WE DON’T REALLY KNOW MUCH ABOUT TESLA CYBERTRUCK
Probably the only thing we know for sure is that its development will remain fluid
It was recently announced that Elon Musk has become the fourth richest man on the planet, despite heading a company that can’t eke out a meaningful profit without the sale of government-mandated regulatory credits. If that makes sense to you, maybe you should stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you need numbers to add up, then the latest news on Tesla Cybertruck might be of interest.
Considering how splashy was its introduction, we know precious little about Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck. Like Donald Trump, Elon Musk operates by tweet, and like the American president, sometimes those tweets can be contradictory.
As for what we know to be absolutely true, I think that might be limited to the fact that the Cybertruck will be all electric, it will ride on a unibody — rather than body-on-frame — platform, and said body will be constructed of stainless steel. That’s about it for facts, other than there will be three variants — one-, two-, and three-motor — when the company’s Texas Gigafactory comes fully online.
Officially, Tesla has said that the base single-motor pickup will scoot to 96 km/h (60 mph) in six seconds, the two-motor jobbie in 4.5 seconds, and the three-motor version in a truly stupefying 2.9 seconds. According to Topspeed. com, that means the three-motor “plaid” Cybertruck will boast some 800 horsepower and more than 1,000 pound-feet of torque, as well as a range of 800 kilometres and a payload capacity of some 3,500 pounds (1,590 kilograms).
This last, in fact, seems just a tad optimistic, considering that’s about the same acceleration time the fastest Model S manages and it’s not loaded down with bulletproof windows or enough battery to eke out an 800-km range (which is about 30 per cent more than the best Model S).
Of course, Musk could be pulling a good-old fashioned bait and switch by claiming that some tri-motors will claim extended range while others with less range will accelerate to 100 km/h in less than three seconds. That said, the Cybertruck will probably be the quickest pickup available when it hits the road.
As for what we’re just guessing at, there are so many tall tales on the internet that one hardly knows where to start. The Cybertruck will almost certainly boast 250-kw charging, and if Musk’s tweets are to be believed, a seriously fast 350-kw Supercharger may be on the horizon.
Of course, it would not be a true Tesla launch without grandiose exaggeration. Insideevs is seemingly ginning up its readers to expect 700-kw and even 1-MW charging for the new Cybertruck. That, for the folks sans electrical engineering degree, would require something like a 1,000-volt battery and a charging station capable of pushing 1,000 amperes of current.
One Tesla fanboy, aptly named TESLABRUH, contends that Cybertrucks won’t actually need recharging because solar panels affixed to their gargantuan roofs will be so efficient that you will never, ever have to plug it in.
One thing I think we can take as gospel is that the Cybertruck will have a load-balancing air suspension. However, there has been speculation of as much as 500 millimetres of suspension travel, because Musk says he wants to “kick butt in Baja.”
That seems unrealistic. No matter how powerful the topflight truck might be, it will need multiple recharging stops, each requiring a minimum half-hour (and that’s if they can upgrade to a 350 or so kw charger in the desert). Besides, at full throttle — and the Baja 1000 is a race, after all — electric motors eat up lithium ions even faster than internal combustion engines suck back gas. The one E-class buggy that did finish the Baja 500 ended up swapping out batteries every 50 miles. I suspect that rules out any Baja-challenging Cybertruck.
All that said, the high-tech load-balancing suspension is allowing Teslarati.com to speculate that the Cybertruck’s active ride height and the suspension’s active damping could make “realtime” adjustments to its weight distribution by changing ride height. That sounds doubly cool — if just a tad fanciful.
In other words, probably the only thing we know for sure is that Cybertruck development will probably remain completely fluid right up until its launch date, which, depending on the tweet du jour, is either early
2021, late 2021, or possibly 2022.