know when to refuel, neither is the reserve.
Come to think of it, what might work is giving people a way to ‘siphon’ the charge from another EV. Plug the two of them together for a a little while. The full car loses a few miles, the dead one can get to a charging station.
But none of this is likely to happen until they’re considerably more popular. Not only so that charging stations show up, but also so that there’s more people with more (similar) problems that will need easy to implement fixes…like having the battery die when you’re 20 miles from home.
I was going to skip it when it showed up in my subscription feed with a snippet of her cutting into a perfectly good car. But then I saw the fake ad and saw that the end product was a step above her average output. I couldn’t have stomached sacrificing an expensive car to make a “shitty robot”. 
Exact?
It’s an Australian term and I’m not-Australian, but I’ve heard of it. I’ve used the term because that’s what describes the Truckla - El Camino’s are distinctly, car-like, the closest to a ute is maybe Subaru Brat (Baja less so). I don’t think I’ve ever seen an SSR.
Those look like renders and mockups to me.