Everyone's favourite billionare temper-tantrum chucking oversized 3-year old, Elmo Moss, has taken the best part of four years to bring his Cybertruck to market and the final product by all accounts, will suffer from awful panel-fit and poor quality control.
More generally, Leon Muss' story arc is the kind of think that one would see in comic books. He has gone from being the son of a property developer and emerald mine owner, to being in the right place at the right time to sell off businesses like Zip2 and PayPal, to become a weird Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne type superhero who owns The Boring Company, Tesla Motors, Space X; who then decided to enter the culture wars and buy Twitter, to ten turn into a right-wing nutter who millions presumably hate.
Noel Mess' Boring Company seems really intent on inventing things that already exist but doing them worse. The Boring Company Loop System in Las Vegas, reinvented the train but used electric cars; to make a not very usable mass (?) transit system.
Not content with inventing worse trains things than trains which already exist, Olen Mask's Tesla Motors has decided to invent a worse version of the pickup truck for reasons that make no sense to me. From what I can determine, the Cybertruck which was supposed to have used a proprietary exoskeleton will revert to a normal unibody or railframe construction. However all that aside, the Cybertruck's existence is a strange strange exercise in ontology. Why does it need to exist?
I saw this photograph of what is presumably a pre-production Cybertruck on X the other day and to be honest, the sight of this thing made me sad.
Every single view I ever see of this truck, looks more and more ridiculous. I don't know that's even possible.
I shall use Imperial Units for this as I am a metric man, every inch of the way.
As far as I am concerned, the final form of the evolution of the motor car, is the VE Commodore Ute. Quite literally no vehicle beyond that dat has been better backed, better built, better engineered, or better suited to purpose. It is a good donkey which was sufficient cool enough, sufficently big enough, sufficiently strong enough, and sufficiently capable enough to do most things well. The relevant details are thus:
VE Commodore Ute:
Weight: 3726 lbs
Wheelbase: 114.8"
Tray bed: 72.0"
Price: $36,000
In comparison the Tesla Cybertruck is expected to have the following dimensions:
Weight: 6800 lbs
Wheelbase: 149.0"
Tray bed: 70.0"
Price: $96,000
This means that for a mere $60,000 more, you can have a thing that weighs 1.8x as much, has a wheelbase which is not quite two feet longer, and has a tray bed which is two inches shorter.
Perhaps the one redeeming thing about the Cybertruck is that it allegedly produces 800kW of power from the electric motors. Electric motors by virtue of operating because of the motor effect in physics, produce maximum torque at zero revs. This makes electric motors the best theoretical motors to put on things that need to start and stop, such as trains and cars. 800kW is about 1070 horsepower; which means that on the signal, more than a thousand horses are unleashed. That's pretty tyre shredding, as it is only about 6 pounds per horsie as opposed to the nearly 20 pounds per horsie in my Mazda 2. The fewer number of pounds per horsie, means that the horsies that are there, can be angrier and with more than a thousand, that's plenty angry.
Except when you have more than 6000 pounds, that's an unpleasant driving experience. The founder of Lotus Cars, Colin Chapman, said that if you wanted to add speed, add lightness. Lighter cars have less mass to accelerate, stop, and change directions and the Cybertruck, is a very very hefty chonky boi. The Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 that I had, at 4200 pounds and a wheelbase of 116.7" felt like a massive thing because it was. This is even more massive by almost half again.
I suspect that this stainless steel Porygon type body on this truck is supposed to evoke sentiment for a future that never was, as though it were from Back To The Future Part II. The problem is that not only would it be impossible to see anything peripherally from behind the B-Pillar and back, but the massive C-Pillars which extend all the way to the very tips of the rear quarter panels, would ensure that the view out the back of this truck would be an extreme case of tunnel vision.
All of this leads me to ask the question of exactly who is this Eisschrankpanzer for? The kinds of good-ol-boys who buy Brodozers such as the F-150 or Silverado, will not be able to afford this thing, and the kinds of people who would buy G-Wagens and Range Rovers will continue to buy Mercedes-Benz EQS and Range Rover EVoques.
The only logical conclusion that I can make as to who the jinkies would want a 6000 pound, hideous looking monstrosity, which looks bad at doing the only job it was designed for, is none other than Elmo himself. There is no Plan B. There is also no Plan A. He has no idea what he is doing but he's got more money than the sense to use it. He could have bought a Formula One Team, or started a sensible car company but no. Siberchonk is Elmo's car for Elmo and only Elmo will ever want one.
No comments:
Post a Comment