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Thread: I'm not a fan of Tesla cars, but their truck is sick

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    Re: I'm not a fan of Tesla cars, but their truck is sick

    Old school truck guys talking about why this truck is good:


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    Re: I'm not a fan of Tesla cars, but their truck is sick

    Summary

    • This is the most disastrous unveiling Tesla has ever done, and maybe the most disastrous of any product I’ve ever seen.”
    • “I was delighted with it other than the presentation which was so bad, and Elon Musk is a flippin genius, he just is. He centered on exactly the Truck thing, and by that I mean:”
      • “Everybody thinks trucks are for farmers who do work. There are farmers who do do work - I don’t know if any of them will have this truck.”
      • “All truck advertising is about how tough they are” (goes through examples)
      • “Elon Musk has done what I think is the perfect truck at the perfect time”
      • “Understand most guys who drive pickup trucks don’t do a days work in their life, they’re all tax accountants, however, they all identify with the big manly truck, or they’re someone like me where getting into a car is a problem”
      • Goes on to explain how in middle America, your mom has a car and your dad has a truck

    • Introduces his friend Richard, who was in the pickup truck business for 20 years and is very familiar with the customer, and was an early pioneer of the Tonneau cover (had one of the early designs)
      • Invented for chevy a flat lid to cover the bed that dramatically reduces the drag and lets you lock your stuff up
      • His was called a flush mount bed cover, and was sold under the Checkmate name

    • Richard’s first impression was the outer skin, the XY design and stainless steel which eliminated paint.
      • “This is something that’s been kicked around, and you’ve heard conversations for 20 or 30 years”
      • “They always talked about if they made something out of sheeting, they wouldn’t have the molding, forming, stamping machines etc.. Those things get out of variance fairly quick, so you have a huge (tooling? towing?) cost”
      • “This truck has a huge (tooling? towing?) advantage”

    • “Several observers were kinda tongue-in-cheek calling it an origami design, which is not far off. This idea is not original, but no one has had the balls to do it”
      • “It’s called the XY design”
      • “You get a huge sheet of stainless steel, and score it (draw out the design), then cut out the corners and edges with a laser cutter or water jet”
      • “What he’s done is taken a 3mm sheet of 301 stainless steel, which he would have you believe was specially designed for spacex - not quite”
      • “301 is about 17% chromium, about 7% nickel, maybe 2% manganese, a little silicon mixed in, about 1% with steel”
      • “It comes in 4 basic hardness - quarter hard, half hard, 3 quarters hard, and full hard, and this is a function of how it is annealed in the process of forming it, and the cold rolled process is how they get full hard”
      • “I suspect the spacex and this might be some sort of super pressure cold rolled where they get it even harder than what the full hard would imply”
      • “So you lay it out flat, score it flat and cut it flat, and you do fold it up sort of like origami, and then you weld it”

    • “They do use 301 stainless for aircraft, but also subway cars, and even appliances”
    • “The reason this has been kicked around for so long is it eliminates stamping machines. It lends itself very well to robot laser assembly on the line. You basically take one or two sheets and fold them up into a truck, which is a huge cost savings”
    • Richard: “I think that’s probably what detroit is talking about today”
    • “No one has ever pulled the trigger because it winds up looking like japanese origami, and then drilling a hole in 301 stainless is a hard day’s work”
    • “So you vastly reduce the work and equipment required to assemble the truck, and no paint shop required”
    • “Then you stick on whatever kind of black plastic vacuum formed trim, and there you go”
    • “So what are you left with. Stainless steel, I detest it because you can’t drill a hole in it. But what you get is a tough, manly truck, that wont’ show a lot of damage”
    • Richard: “that’s one of the reasons those guys really don’t like those trucks that are on tv out in the woods anymore, they have so much in them (as in they cost so much), and they get their paint scratched when you get off road”
    • “The average price of a pickup in the US is $48,000. But that’s not for the coal burner, Ram, dualie you’re thinking of; those go up to about $100k if you wanna be the big guy with the truck”
    • “The cybertruck has a light bar on the top edge of the front, so you can’t bust out a headlight, because there ain’t a headlight. And you can’t bust out the grill, because there ain’t a grill, and you can’t dent the bumper because it doesn’t really have a bumper. It has a little piece of plastic on the bottom of the front that should be relatively inexpensive to replace, and the rest is a flat, blunt wall of steel “
    • Talks about the sledgehammer and ball bearing for a few mins
    • “And you know what, if you keyed it, or ran it through the woods and scratched it up, you know how you fix that? With a buffer”
    • “So what are the downsides of stainless steel? Well paint won’t stick to it, but if you wanna dress this up it’s like a chalkboard - you can vinyl the crap out of it, you can write your name, cover it with ********* stickers, whatever you want. And that’s the other thing about a truck - you gotta be able to customize it a little”
    • “Was I shocked by the body? No he pretty much described it as a futuristic armored personnel carrier, and it looked very reminiscent of a lockheed f-117”
    • “It also looks like the new Zumwalt Destroyer”
    • “Also notice all the glass if flat - I cannot express how that simplifies the construction of the vehicle”
    • “I predict that the shock of that design will be replaced by the genius of it”
    • “The glass is a polymer and glass laminate, similar to the gorilla glass they use on iphones, but thicker”
    • Goes over the window thing


    • “So I talked about what I liked, what didn’t I like”
      • “They didn’t really give us any information. We don’t know what size battery pack, what size motors, what the capacity of the 240volt AC inverter is that you can use your power tools with”
      • “There was an aftermention of an air compressor, because you already have one for the air suspension, well that’s not a very big compressor. Maybe you could use it for a nailer?”

    • “The shocker was the price tag. For the 39900 variant, a similarly equipped Ford F150 I kinda priced out for around 43800, and really the Tesla exceeds it in all respects”
    • “With a 3500 lbs bed capacity, well that’s like a 2 and a half ton truck. That’s like a Ford F-450 or 350”
    • Goes over the trim levels and their availability
    • Suspected the base trim is an 85kWh pack, 120 for the mid, and two of those for the plaid.
    • Goes over the towing capacity
    • Richard “I think the towing situation is going to be HUGE for truck owners. Everybody now, basically buys a truck to pull something - they pull a camper, they pull a custom little car, they pull a boat. The reason you buy a pickup truck almost in today’s world is for towing, and that electric motor system is going to have torque all the way through the cycle, all the way through the acceleration of the vehicle, and pretty even torque going up and down hills”
    • Talks about the interior and how much room there is. Talks about how the center seat folds down and you get the most massive console he’s ever seen.
      • “It looks like it has about 5 cupholders in it, and plenty of storage, and it’s basically a desk”

    • Talks about the rear view camera a bit
    • Talks about the lit bed, and the panel in the bed
    • Was told the dash is made of compressed recycled paper
    • “Storage - nobody, at any time showed the frunk, but i’m told there is one. Nobody in the unveil ever showed, motor trend has some photos of it, it has a secure storage area beneath the bed”
    • Richard “that’s gonna be huge”
    • “The slatted electric Tonneau is going to be a huge problem. It goes up, then it goes down and there’s a cylinder it rolls up in beneath the bed. And that’s, I predict going to be the number one maintenance issue on the vehicle is this kinda overdone Tonneau, but it is a key piece of the design because of a lot of things, one of them is aerodynamics for mileage and efficiency, but the other thing is security.
    • Richard: “They kinda had those in the industry, but you know what you would happen to them - a little bit of water would trickle inside the mechanism, and on cold nights it would freeze up and lock them up. So the only thing I would say is I’d make sure that thing was weather sealed, where water couldn’t get into any of the devices”
    • “How bout dust, how bout mud, how bout insects, how bout leaves. It’s gonna be a nightmare. It’ll be THE maintenance issue with the truck, BUT it’s one of its coolest features, and I don’t know another way to do what they’re doing. The security advantage, and the aerodynamic advantage, is such that it’s an absolutely necessary function”
    • Richard: “And it actually goes half height, so it is where you would have tall storage much taller than a flat pickup, where you would put a few items back there.”
    • In regards to offroading - “this thing’s a hummer. A Ford F-150, the tricked out 4x4 supercrew cab, has 9.6” of ground clearance. This has 16” - that’s like a hummer. I think the hummer H1 was 16. So it makes a big difference in offroading And underneath that, I’m told it’s all armored, it’s all covered, you can’t get at the motors, you can’t get at the batteries, it’s a skidplate.”
    • “So specifically, on the things that define a pickup truck, and I’m surprised Elon Musk even knew what those were, but he’s got it, and that’s this offroad capability, and this kind of tough, durable, manly kind of gig.”
    • Talks a little bit about how trucks are an image thing, and what they’re actually used for is “none of your business!”
    • “He hit all the right notes, on here is a truck you can take a sledgehammer to, and you can beat this truck all you want and it doesn’t even show damage. And it has an offroad capability in case you ever roll it up onto the front lawn of your house.”
    • Talks about how they screwed up the reservation system by making it $100, because even if it’s a huge success the critics will point to that as a sign of weakness. Like they just want a bunch of people to sign up to make it look popular.
    • Thinks some time from now they’ll be inducting Franz into the design hall of fame for finally pulling off the XY design; dramatically changing the manufacturing of pickup trucks, and doing the iconic pickup truck of all time.
    • Talks about the announcements being made by other OEMs. Makes fun of the mustang mach-e which he calls a totally dead rip-off of the model Y with a higher price and worse specs in every way.
    • Talks about Tesla’s lead in charging network
    • Talks a bit about battery tech. Apparently some study determine ethylene bicarbonate is the culprit for dendrite formation. He’s excited about the million mile battery tech from Jeff Dahn and increased manufacturing speed form Maxwell dry electrode. Believes Tesla will bring cell production in-house.
    • Goes back to the 240V inverter. Jack thinks it’s probably going to be some small 3KW inverter, when it should be 10 or 12.

  3. #13
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    Re: I'm not a fan of Tesla cars, but their truck is sick

    It appears Musk's engineers cribbed this 'truck' design from one originally conceived FORTY years ago, including the variable height suspension -

    https://www.ericpetersautos.com/wp-c...1/urbacar3.jpg

    https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2019...oled/urbacar3/
    "A man is to be held accountable for the thoughts he chooses to entertain." --Richard Alan Miller

    "If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?" --George Orwell

    "It's not a matter of what is true (reality) that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true (reality)." --Henry Kissinger

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    Re: I'm not a fan of Tesla cars, but their truck is sick

    BTW, today I dropped by a friend's car lot where he specializes in high end cars and low and behold there's a Tesla Model 3 sitting there on his lot - PLUGGED IN. We had spoken previously about Tesla cars and whether that was a good fit for his lot. He seemed interested and curious but not fully enthused. I haven't dropped by there in several months so I dropped in to catch up and I see the Tesla. I ask him, "I see you've gotten into Teslas now." He replied, "Yeah, this is my first one and I hate it. It's like a golf cart, you have to keep it plugged in all the time. If you forget to plug it in then you're hosed and you cannot go as far as you would like or maybe nowhere at all. It's a major PITA to remember to do so EVERY TIME YOU GET HOME."

    And FWIW I see that over this past weekend Tesla owners were waiting up to an hour in line for their turn at a Supercharger. Musk reminds me of a carny barker. 14,000 chargers WORLDWIDE. WOW. Impressive. /s Today I pulled through a local parking lot and noticed a Tesla Supercharger station. There must have been at least 20 spots there (of the 14,000 WHIRLED WIDE...translation: ~20 charging spots at a Supercharger setup = only ~700 locations to get a charge worldwide that is really not that many locations) and not a single Tesla in sight. And this town is full of the delusional Tesla owners.

    It's electric!
    "A man is to be held accountable for the thoughts he chooses to entertain." --Richard Alan Miller

    "If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?" --George Orwell

    "It's not a matter of what is true (reality) that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true (reality)." --Henry Kissinger

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