In a wide ranging conversation with auto industry veteran Sandy Munro, Tesla executives explained salient features of the Cybertruck design.
The video was posted Monday on Munro Live (see bottom).
Range Extender: We want to make more cars, not more batteries. “For most people 340 miles. That’s totally fine,” said Lars Moravy, Head of Vehicle Engineering in response to a question from Munro about range. “But we want to make more electric vehicles” not more battery cells “that no one will ever use.” “That’s why I decided to make [the range extender] an optional add-on.”
Moravy is speaking to a trend in the EV industry where smaller battery capacities can make more sense because most people don’t drive more than 40 or 50 miles a day and rarely use the extra capacity.
Towing and range: “It depends on the aero efficiency of what you’re dragging around. If you pull a horse trailer it’s pretty bad. May take away 50 percent of your range. But if you pull a Skidoo or something a little more aerodynamic it may be 20 or 30 percent,” Moravy said.
“If you’re somebody that tows a lot. From San Francisco to Tahoe. The range extender might make sense.”
Body: The goal was to create an exoskeleton that was a result of form from function, not strictly an aesthetic decision, said Franz von Holzhausen, Head of Design at Tesla. That statement flies in the face of a widely-accepted notion that the design is intentionally odd looking.
“We call it HFS now, Hard Freaking Stainless,” said Moravy, speaking about the stainless steel construction. “We had to balance the corrosion toughness of lower-grade alloys with ductility of the higher grade alloys,” Moravy said, adding that stainless steel does in fact rust so “so we had to make it super corrosion preventative.”
Power your home or charge another EV: 11.5 kW continuous bidirectional on the charge port, Moravy explained. “You can power your house,” he said. And with the 240 volt outlet in the bed “you can just charge another EV right off the back.”
Less wiring: “We have switched to Etherloop so we have gigabit Ethernet loop in the car that connects all of the high-speed controllers together,” said Pete Bannon, Head of Low Voltage.
“Bidirectional for redundancy,” he said. “The number of wires that go across the car has been reduced dramatically,” he said, reduced to 155 from 490.
Batteries: the Cybertruck uses Tesla’s newest 4680 batteries with a 9 percent higher energy cell.
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