The Cybertruck Challenge

2023-12-03 19:53:05

So if I read one more fucking post about how the Cybertruck is the greatest creation of humankind since fire I am going to scream.

But then I thought, let’s concoct a simple means to test it! And that test is: is it actually a truck?

Thus, I give to you, the Cybertruck Challenge! It is as follows:

1. Start with a fully changed vehicle.

2. Load the bed with the following:

enough firewood for 2 nights, approximately 12-15 big arm-fulls (a few hundred pounds, easily)

40L of water (2 large and 1 small Scepter cans)

food and drink sufficient for 2 adults to have regular meals and snacks for a good weekend (Friday mid-day to Sunday mid-day)

throw in about 50 pounds of extra kit - clothes, etc.

3. Connect a 2-wheel trailer weighing no less than 1300 pounds

4. The drive out:

Leaving on a Friday before noon but after rush hour, take a trip of no less than 170 miles, which must cross the Eastern Continental Divide, and must be done in 1 nonstop trip. The trip must include at least 1 mile along a non-paved forest road or otherwise generally-accepted “backcountry” road (fire roads, hunting trails, etc). Any trip time in excess of 4 hours is a failure of the test; assume that your destination is a single camping spot that is very popular and not getting there soon enough means someone else will have claimed it.

Leave the vehicle parked until Sunday (disconnected from the trailer). You may use any vehicle features you wish during this time.

5. The drive home:

You may leave for home any time after sunrise on Sunday. The only change to the loadout is that you may dump the water, firewood, and food (hopefully not actually dumping it, we are assuming here it has been used!). All other elements remain the same.

You may stop to “refuel” on the way home, but any trip time in excess of the time you took to go out is a failure (with obvious exceptions like serious traffic problems such as road closures or bad accidents).

My 2017 Tacoma (V6 engine, 4x4, SR5 trim) can do this; we can drive from home, with the trailer and a long weekend of gear to Abe’s Run, just a few miles from Bartow, WV, without stopping while carrying the Hiker over the Eastern Continental Divide. If you’ve never made that trip, it’s a lot of fun. You get to go the long way over the Divide, which is a much more gentle slope at the cost of a LOT of extra miles, or, you can haul everything up and then back down a roughly 11% grade that’s just a couple miles.

The Cybertruck cannot do that. We have, in our owner’s group, met multiple people who have towed a Hiker behind existing Teslas and you get about 90-100 miles of range over flat, midwestern highways. Giving the Cybertruck the benefit of the doubt on range, maybe it’ll make it the 170-odd miles to Abe’s Run, but it won’t be able to do another hour back out to get to the only charger in Pendleton County (which, if the locals are to be believed, doesn’t work most of the time anyway).

So if you believe that it is the best thing ever created by humankind since fire, there you have it: a basic use case for “can this thing be a truck”. I think it’s a good test, because it has a number of specific things that greatly impair just about any vehicle. For example, the Hiker is as aerodynamic as a brick. Maybe less so! It’s a squaredrop design, so it trades the (ostensibly) better aerodynamic qualities of a teardrop for more usable volume. You can take the long way (over Corridor H past Davis, WV) which gives you insanely gentle hills but it’s a much, much longer distance. Maybe the gentler hills will give you better regenerative braking; the incredibly steep “short cut” will absolutely not.

For what it’s worth, the Lightning and Rivian can’t do this, either. I’m not picking on the Cybertruck pe se; I’m really picking on its reality-distortion-field-drunk fanboys.