Musk's Tesla doesn't only intend to change the direction of the EV passenger car industry. The company has numerous other projects in the work. The Tesla Truck aims to revolutionize the hauling industry. The reborn Roadster will give Porsche's EVs yet more competition.
Most notably the Cybertruck drew attention to the brand's other projects. A pickup truck with a futuristic design, the Cybertruck straddles the line between SUV and pickup truck, like all Teslas this car will revolutionize its market segment. Or at least it will when the vehicle eventually arrives to customers.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is a visionary, or at the very least poses as one. A co-founder of PayPal the entrepreneur pioneered digital payment systems, bolstering his already impressive inherited wealth. SpaceX strives to make space achievable again.
For us gearheads, we associate Musk mainly with Tesla, the ultimate expression of EV potential as well as his impressive personal collection of cars. With ludicrous acceleration and futuristic design, Tesla paved the way for the EVs that we see coming from brands like Hyundai and Ford. A trendsetter the company set the direction of the industry. Tesla truly is inseparable from the EV.
Tesla's Cybertruck pushes the pickup and SUV industry towards lifestyle-focused luxury vehicles.
This Is How The Cybertruck Plans To Change The SUV Market
According to Tesla, the Cybertruck offers "Better utility than a truck with more performance than a sports car". Quite the statement from the California-based automotive manufacturer. Over the past decade demand for extra sporty SUVs only increased. Take for example Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk and Range Rover SVR models.
These cars essentially act as a successor to the muscle car. With large displacement V8 engines, these cars pack the punch of a muscle car, but as a result of their weight, they lack the true handling dynamics of a sports car. The Cybertruck may change this, yes EVs are exceptionally heavy and throughout a lap of the Nurburgring a regular Porsche 911 Carrera will catch up to a Tesla.
But with battery technology comes the opportunity to mount the batteries low in the body, as seen on the new Ioniq. This results in a lower center of gravity and better handling dynamics. Tesla promises a 0-60 time of 2.9 seconds. While not as impressive as their Plaid model, this beats pretty much any truck on the market to 60mph.
After all the competing F-150 Lightning achieves this in a comparatively weak 3.8 seconds. Somewhat optimistically the company promises a range of up to 500 miles. Something very few manufacturers currently offer. Currently only Lucid offers a 500-mile range between charges.
This Is What The Cybertruck Means For The Truck Industry
The EV truck market recently saw entries from both Ford and Chevrolet. The F-150 Lightning certainly took the automotive world by storm as the EV version of the United States' most popular truck. The Chevrolet Silverado EV came on sale a few years back to a lukewarm, but still overly positive reception.
These trucks although lifestyle oriented, in other words for people who don't really need them are still made with rigidity in mind. For the Cybertruck this likely won't be the case. According to the BBC, "Elon Musk had an embarrassing moment when demonstrating how hard the windows were to break", these promptly smashed.
Musk quipped that the vehicle had "room for improvement". Perhaps an orchestrated PR stunt, but still indicative of the brand's issue with the build quality. Critics often cite the major drawback to Tesla as the interior's substandard design for the luxury segment.
If these same issues with design quality continue with the Tesla Cybertruck then one can only doubt the car's utility potential. Teslas arguably aren't bought for their engineering genius, but instead for the prestige of owning one of these luxury and rare vehicles. Think in the same way people bought BMWs at the turn of the millennium.
As a result, the Cybertruck would lean more towards the lifestyle section of the truck segment, just like Rivian, another EV brand. More than likely this would then push competing manufacturers further away from the more traditional design of their utility vehicles.
However, Tesla when this model comes to production promise to use an exoskeleton, in other words, a reinforced chassis made of "Ultra-Hard 30X Cold-Rolled stainless-steel structural". Alongside the car's 14,000 pound towing capacity, and spacious flat loading bed capable of holding 3,500 pounds, very little on the market has competing specifications as the Cybertruck.
What The CyberTruck's Radical Aesthetic Means For The Industry
Manufacturers like Audi and BMW are moving progressively to more evolved designs for their EVs that have plenty of aggressive lines and increased announce their road presence. Tesla's Cybertruck, just like the rest of their range takes a minimalistic design. In a way, it looks like Elon Musk took a piece of paper and a ruler.
Drawing a triangle and a square, as opposed to the traditional two-box design of a pickup truck. This indicates a broader trend within the EV space. EVs from most manufacturers play into the utopian futures of science fiction with more minimalistic designs than their ICE counterparts.
Take for example the new Hyundai Ioniq, the car features fewer body creases and intakes than the rest of the brand's vehicles like the Tucson and i30. The same trend exists for the German marques, Mercedes EQS rounds off the edges of a traditional Mercedes G-Class. Audi's E-Tron reigns back the company's ever-more-aggressive design. Tesla continues and perhaps even accelerates these trends with its Cybertruck.
Source: Tesla