Sort of. As I understand it, the main issues with the cyber truck’s offroading capability are its weight (it weighs a LOT more than even a large pickup due to being an EV) and the fact that you can’t replace the tires with something more suitable for your intended terrain.
In this case, I think the main issue is the weight on a very soft surface.
This isn’t true. Many higher trim F150s (bigger cab, 4wd, luxury interior) weigh over 6000lbs. Only the smallest, cheapest ones used for work vehicles are on the 4000lb range. Not defending the Cybertruck, but repeating false info doesn’t help.
The 2023 F150 King Ranch Super Crew has a curb weight of 4,912 pounds. The Cybertruck is nearly a ton heavier.
It’s not an unfair to explain that being heavy affects traction in the sand, and batteries weigh a freaking ton. In the case of the F150 Lightning, for instance, the battery is 1800 pounds, and it’s pretty close to the Tesla in weight.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what’s being said here, but it’s pretty surreal hearing someone explain how their pickup truck is too big to be useful as a work vehicle.
Most big trucks are big because they have more interior passenger room. They’re essentially vans/SUVs with a small, useless bed that’s purely for looks. Only smaller trucks have a bed of usable size.
wealth and stupidity come hand in hand in many, many cases.
I think this is partially because in order to make a lot of money in most cases you have to fuck someone else over and never have it occur to you thats what you’re doing. Like if you find out you can buy t-shirts for €1, then you go to your neighbor and tell them they can have a t-shirt for the low price of €30 (and manage not to feel bad about that) you’re a successful businessman and a pilliar of the community.
Cyber truck buyers are Elon worshipping tech bros, which means that they think they are smarter and better than everybody else. This leads to acts of hubris like the above picture, which are obviously very stupid and easy to see coming, but these types of people think, “I am very smart and know exactly what I am doing at all times. This will be fine, because I am doing it.”
Back in the late-80s or early-90s, a guy in my coastal town bought a new Nissan Pathfinder, took a bunch of friends for a nighttime joyride at the beach. I do believe there was beer involved.
When they hit water lapping in the sand and made a sharp turn, the tires made a wake that looked really, really cool! Do that again!
Suddenly, the car stopped moving forward. They had drifted too deep. Of course none of these rocket scientists had any idea if the tide was coming or going… it was coming.
They got out - through the windows I guess - waded onshore and prayed for the best. But like I said, the tide was coming. They saw the Pathfinder that still had that new agency car smell, getting completely submerged.
Next day a tow truck pulled it onshore, but as you probably guessed, it was a total loss.
Since no one else has said it, this isn’t a design flaw of the truck. The operator didn’t let air out of their tires. Before driving on sand you really want to let your tire PSI down to like 15 to be safe. I used to pull hummers out of the beach with my old four cylinder Nissan pickup because their drivers were often overconfident they didn’t need to deflate their tires (or just completely unaware). I don’t like Tesla but this is an operator error, not a fatal flaw of the truck.
I used to race cars, and would over/ under inflate my tires based on the weather and track conditions. Never thought about driving on sand, but that’s a super useful tip that I would wager most people have never heard.
Yeah it made me a lot of extra cash when I was in high school. I would park over the on-ramp for beach access and wait for a tourist to inevitably get stuck. Most of the time I wouldn’t ask for money but they’d give me a nice tip since they knew the only other option was to call a tow truck. The park service requires a permit to off road now, and that info is on the permit so fortunately for visitors it happens less often now.
It’s not just sand, rock crawlers will deflate tires down to single digits (that’s why they use beadlocks) so that the tires actually wrap around the rocks.
That is an excellent point. Yeah, PSI would totally read as pounds times square inches which would be something else entirely. Adding in the extra P would fix it, too. PPSI. Suppose it’s another thing that people just have to get used to, haha.
Eh, it’s pretty unambiguous. kW/hour is a pretty useless unit. Power surges may be measured in kW/s or something, but they don’t really have any impact over a span of more than a couple seconds.
Likewise, pounds times square inches is equivalent go kg*m^3/s^2 in SI units - which also seems pretty meaningless. Maybe there is a use for it?
What really grinds my gears is that pounds are a unit of mass, not force. The “pounds” in “pounds per square inch” is short for “pounds-force“. It’s the force of one pound of mass accelerating at 1g. Preposterous.
Wait wait Wait, can you give me more on this kWh thing? I thought I understood this already.
A single kW is a unit of power, literally 1000 watts.
A kWh is a unit of energy, as in stored or delivered. Draw 500 watts for 2 hours? That’s a kWh. Or have a battery that can hold 1 kWh, then assuming 100% efficiency you could draw 1000 watts from it for an hour before it was empty.
All of this is kW times hour, I would say? But in my mind I would interchangeably say per hour as well, they feel the same.
If you use exactly 20 kW for an hour, it will translate to 20 kWh. But if your power usage varies over time, you can’t keep track of it so simple. It’s just how it is.
The unit is really watt [W] and the Greek prefix kilo (k) for 1000. This way it’s fast and easy to convert to different scales (like Mega, Giga etc) for comparing numbers
A watt is a derived unit for a rate of change, an amount of energy used in a unit of time, so P = E / t. A kW per hour would be a rate divided by time, or E / t^2, resulting in another rate.
More colloquially, think of watts/power by analogy to another rate, that of speed. Moving at a speed of 100kph for 3 hours results in 300 speed-hours of distance. Saying 100 kilometers per hour per 3 hours sounds awkward, but is actually a weird way to say acceleration, a rate of change of speed. (And probably a hint to get your car serviced.)
Anyway, the key is to think of a kilowatt as a rate, not a quantity.
I see now that watts and therefore kW are rates. So it’s silly to add another rate to the end by appending “per hour”. But what is the time component of the watt calculation? To me it’s essentially instantaneous, even if that’s wrong. Even if that breaks the math, it’s still essentially true on a macro scale. And if it’s instantaneous, or even just close like microseconds, then it doesn’t hurt to apend another rate to the end, does it?
So why not use it? Batteries come with capacities rated in Wh and kWh, and it weirdly still makes sense to me because of my usage rate per hour example in my last comment.
And if we shouldn’t use it, then what should we use?
Is this problem we’re discussing, one that only occurs if you try to get really accurate with the numbers and times? Because for my uses it’s always seemed to work well enough.
Not being argumentative, just trying to learn, thanks
Oh, hey, Jerboa is not so good about updating the Inbox tally…
I was responding to your question about kW per hour, and I was going for the intuitive sense of why that’s not right. The more “it’s just so” reason is that the math just doesn’t work, since the word “per” signifies division. So if we discharge a battery at a rate of 100 watts for 3 hours, that’s 100W * 3 hours, or 300 Wh used. If we say 100 watts per hour for three hours, that’s 100W / 1 hour * 3 hours. The hours cancel, and the result is 300 watts, which is a rate.
It’s totally confusing, I know, because people often use “watts” and “watt-hours” interchangeably, but they’re as different as speed and position.
Anyway, the watt is a derived unit in SI, and it’s equivalent to kg·m^2^ / s^3^. The per-unit-time is hidden when you write it as a watt, but clearly there when you write it in terms of base units. Of course, the joule is kg·m^2^ / s^2^, so energy also has time in the denominator, and I guess could technically also be a rate, but understanding that is way above my pay grade. 😀
Sorry, yeah I meant psi. And yeah, pressure units annoy the hell out of me too. There’s psi, kPa, Barr, Torr, atm, mmH20, in. Hg, and so on. It’s dumb.
bar is just the sensible scale for Pascal (1mbar = 1hPa), where 1 bar is about exactly standard atmospheric pressure. Beware though if you see bar scales it’s often not an absolute but overpressure scale, if the tyre pressure gauge says “1 bar” it means 1 bar over atmospheric pressure, that is, about 2 bar. 1 bar is also about the pressure of 10m of water.
atm is metric, too, with 1atm being exactly standard atmospheric pressure, toss it for bar. mmHg is only used in medicine, not used for actual calculations back in the days where blood pressure was first measured they did it with mercury scales and there was never any reason to change, on the contrary, changing would only introduce confusion. Torr is the same as mmHg, forget about it. The rest is colonial nonsense.
As an Aussie I’ve used metric for everything my whole life, but I’ve just realised that everything I’ve ever used to inflate stuff has been metered in PSI. I just know that ~30PSI is good for tyres, ~15PSI is good for soccer balls.
I wouldn’t know the conversions because there’s no use for it because that’s not what the pumps use. Weird.
Generally speaking you can hold in the valve for 60 seconds to let out enough air from your street pressure for off-road. It’s better to measure and you really want a 12v compressor to reinflate for the ride home but in a pinch…
That’s handy to know, but I believe the implication is that the owner of the car in the photo is dumb for buying the car and then dumb for getting it stuck in sand.
Calm? It scares the ever-living shit out of me that I’m surrounded by these people every day. They drive next to me. They have power over me. It’s frightening.
It’s an attempt to parody the meme format where people take two similarly looking characters and put Science Blaster (Game Theory’s theme song) in the background, implying that the two characters are the same. Such as this one.
slrpnk.net
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