Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to Tesla so I'm a bit biased.
The Cybertruck I thought was initially kind of neat but when you try to use one as a truck you quickly can see some glaring problems that most people who buy a truck want. Towing with an EV is terrible. I've heard there's power stations with pull throughs but havent' seen them personally. The truck bed isn't practical for anything but a lawn mower. When I ride in one it rides like a car. It doesn't look good dirty. I just think they were going for warthog from Halo and thought the rest would work out. It's also super expensive for all these issues. It's a hobby vehicle. A toy.
I think Tesla is struggling personally. The marketing tactics of showcasing cars we'll never be able to buy just to cause a scene. Don't get me wrong the new Roadster my jaw dropped and I agree with Elon now that SpaceX and Tesla are the 'same' company I think it's great but let's be realistic. Most people want cars that are cheap, dependable and sort of cool. Not everyone can afford multiple cars, and a corvette that isn't feasible. Like I said I work for a competitor (GM) and I fear China is going to eat our lunch. Unless we make infrastructure for charging better and make it a no brainer.
I would buy an electric car tomorrow, I have access to cheap charging, and I don't even do long commutes. But there is zero chance I want a spyware car that's like another cell phone.
The U.S. is being protectionist because of Chinese cars that can spy on U.S. soil-- just do the right thing and stop all the car spying nonsense. Require manufacturers to open the code and let us even develop alternatives.
Tell GM.
I have an electric Hyundai and you can disable all internet connectivity fairly easily. I have mine disabled and the car works fine. It never connects to any internet connection. I suspect that most other modern cars are similar. The firmware is closed source, but it works fine. It supports CarPlay and Android Auto, which are effectively open standards, so you can replace the infotainment system with whatever you want. This is standard for modern cars.
America is the only country where buying private data is legal so this is a flawed idea. Ford would definitely spy on you for those adbucks.
Heard of Slate Auto? Full electric, simple, no cellular modem at all, hand-crank windows.
IDK. Grok bot works with Tesla’s grok so today I learned I can just ask how’s my house is doing. It responded how much solar I’m making vs consuming, hows batteries are doing, is garage door open and flagged that my heatpump water heater is off (i shut it earlier because it can get little loud).
Yes you can sort of get there with Siri and HomeKit, bug nowhere close to sophistication.
Yes please. Make it a selling point and people will buy it.
Here in Australia, it's interesting how well the Tesla cars are still selling.
The model Y is still the best selling EV despite the wide choice of other brands. BYD out sell them in aggregate, but Tesla are holding their own pretty well. Of course, all the Tesla cars here are made in the Shanghai Gigafactory, but still, I don't think Chinese brand dominance is a forgone conclusion. I think the real danger is if American protectionism makes Tesla feel like they don't need to innovate any more.
Software is everything when it comes to EV's. As an American, I've had many years of experience with software from around the world. No one makes software more suited for Americans, than other Americans.
The UX of the car software is only a small portion. The actual car has a lot of software which isn't cultural.
The dashboard and UX of the car can be tailored to a culture, while the onboard processing remains the same - it's just one software update away. This is sort of a silver lining of removing physical dials and buttons and going all in with touch-screen.
These are exactly the kind of takes I still come to this site for!
Can you explain a little more? What expectations do Americans have of software that are unique to their country?
just compare the landing pages for taobao or baidu to the western equivalent. UX for the asian market has wildly different expectations and best practices
> No one makes software more suited for Americans, than other Americans.
yeah that's why there's no immigrants in US tech am I rite.
that's also why tiktok is not used by americans at all /s
How well does the self driving work over there? That's the real innovation and personally it seems to work well enough in America so I'm curious what your experience is with that.
I used it in a Tesla Y to commute to work in Sydney (from Terry Hills to Alexandria).
Absolutely sublime. I turned it off _once_ yesterday as I didnt trust the gap it was leaving with a woman who was driving over the lines.
Honestly blew me away.
My colleague at work paid extra for it a few years ago - still waiting for it to activated… not sure it widely available here yet
That doesn’t sound right, why are some people same to get it and not others. As far as I’m aware you can go buy a Tesla in Australia and enable it via subscription.
Only on later HW3 cars. Older cars can still buy the subscription but get limited features (summon, etc, not full self driving). Apparently there’s work underway to support older cars
China is bringing their more expensive cars first to make money once the market gets saturated then we might see more domination as they try to compete for more market share
> now that SpaceX and Tesla are the 'same' company
Did I miss something big on the stock market or are these actually still two different public companies? How do the shareholders of both of these (ostensibly different, kind of unrelated) large publicly-held companies feel about them being conflated like this? Is there any historical precedent for this situation?
I read this as 2 phrases
“I agree with Elon now”
Meaning now I agree, and
“that SpaceX and Tesla are the 'same' company”
With ‘same’ in quotes meaning they are not literally the same but conceptually they are the same.
FTR I do not agree they are the ‘same’ company and I think the circular relationships between Musk’s companies is kind of like a shell game.
Sorry I did not mean to be vague you hit the nail on the head but I think the circular relationships he's made between his companies has real pay off.
Seems super strange to have 2 seemingly successful companies with huge market caps and you want to merge them?
There are two big advantages for Musk…
1. Power. He can amass more power by concentrating it in SpaceX. There was a lot of financing needed getting Tesla to mass produce vehicles… where Musk likely conceded more power (and money) than he wanted.
2. SpaceX (sans xAI and Xitter) is the one business he’s got really generating a profit and likely will be able to continue that trend. It lets him paper over financial issues that would show up in the balance sheets of individual companies.
They are still distinct public companies and they want to merge them. And even today the amount of cross mingling between those two entities however is quite significant. You would not necessarily know that they are independent from each other.
The roadster uses Space X propulsion tech, the cybercab uses starlink, grok is in all Tesla cars, both companies share Terafab. But then Tesla also supplies batteries and cybertrucks to Space X etc.
The "roadster demo for a car that doesnt exist and may never exist" uses space x propulsion tech.
They might be confusing X, which is a subsidiary of SpaceX. The IPO was just a vehicle to pay off X’s debt.
> The IPO was just a vehicle to pay off X’s debt.
... and to offload a ton of bad luck onto retail bagholders.
Once the AI bubble pops, SPCX will collapse, but everyone in on the game will have gotten much more thanks to selling their stock than they'd ever put in in either SpaceX or Twitter.
There is a rumor going around that Musk is going to merge the two in December before the Democrats take power.
Always thought it was designed after the '79 toy the Big Trak. Even the initial concept of the trailer looked like it was from the aesthetic.
Wow, I'd forgotten about these. Thanks.
What is your opinion on the upcoming Tesla Semi? I expect that it will be successful, useful, and efficient.
Nobody expects an impressive 1/4 mile time from a vehicle towing a trailer. That's not what makes EVs bad at towing.
My towing-capable gas vehicle sees at worst a 30% decrease in range from towing my camping trailer, and my towing-capable diesel vehicle sees closer to a 10% decrease in range.
A while back, I read a comment on here from someone who lived in a trailer full-time as a digital nomad. They were also dedicated to driving an EV. They towed their small trailer with their Model Y. I grant you, the Model Y is not optimized for towing the way that the Cybertruck (ostensibly) is, but they described the process of travelling between Grand Junction, Colorado, and Moab, Utah, a distance just over 110 miles. With the trailer, they had to drive to Cisco, about halfway in between, drop the trailer, drive back to Grand Junction, recharge fully, drive back again, pick up the trailer, and drive the remaining 60 or so miles to Moab, where they could recharge again. Because without the trailer, they could drive the entire 1-way distance 3 times over without recharging. With the trailer, they could not make the whole trip once.
That is pretty bad. Probably a combination of the smaller battery, and a very non-aerodynamic trailer. Of course, an ICE truck could do it without too much trouble, but that's largely because most tow-focused ICE vehicles are wildly inefficient compared to EVs and are discarding lots of unused capacity every time you drive them without towing near maximum load. Not a big deal when diesel is cheap, but now, less so.
If you think about how much excess power your diesel is wasting when you aren't hauling its kinda crazy. When you changed the total weight, and thus total energy required in the system, 50-70%, you only started using 10% more energy.
I remember my family driving long distances in a 1980s VW Diesel, we could barely climb hills but we got 50mpg.
It is reductive to say it is terrible. The issue is that the current range we are putting in trucks, adjusted for the range loss from towing a large trailer, is insufficient.
The Tesla Semi proves that this is the issue: with an extremely large battery and high-speed charging, the Semi solves these problems.
A regular truck that can TOW 300 miles would certainly not be "terrible for towing."
> A regular truck that can TOW 300 miles would certainly not be "terrible for towing."
Agreed. A fairly typical gas half-ton gets 300 miles from a tank. If an EV can get that distance and recharge in like half an hour it would be a pretty great truck.
It's not hard to run the number and see how likely it is (spoiler alert: not very).
The first easy number is the sheer amount of energy, diesel has an energy density of 10.7kWh/L, so a 30gal tank holds 1460kWh. By comparison a silverado EV (probably the best currently available EV tower short of a semi) has a 215kWh battery.
The second more complicated number and why diesel is so good at towing (and other high-power applications) is that diesel gets more efficient when loaded, by a factor of 2-ish: an unloaded diesel might only use ~20% of the fuel it burns to actually move stuff, or on a 30gal you get around 300kWh out of your 1460kWh tank, but that will climb to 35~40% as the load increases if kept in the efficiency range, so towing you might have 500~550kWh out of 1460kWh available to actually move your load.
There's no such thing on an EV, there's some variation but load isn't really a factor, pretty much just the band, so your Silverado gets 205kWh usable at the wheels unloaded and the same loaded. Therefore all the towing losses (rolling resistance and drag) come straight out of your range.
And short of a breakthrough on batteries it's difficult to add more battery capacity, the battery already accounts for a third of a silverado's weight and a significant fraction of its internal volume. Getting a 500kWh battery in a truck is currently impossible: that's the sort of capacity you find on semis (european EV semis cluster around 550~650).
And then of course you have the charge concern, charging a 500kWh battery in half an hour requires a megawatt charger running at more than 1MW, and the ability to ingest that in your pack (on 800V battery tech that's 1250 amps, which is within MCS specs but the vehicle side is pretty damn rough).
They provided a concrete example: Trying to charge when a trailer is attached.
> As I understand, electric motors deliver instant maximum torque. Isn't that advantageous for towing?
Your understanding is not wrong, but quantity of torque is a minor piece of what matters, so that doesn't move the needle.
Towing lowers the range of an EV by so much that it becomes nearly useless. This is much more important with an EV than an ICE, because EV charging is less available and takes much longer.
It's understandable that you might not fully understand the magnitude of the pros and cons from your LLM prompt, those sorts of responses usually assume certain levels of experience and familiarity with the topic. It'll make more sense when you get older!
Towing for traveling, you mean. Around town, a Lightning with a big utility trailer is still good for over 100 miles, and that meets the use case for a lot of small businesses that need to tow. We get a bunch of them over on the Lightning forum. They love the truck, and they love how inexpensive and convenient it is. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth (and a scramble to find funds to quickly fill out their fleet) when Ford announced the cancellation.
> quantity of torque is a minor piece of what matters, so that doesn't move the needle
I know of approximately nobody who thinks this, who actually tows anything meaningful. Somethning like a 6.2 naturally aspirated Ford V8 in an F250 is a chore, it's loud, works very hard, goes nowhere with any urgency. This is why people love diesels -- torque. And an EV takes that to the next level. The towing is sublime.
Yes, we need bigger batteries though so people can do long distance road trips with travel trailers. That niche isn't a great use case today.
The downside of electric motors for towing is that they require electricity.
And towing requires a lot of electricity. How do you bring enough electrons?
The towee could carry an additional battery. Probably not hard to link it with a cable to the tower.
RV trailers like that are coming to market, seems like a good solution. e.g.
https://pebblelife.com/
https://www.evotrex.com/
https://www.aboardrv.com/
An additional perk for these is you now have a large battery to power appliances in the trailer.
I don't think the towing aspect matters much: I live in a semi-conservative rural area of the US with a lot of truck drivers, and about 90% of pickup trucks are used as glorified minivans / SUVs anyway that are kept clean at all times. The only pickup trucks I see towing anything are much older trucks (late 80s-early 2000s). Very old 80s Toyota Hilux / Ford Rangers are a common sight as well for filling the truck bed which carries a lot more volume that even modern trucks (most of the drivers don't care about going over the weight limit).
The Cybertruck failed because it's an awfully designed vehicle, along with all of the baggage of being associated with Elon Musk's politics (whether you agree with them or not).
I think it matters. There are lots of people who have a camper or a boat or some ATVs or whatever. Maybe they only take the camper out once or twice a year, and so you never see it hooked up. However, on that one week per year, they do need it to be able to tow.
Gas/Diesel trucks lose range when towing too, but dealing with a shorter range gas truck isn't too big of a problem on a trip beyond the extra cost. Gas stations are everywhere and it takes 5 minutes to fill up. At most gas stations, filling up while towing a trailer isn't too big of a problem. Even if your truck only had a 150 mile range while towing, it would only be a minor annoyance, and the reality is that you'll probably get at least 250 miles out of a tank.
If you're towing with an electric though, you probably are looking at less than 150 miles. Now every couple of hours you have to stop for probably an hour or so, even with a fast charger, because you're probably going to want to charge the truck to full, not 80%. You're also probably driving somewhat out of your way to hit charging stations that frequently if you're not in a very populated area.
> Towing with an EV is terrible.
If you have to charge, it can be a pain. It's fine for towing short distance. It can tow up to 11k lbs.
> The truck bed isn't practical for anything but a lawn mower.
Hard disagree. I've hauled gravel, lumber, furniture, appliances. It can fit a 4x8 sheet of sheetrock with the tailgate down.
> When I ride in one it rides like a car.
It drives like a sports car. Literally the most fun vehicle I've ever driven.
> It doesn't look good dirty.
Disagree, I think it looks better dirty. More dystopian.
> It's also super expensive
The price for the AWD dual motor is comparable to other pickups.
It's also the safest pickup truck you can buy, according to the IIHS and NHTSA.
Make it make sense. A silverado Turbomax can tow 12k and the bed can handle cargo up to 2500lbs and it's around 45k and a cybertruck easy 85k. Don't get me wrong some of what I said was opinionated.
I think a more apt comparison might be a fully optioned silverado trubomax, which can range $60-$75k.
AWD CT can haul 7500 lbs, air suspension, tonneau cover, premium sound, 240v out, FSD, etc.
spec for spec though. The majority of trucks sold are the turbomax spec a turbo charged 4 cylinder. About 20% of them go to fleet sales.Higher trims yes Cybertruck has some good options but go see what WHistlin Dixie did to his and you'll understand more of my opinion.
> I think Tesla is struggling personally. The marketing tactics of showcasing cars we'll never be able to buy just to cause a scene
I think as a car company they're doing alright. They sell two of the most popular vehicles on the road. But the valuation of TSLA is 15-20x what it would be if they were valued at a car company, which is why you get over-the-top demos like the roadster.
>Towing with an EV is terrible
Why?
I explained this in my other comment but I'll paste it here:
The thing is that ICE vehicles are so inefficient to begin with, but a towed trailer needs the same amount of energy regardless of what is towing it. Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.
This analysis doesn't make sense to me.
An ICE vehicle isn't less efficient because the frame itself takes more energy to move, it's less efficient because the engine burns off a high percentage of its energy as waste heat.
But that will be true regardless of what the load is. If the ICE truck takes 5 units of energy to pull itself compared with 1 unit for the electric truck, that implies that the the truck chassis only actually requires 1 unit to move, but the ICE engine burns off 80% of its energy as waste heat. The engine is only 20% efficient.
Now if you start pulling a trailer, you have (in total) 2 units of energy worth of load. But if the ICE engine is still only 20% efficient, then it will take 10 units to pull both, rather than 6.
I can believe that this effect is real (electric cars suffering more range loss when towing), but it seems to require an explanation beyond this one.
It is more complicated with ICE though because the efficiency changes with load amount, and what power output an ICE is most efficient in can be designed with towing in mind. Ive seen 90s trucks that got 18 MPG empty on a good day, but then when loaded with twice or more the vehicle's curb weight on a trailer merely drop to 17 MPG.
Generally this is only true for ICE with an abundance of extra power to start with, but that is basically every truck and most other cars for the last 25 years.
It's the effeciency curve. ICEs are more efficient with heavier loads - more fuel goes to useful work.
There's also that electric cars have a marginally better drag coefficients for a few reasons - ICE vehicles have a bot less incentive and they need to use more air for cooling - so the drag from a trailer will be worse, as a percentage extra, on the average electric vehicle.
Why would an ICE be more efficient with a heavier load?
ICE are most efficient in terms of energy in -> rotation energy out near their peak torque output for a ton of reasons:
* cylinder filling is more efficient at maximum output request (on naturally aspirated engines operating in vacuum, due to less simple pumping loss, on turbocharged or supercharged engines, due to less wasted energy producing charge air and generally more optimized air/exhaust exchange). in short, air gets into the cylinder more efficiently in the first place at high torque requests
* combustion is more complete at high cylinder filling; not only does more air get into the cylinder, but it also burns more completely
* friction losses matter less at higher torque, especially on larger engines
Almost every ICE complexity advancement over the years is to hack around these basic properties: VVL and VVT to optimize pumping, direct injection, stratified injection, and dynamic compression hackery to get around cylinder filling efficiency, and cylinder deactivation / variable displacement to avoid friction and pumping loss from unnecessary engine size. but while ICE engines have made huge strides, they're still more efficient when they're loaded.
And note that this is efficiency, not absolute consumption - of course you'll consume more at higher load still, but the ratio is better. Combine this with the aerodynamics of most ICE pickup trucks and you have a scenario where ICE trucks frequently lose very little fuel economy / actual consumption when towing a trailer.
Thanks, this makes sense. Part of my confusion was the RPM for peak torque output isn't the full condition for it, cause you're only getting peak torque at full throttle of course. And a towing truck is at higher throttle than an unburdened one.
Efficient in this situation means units of fuel per units of work.
Of course an ICE uses more fuel in absolute terms on a higher load than a lower one. But the proportion of fuel wasted compared to fuel turned into propulsion improves as load is increased (at least up to a point, maybe not all the way to absolute maximum load).
Electric systems also have efficiency curves, but they are less drastic within the primary load range.
Er right, I understood it was fuel per units of work but still didn't get it. Makes sense after reading your comment and the other ones.
Engine tuning; an engine designed for towing heavy loads is much less efficient when not towing.
The range on my diesel truck drops in half when I pull my trailer. Roughly similar to an EV towing. It also happens in winter (not quite as big a drop). Thats what most folks care about. But people like to overstate it as a dramatic downside of EVs.
But the range on the Cybertruck is starting much lower, so that halving is a lot more painful.
I frequently tow between Washington and Montana, and I only have to fill up the F-350 once or twice when loaded. You would need to recharge a loaded Cybertruck 5+ times on that same route. My 11 hour drive just turned into a 15 hour drive in ideal conditions. And I don't think there are the latest superchargers available on most of the route, so the time spent charging is likely much higher.
Don't get me wrong, I like EVs and have a Model 3 as my daily driver. But I would never get rid of the gasser given today's battery tech with the number of roadtrips we take.
> I frequently tow between Washington and Montana
But... why? Like, at that point it should make more sense shipping whatever freight you want to ship by train?!
Regular people aren’t towing freight. More likely a camper or a boat or other recreational toy. Shipping those via train whenever you wanted to go on a trip would be absurd.
The answer from someone who owns a truck and a trailer would be "why would it make sense to ship by train when I have a truck and a trailer?"
Tonnages, distance, and cost per calculations.
Locally farmers built a rail to port system as a grain carriage has more tonnage than a road train.
Two axle trailer is it? What's that max out at, two tonne?
Probably more like 7-10k lbs, so 3-5 tons, depending on the specifics of the trailer. More if it's a fifth-wheel type.
Yes, clearly there are cases when it makes sense to ship by train, otherwise they wouldn't exist. I can't tell if I'm not getting my point across, or you just want to be pedantic, but the point is that most people who own the capability of transporting something, will transport it themselves.
> depending on the specifics of the trailer.
I did specifically ask about your trailer - not a generic set of trailers, but, okay.
What I'm getting is you don't have a prime mover actual truck with one, two, or three trailers to tow single or in a road train.
> the point is that most people who own the capability of transporting something, will transport it themselves.
to some degree but by no means always, sometimes it makes sense to have others do transport while getting on and doing others things in the same time.
> or you just want to be pedantic
Just familiar with transport, a great deal across a remote state 3x size of Texas, and a fair amount to other parts of the world, by air and sea.
The problem is charging stations are few and far between in rural areas already.
> This analysis doesn't make sense to me.
Because the numbers are a bit off. I've towed a lot, gas trucks do not lose 15% when towing. My old F150 went from 18mpg to 10mpg. My super duty went from 16mpg to 8mpg.
The advantage is that gas is so energy dense we just routinely equip trucks with 35+ gallon fuel tanks. There's no battery option equivalent yet.
I think what it actually says is that EV has short ranges.
If a car held gas worth of 750mi of driving and towing would reduce it to 500mi, and your actual driving distance was significantly less than both, the difference would be unnoticed.
If a car held gas worth of just 500mi with extremely well optimized aero and driveline loss minimization and highly efficient regen, and a towed trailer would absolutely ruin that, and your driving distance was too close to the diminished range, you will notice that.
If your EV held like 12500kWh of charge for like 3000 miles of range, and it was mostly for Costco runs, towing range penalties will not be among your top concerns.
It’s also the part that if you go from 400 miles to 200 miles between 5 minute gas fill ups, eh. But doubling 20-30 minute charges? Super annoying.
But boy does my model Y tow tiny trailers well.
The EV trucks usually do more like 30-40 minute charges due to the large battery. But also, gas vehicles don't do 5 minute fillups either, AAA says average is about 15 min.
> But also, gas vehicles don't do 5 minute fillups either, AAA says average is about 15 min.
What? It takes about 3 minutes to add 350 miles of range to my gas vehicle.
3 minutes on a gas pump? Slower than diesel.
In my little commuter car with a 40l tank the fastest I’ve ever filled up was 6 minutes.
That's part of the answer, but the other part is that towing is going to reduce range significantly regardless of your fuel. With a gas or diesel vehicle that's not a big deal, because you can fill back up in 5 minutes or less. With an EV, it takes 20+, and the fast charging locations are less plentiful than gas stations. If you're not towing, that doesn't matter too much, but when you have to charge 2-3 times as often due to towing, it becomes a real issue.
Fast charger stations also rarely make allowances for cars with trailers. You often have to detach the trailer in order to get into the charging bay or park across multiple.
Not to mention you can't really charge while having a trailer.
This would only make sense if the EV efficiency gain were due to lightness of the vehicle or better aerodynamics. It's definitely not the first, and don't imagine the second is a big factor but maybe I'm wrong. I'd even expect EV to help here because a heavy trailer takes more energy to get moving that can be partially recouped when regen-braking.
Is it just that these EV trucks don't have multiple gears to tune themselves for towing? Like how many EV cars are geared for city speeds but suffer on the highway. I know dual-motor ones have different ratios, but that's still 2 speeds vs 6-10. Edit: Could also be about engine tuning.
The second is in fact a big factor. The vast majority of a car's drag is aerodynamic drag since it grows quadratically with speed; rolling resistance and stuff are much smaller at highway speeds. In order to compensate for the tiny capacity of batteries, EVs try really hard to squeeze out better efficiency in aerodynamics and other sources. That's why EVs have flush door handles and stuff.
That would explain it if it's large. But if this matters so much, why don't the diesel trucks make all the same resistance/aerodynamics improvements? The only EV-specific advantage there is not needing air intake... again I have to say, intake drag doesn't sound huge but maybe I'm wrong.
The large fleet operators do care about this and do go out of their way to improve aero. Look at a UPS 18-wheeler and you'll see trailer skirts, no bug deflectors, window buffeters, etc.
Ironically, the private owner/operators are most often the ones installing accessories to make their trucks look cool and sacrificing immensely for it.
Vehicles have two primary components of resistance, air drag and rolling resistance. Rolling resistance is a function of weight, and air drag is a function of the frontal surface area (and to a lesser extent the total body surface area). For a small passenger car, rolling resistance is much lower than for a large truck, so they get much greater efficiency gains from reducing air drag. For a large truck, the rolling resistance is so much greater that the gains from reducing air drag are not large. That's why big tractor trailers don't have the same optimized aerodynamics that a tesla or a prius has.
1. No real market pressure — if you cared about fuel burn rate you wouldn't be looking into buying a truck in the first place. EVs on the other hand live or die by their battery range.
2. When optimizing, you want to start with the biggest problem and work your way down. ICEs are so laughably inefficient that improving aerodynamics just won't have that much of an impact.
A large amount of the energy of an ICE is wasted as heat and noise. Some of that is a constant factor that isn't sensitive to load. So when increase load, it doesn't make as much of a difference to energy used.
By contract in EVs, much more of the energy is going towards moving the vehicle and therefore both weight and air resistance greatly affect the amount of energy use.
The heat and noise do scale with how much gasoline you burn. That's part of the whole ICE being less efficient than battery in terms of input chemical energy vs output mechanical energy. It cancels out when you're calculating regular vs towing range. The engine is the same efficiency either way.
Oh, it's not the same efficiency either way though, got some good explanations elsewhere
You can’t recoup the braking energy when the trailers have their own brakes.
True that
I'm confused by where efficiency comes into this.
The efficiency is usually defined as the energy the car can use to move itself over the energy going in (electrical, or chemical for gas). If an ICE is 20% efficient then using 5 units means you get one unit out. Towing a trailer that doubles the load means you need 2 units out, which means you need 10 units in. So you get half the range either way.
The engine doesn't get more efficient just because you hook a trailer to it: it's still 20% efficient regardless.
ICE engine efficiency is not a flat figure, it varies by RPM and load.
“20% efficient” is like an EVs “270km range” - how far you can actually drive an EV depends on temperature, speed, etc.
I think you're missing the cost of ownership in your efficiency calculation. EV's without incentives cost a lot compared to ICE so much so that the savings don't equate usually until I hear year 4 of ownership. Now that's getting better I mean look at the new Bolt or Ford Fathom 30k Retail usually (which I think is where there's a lot of room in small midsize trucks and EV's)
> EV's without incentives cost a lot compared to ICE
This is highly variable. My Lightning was cheaper than the ICE version I had been shopping for. It has been better for my wallet from day 1. And it has depreciated less. The credits did distort the market for a while, though, that is for certain.
>So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing
The fuck?
best explanation of towing I've heard great job.
Once I discovered that the entire EV battery holds only 2 gallons-of-gas-worth of energy (roughly about 65kwh) , all of the range issues made a lot more sense.
Half the range for 1/20 the energy is a win no matter how hard you spin it.
Not when you are towing
Drivers care about range and cost per mile. The EV is better for one and worse for the other, not strictly better.
I don’t think this is true at all. If towing the trailer doubles the energy required at the wheels (and both engines maintained the same efficiency under the additional load) then both ranges would be halved.
In practice, diesel engines can become more efficient under additional load, and it obviously varies between models but it’s not a 16% vs 50% difference like your example.
The reason EVs don’t tow well is they don’t have a high enough range to begin with. Diesels have nearly double the starting range of an equivalent EV, and storing additional fuel on board is an option.
Getting some downvotes on the above. I’d appreciate if those who disagree explain why they disagree.
The anti-EV crowd is dominated by people with very strong political ideology, I wouldn't take the downvotes personally.
So the EV still beats the ICE vehicle threefold (2 units vs 6 units), it just _feels_ worse (half as efficient as without a trailer) so you declare it _is_ worse.
With that type of reasoning, let me guess, the competitor you work for is General Motors?
EV beats ICE in isolation but without just as much charging stations as petrol stations the advantage is theoretical. Also you need faster charging too (I heard BYD latest tech can do this, can Tesla just license?)
A federal law could easily fix this though, but you would need an administration that cares about climate change or at least about EV
I think the whole thing about climate is kind of disingenuous but that's another topic. Mining the minerals for EV's is utter strip mining and terrible. China is selling it's future away. Look at the story of Mountain Pass Mine in California and do 20-50x that in China at less efficiency.
Efficiency was brought up to explain the real problem, range. I didn't fill up between Reno and SF in my F350 towing a massive trailer and still had plenty of fuel to spare. A cybertruck would've barely made it past Sacramento with a much lighter load and would've taken much longer to fill up.
Actually from Tahoe to Sac is probably one of the better stretches to pull that off, it’s all downhill.
That doesn’t change the gist of your comment however - which is correct. (I’m a happy Bay Area Rivian owner who’s made that trip often)
Tahoe to Sac for sure isn't bad. The uphill section before that adds 2-3 gallons by itself when I'm towing though (compared to a flat route the same distance and speeds). IIRC net fuel economy winds up being similar to a flat stretch (even the downhill stretch burns a lot of energy in your brakes and has enough flat and uphill segments -- slightly ameliorated with regenerative braking, but I don't think it moves the needle enough).
How is your Rivian by the way? Is it in any way comparable to a cybertruck or is it just far and away better?
IMO it is worse. And I thought I said where i worked in my original comment. You just can't get the range to work on EV's and towing (my personal opinion) large pickups have big gas tanks and it's quick and easy to fill up. It's all about ergonomics. Yes an EV with a full battery vs a ICE with a full tank EV will always be more 'efficient' but day to day it doesn't add up.
Ergonomics and ease of use are why people get cars. Ergnomics right now to me are reason why EV's in America don't sell well. Infrastructure. If every apartment complex and shopping mall had chargers or we had a novel way to charge a battery like an ICE engine then yeah it will take off. Culturally though I think we just love gas stations, emissions and pollusion.
> Ergonomics and ease of use are why people get cars.
It's why I got my EVs, for certain. It would be hard to convince me to go back to the inconvenience of a gas vehicle at this point. I'm hooked.
They put the competitor they work for in their comment, it was not edited, it was there when you posted this reply.
Excellent sleuthing, either way.
Yes, it was a dig at GM.
The topic is a now-discontinued EV truck, or two of them if you're counting the Lightning, and a real measured range drop when towing. And GM makes EV trucks too. So can we please make this honest and not a fanboy fight?
Dude, your comment does not compute.
Care to clarify with actual math? We are a technical audience here.
The charging port is on the rear of the Cybertruck, which means if you have a trailer attached, you would have to find a charger with a long enough cable, or one that lets you pull all the way through.
If the charging port were on the front of the vehicle, you could pull straight in, but now your trailer is probably blocking traffic.
Of course you could disconnect and reconnect the trailer, which adds an extra 5-10 extra minutes to your 15-40 minute charge time depending on your battery level.
In Europe at least newer Tesla charging stations are drive through charging stations in pairs. Unless it is crowded, the trailer is parked in the charging spot behind you. Only if it is crowded do you have to disconnect.
Pulling a trailer with an EV is very common around here (Norway).
Lol it's like that awfully stupid design choice of Apple charging the pencil by physically connecting it into the ipad charging port
Aging Wheels on YouTube basically concluded that EV towing from a handling perspective is actually quite superior, but the charging and range is so much worse that depending on what you're doing it's likely a dealbreaker.
His channel is a highly recommended watch for anyone who is curious. He also did some very easy to understand tests of range for towing comparing the impacts of the weight of what you're towing vs the wind resistance.
How do I pull into a charging station when I'm towing a camper?
some of the newer locations have clearance for one camper . otherwise you have to take up extra space or unhitch .
Range is cut in half for starters.
We have Rivian charging stations in Montana and Idaho that have pull through bays.
I've seen pull through charger spots at the Rivian stations where I charged my VW.
The top comment says that the cybertruck is neat?!?!?! TS;dr. Is there a sort order that improves HN comments?
China (e.g. BYD et al) is basically banned from selling in your USA country. They will not eat your lunch there.
Everywhere else on the planet, though? Most certainly.
> I've heard there's power stations with pull throughs but havent' seen them personally.
FWIW Rivian has pull through charging stations along I-5, so they do exist. In general, their charging infrastructure is very reliable, uses renewable energy (matching), and is fast (even for my non-Rivian EV) and is not associated with a fascist.
> Like I said I work for a competitor (GM) and I fear China is going to eat our lunch.
AFAIK outside of trucks GM is mostly a reseller of chinese cars these days.
> I agree with Elon now that SpaceX and Tesla are the 'same' company
Why? Doesn’t make any sense to me although there is much speculation as to why Musk wants to merge them.
I mean the synergy is there to do some amazing stuff with vehicles.
I don’t see it. The roadster stuff isn’t going to lead to any mass market or even niche profitable product for a very very long time if ever.
I could pick nearly any two random companies and come up with equally wild speculative synergies.
People intuit cost per mile, if states stop making it illegal for Tesla to charge less insurance themselves with FSD, it’s possible they win.
China can produce 7M more vehicles annually than the entire world (including them) needs, so the world has to decide whether to give up all their manufacturing to let china do it, or china has to increase worker’s rights and pay so that they can afford to buy more vehicles (their currency and financing tactics essentially reduce purchasing power at scale to fund their manufacturing infrastructure).
It'll likely be both
Towing with EV isn’t exactly truck or Tesla problem. So I kinda agree for those particular cases it’s pretty bad choice. But most don’t do that and just like big cars with utility.
> Towing with an EV is terrible.
Why? I saw a Cybertruck towing a Porsche 911 racing a Porsche 911 and winning. That seems like decent torque.
Range is the problem, of course.
All EV trucks suck at pulling, so that's a category problem. It's designed to ride like a car, as truck dynamics of leaf spring suspension on a solid rear axle isn't actually good technically. The feel, though, is a personal preference. It is not a hobby nor a toy: it is fully functional as a truck other than for pulling long miles. It is way more capable than other trucks on certain dimensions. Other trucks are outrageously expensive with similar features. I feel like you are biased.
How do you not understand the trickle down effect of motorsports, given that you work for a competitor? The tech in the roadster trickles down to normal cars (e.g., its drivetrain advancements), and possibly to off-planet rovers (Earth is the brutal case to test the equipment on, but I don't know enough about the potential to reuse here).
>there's power stations
you lost me here, laughing. Nobody calls them that. You’ve never driven an EV long distance, much less actually towed with one.
I’ve towed 5000+ lbs, including a mid-size SUV on a trailer, cross-country with another EV half of a dozen times. Stopping a lot is bit tedious, but it drives so well. The Rivian and Silverado both have big packs and work well. The Lightning didn’t have enough range for long-distance towing.
Moving a trailer around in town or taking a boat or camper to a lake nearby would be comfortable and the torque makes the drive effortless.
5,000 lbs is not some kind of grand feat.
A 3.6L V6 can do that easily and they are dime a dozen.
Yeah I don't get the brag 5k lbs is nothing. That's like 450lbs of tongue weight. I've pulled that with a toyota corolla.
If you stay in first gear and avoid long downhills, you can tow almost anything with almost anything.
I did some towing of loaded ~1500lb trailers with a 1.6 liter Corolla twenty years ago and it was sort of OK... Not great, not terrible. Requires some patience and some extra planning ahead.
[dead]