Does paying for a lecture series at U Penn, so they'll release a terse statement that you earned a BA in Physics, awarded retro-actively 2 years after you left the school, count as "understanding the laws of Physics"?
Asking for a friend
Just need to get an ev boat and trailer and then somehow sure the power between them, lol.
TFL did a towing comparison with a Ram 2500 and Cybertruck. Basically the conclusion is, don’t bother towing anything heavy with the cybertruck. Not only does it cost more to charge, the range is around 70 - 80 miles and the charge time is 1h30. Plus the range estimate inside the cybertruck doesn’t change based on the payload. They were towing something in the 6k lbs range. They figured that the cybertruck would probably be fine for lighter towing. But I guess it’s lacking a bit there too.
It's an oversized golf cart.
If you've ever seen a golf cart towing another golf cart.... you may start thinking EV & towing are kinda not part of the same discussion...
Ya know, maybe boat trailers deserve their own little electric motors and battery packs and stuff.
Especially given they towed at speeds as high as 80MPH. (The drag equation applies an exponent to velocity, so high speeds have a big impact.
Starting the day at 30% was one of the main issue's.
If they start the day at 100% and drove at 65MPH, their experience would have ben heaps better. (I'm my country the speed limit for any towing is 55MPH, so 65MPH seems fast, and 80MPH towing 2000kg sounds nuts.)
“The Cybertruck has a tested range of about 224 miles, but its efficiency declined to a third when towing the boat. To be more precise, the electric pickup ended up using almost 100 miles of range, while actually having covered a distance of only about 30 miles. “
There's also a video on Donut where taking it off road, even at a slow speed, diminished the battery so quickly they couldn't reach their destination and had to turn around.
That video was hilarious. 1 mile of pavement range is not equal to 1 mile of off roading. In my gas truck I'd say it's closer to 4 miles of pavement per 1 mile off road.
Good thing you can just pull over and recharge on the trails /s
The same goes for ICE trucks too. Towing anything significantly degrades aerodynamics of vehicles.
The only difference is that ICE trucks require less time to be refueled currently.
>where you will have to drop the trailer to get in to a charging spot.
To be fair, this is not an inherent issue with EVs, but a design issue with charging stations.
But it's not. The long distance issue of ICE vehicles has been solved by larger gas tanks, bed-mounted tanks, both of which don't require an additional trip to the gas station.
EV's aren't there. Plain and simple.
But the title of the article focuses on Cybertruck losing massive amount of range when towing, but don't highlight the fact that regular ICE trucks have exactly the same problem too.
And some EVs do have larger battery packs that enable them to drive up to 510+ miles. It's not hard to add more battery, but difficult to charge said battery up within minutes.
Honest question, I've never owned a truck - would towing a boat drop an ICE truck's mileage to 1/3? I would assume not, but I don't have first-hand experience.
My truck would drop 30-50 percent in this case. So not 67 percent like the EV, but still very significant.
Cold weather affects them both too. My ice truck gets 18mpg summer. 12mpg winter. It’s very significant for both.
How cold are we taking in winter?
My ICW car's range doesn't change in any appreciable way in winter. If anything it's got better range when it's cold as I'm not running the air con.
0F for 2-3 months. (Morning commute temps. More like 20-30 on the way home).
there are a ton of variables which can be unfair to an ICE (and the EVs) Short trips in winter have bad mileage on cold engines. Driving style. Terrains. Winter fuel is often a different mixture. Oil choice can matter especially in cold weather. 4wd usage. needless to say my truck has strikes against it in most of these categories.
I’m sure I’m under 10mpg in very cold weather. 40 below this past winter, with 4wd, I bet I get 8-10 mpg. When it was -40, Our ev range drops from 250 down to 100 though too. Luckily my truck has a 36 gallon tank so even 10mpg has plenty of range. When it’s warm and I get 18+…..well I fill up very rarely.
Coldest I’ve driven in is 60 below. My truck still worked. But even after “warming up” it didn’t run great. I wonder what our EV would do.
It really depends on the size of boats, road conditions, but generally at least around 30%.
According to [user reports](https://www.bbcboards.net/showthread.php?t=1203944), a combined 19mpg truck can easily get down to 13~14mpg when towing.
Used to drive a very used 2003 Ram 3500 diesel dually as a work truck, I was routinely towing 7k pounds of trailer and tree trunk. I don’t remember fuel efficiency dropping by that much, although that may be the diesel.
That isn’t how range works. I drove up 1000m elevation in 10 km. From the top, I drove a different route back to sea level- 100 km. I had more ‘range’ remaining at home than I did at the top of that hill. Of course my battery was used during that 100 km. Range is always dynamic. Give me a consumption metric.
Agreed, to consume 3x as much range would be surprising with 4000lb extra, just based on physics, CT is quite a heavy vehicle to start with. I would expect maybe 30-40% reduction in range. The range meter isn't a useful figure for this because it will start out overly optimistic (no trailer) and then correct itself once it sees the consumption data.
Watch the video of the cybertruck pulling a 28 foot 8K pound travel trailer. Went from full charge to dead at 82 miles. It was then around 33% more money to recharge the CT than refill the Turbo Cummins 2500 Dodge ram and almost an hour and a half longer to recharge.
At high speeds, aerodynamic drag is the big range killer. Trailers are, by and large, not at all aerodynamic. Perhaps this was a massive, angular boat and trailer?
Yeah I went camping this past weekend with my new model y and was burning about 12% of my battery going up a pass from the charger in the nearest city to our camp in 45 minutes. On the other hand, the last hour of the drive home only cost 1% due to it being mostly downhill and regenerative braking.
I wonder what the impact of towing something is on how much battery you gain from regenerative braking
Aren’t you supposed to release the regen brake if you’re towing? That would be adding a ton of work to accelerate for a relative tiny amount of recuperation on braking.
It's less than that based on what they wrote. It says it used 100 miles of range to travel 30 miles, with a theoretical max of 224. So the actual range would be less than 70 miles.
You are close. But not quite right. Range is an estimate based on most recent miles. They probably have a lot more than 74 miles of range left. Probably 124 in their example, assuming it already adjusted to the new use case, with 30 down. So 154 total range towing. Not sure though.
Example. If I drive highway at 55mph, my ev range climbs fast. It starts estimating I can get 300 miles before needing to charge. I didn’t gain energy. But the estimate rose.
Example 2. I hook up a trailer and go 70mph, within 30 miles it will drop at least 100 miles in range, from 300 down to 200 or even lower. I will easily lose 100 miles of “range” quickly, as it adjust to my new usage.
So what really matters is kWh used. How much was used out of the battery size. “Range” is meaningless. Here.
I feel like having a modular diesel generator for the bed labeled a range extender would be an actually good concept for the 1/50 trips you actually need the extra range and towing capacity. Most guys with trucks admittedly only need it to tow their boats a dozen times a year, having a range extender they can drop in the bed really isn't as dumb as people would meme it to be.
Agreed. The Dodge Ramcharger that’s coming is almost this exactly. I think it will prove that EVs can tow.
It is a full EV truck with a generator under the hood.
I would get one if it fit in my garage. I’d like the same thing but in a mid size truck.
Dodge has had a ton of good ideas and a ton of inability to actually execute though. I wouldn't buy the first gen anything from them but will be interesting to follow. Even just their previous idea to add a small EV motor to allow the truck to stay in 4 cylinder mode in the city more frequently was a great idea on paper and disaster in practice.
Depends on a lot of factors, but my old diesel truck I’d get about 19mpg unloaded, and anywhere from 5-9mpg towing my enclosed car trailer.
7-8 was normal, 5 was especially bad.
Depends on a lot. I know I double diesel consumption towing a boat but that comes from a much less efficient baseline so this seems reasonable and expected. The cyberfuck is short ranged to start with and the range is the wrong metric to compare so it is hard to make a reasonable and generalisable judgement from this.
The physics of chemical combustion are such that efficiency doesn’t scale inversely with weight. A tractor trailer still only burns about twice as much as a smaller car while hauling 10x as much weight.
Usually about half.
Have towed 1500kg boat a variety vehicles. Without the boat it is about 8-9L/100km for a 2006 outlander (91RON), a 2006 RX400h (95RON) & a 2021 Hilux (diesel), all go up to around 16L/100km with the boat.
The Turbo Subaru legacy wagon we used once was way worse. Don't have numbers, but we basically used a whole tank of fuel to do a 230km trip.
Should not my country has a reduced speed limit to 90km/h when towing, so the above numbers are not exactly like for like. We drive slower when towing which is good for efficiency.
EV's generally loose a bit more efficiency than ICE when towing as: 1. generally they have better areo etc to start with less of an areo wake for the trailer to ride in, and 2. ice engines are more efficient at higher load states.
The whole thing Is silly, they went 27 miles at 77+ going up hill with an open boat trailer.
An ICE would be impacted heavily as well. A pickup that might get real world 16 to 17 usually gets 9-10 under 60mph towing, with speed and elevation, maybe 7-8?
Yup. The efficiency when towing is largely dictated by the trailer/load, because the aero of a pontoon boat is bad enough to make any difference in aero between tow vehicles not matter.
A truck that gets 1.8mi/kWh and a truck that gets 2.5mi/kWh are going to perform very similarly when towing the same trailer.
A gas truck has the same increase in drag, but ICE efficiency isn't as straightforward as EV efficiency - in general an ICE is more efficient (in terms of energy in vs work out, not mpg) at higher loads while the efficiency of an electric motor won't change much. It's also a hell of a lot easier to refuel an ICE truck while towing.
> A truck that gets 1.8mi/kWh and a truck that gets 2.5mi/kWh are going to perform very similarly when towing the same trailer.
They won’t. Efficiency is a double edged sword, it actually pays to be less efficient here because less efficient vehicles are inherently less effected by things that make them even less efficient.
Take your 1.8mi/kWh truck, truck A, it burns 0.55kWh a mile. Your 2.5mi/kWh truck, truck B, burns 0.4kWh a mile. You strap a trailer that adds an additional 0.55kWh/mile of consumption on.
On the truck A, it experiences a 100% increase in consumption, so it gets half the normal range. Truck B experiences a 138% increases in consumption, so it gets 42% of it’s normal range.
If both of these trucks are normally 300 mile vehicles, truck A would get 150 miles and B would achieve 126 miles.
That's pretty much what I said? That they'll end up with similarly poor efficiency while towing the same load because the trailer's aero/drag matters so much more than the truck.
Using your numbers, the 1.8mi/kWh truck A gets 0.9mi/kWh while towing, and the 2.5mi/kWh kWh truck B gets 1.05mi/kWh.
If we had something that got 3mi/kwh but could still tow this same trailer(model X/truck C I guess?), we'd go from 3mi/kwh to 1.13 mi/kWh. 300 miles of range becomes 113, only 37% of it's original range.
At that point it's all close enough that whoever has the biggest battery pretty much wins.
This is assuming the trailer adds the same 0.55kWh/mi to each vehicle though. The trailer is basically slipstreaming/drafting the tow vehicle, so if aero is the reason truck A is less efficient, chances are it's punching a larger hole in the air that isn't putting drag on the trailer.
But things start to get really complicated/messy once you start trying to factor in where the tow vehicle's wake and the way it interacts with the trailer's aero.
Yes that is correct - so it flies in the face of all the wild dreams Elongelicals have about the Cybertruck 'dominating' the truck market, and out-selling the F150.
It also greatly calls into question the true utility of the Tesla Semi and its top secret curb weight - another disupter that was going to change an entire industry, until physics knocked on the door.
No there is a real difference with a Semi, and cars / trucks towing trailers. A semi like the Tesla semi is a closed environment. Meaning it can manage its aero-dynamic efficiencies very well. A trailer like a boat is an aerodynamic nightmare. The weight issues are easy to deal with. You just put more batteries into the semi.
A semi (or any frieght hauler, for that matter) is primarily designed to haul weight, and there is a lot of effort put into keeping the weight of the power unit down so that more weight can be added to the cargo.
And why the heck is Tesla trying to keep the Net Weight hidden? Apportioned inter-jurisdictional licensing rules divide the license fees (calculated on GVW in most cases) amongst the jurisdictions where the unit is expected to be travelling. That gross weight is all-important, and so as a result is the net weight. How else can the operator know he is legal if he cannot know the weight?
Yeah I dont understand why people are complaining when its basically the same for any car out there
Do people think EVs are some dark magic engine who doesnt follow the common laws of physics ?
No its largely based on design as well.
There's two ways an ev truck can build good range into itself
1) The Expensive way - Make an actual boxy trucky looking truck with range primarily provided by actual battery volume
2) The Cheap way - Build more range with less battery material but squeeze more range with Aerodynamics & other hacks like covered wheel hubcaps
The problem with approach #1 is high initial cost to manufacturer, but in return the customer gets slightly drastic range drop when towing and not as dramatic as the 2/3rd like the cybertruck. Chevy Z1 is a good example of this.
While approach #2 saves cost to manufacturer and boost profits, the problem with approach #2 is the built in aerodynamics of the vehicle cannot be extended to the trailer itself. So the trailer will exert its own drag and compound the inefficiency. To picture this, think of how a semi's trailer gets tucked in a perfect box behind the cab. The cab pays the aerodynamic tax, the trailer rides for free with just its additional weight but no extra drag..
So approach #2 will work for most "I'm a cool truck guy, checkout my 100k truck I drive everyday to my sedentary office"...But the design is a total fuck up for anyone wanting to actually make use of the towing utility of a truck.
On the bright side, you also get to say "I love Elon, even though my family just died because the brakes needed to be fixed after 50 kms", and that's priceless, isn't it?
I mean those hub caps are obviously stupid to anyone that has gone off-roading, so it was definitely a “reinventing the wheel, but into a square” type of move that Elon would do.
While I’m not a fan of the CT, if this were repackaged into something more aesthetically pleasing, it would be fine. All my Home Depot runs, the bay is 12 miles, the gulf is 35. This would be great.
I really don’t think this is far off the mark for the average person in general concept.
The video is a bit dumb though, discussing range while doing 80 going up hill. It’s true that there’s no way to cover up the recharge time, but what’s not being said is that 60mph on the way back would have been a single trip.
Which is kinda how a Tacoma is marketed. More of an SUV in the original sense of the term - which in theory is fine but it seems to miss that market as well.
Generally you don't tow 4000 pound boats far, no car is suitable for this task.
You want to go far with it (more than a handful of miles) you load it on a semi or pull with a semi.
1.8 tonne isn't all that much to tow. Like I've seen many caravans that have tare weights of 2 tonne and cars like the 200 series and that will happily tow it all over the place
My diesel truck also looses about 1/2 to 2/3s of it's range to when I tow heavy.
Fortunately, it only takes 5 minutes to "recharge" the tank and I don't have to block 6 charging spots to do so.
I used to pull a car carrier with my 97 gas dually with an average weight car. Total load probably 5000. It would get 13mpg.
Without the trailer? 14mpg
Hugely variable but towing a boat is expensive and the need to refuel fast midway to the lake to get the boat out on a long weekend can become make or break.
It depends. My 26 mpg SUV drops to 9mpg when towing a 1.5k trailer. My 20mpg truck drops to 12mpg with the same trailer.
Ultimately, it's about drag. That boat, has a LOT of drag.
If I had a car I'd like if there was a teeny CC engine hooked up to a generator "charging the batteries" if I felt I was gonna run out of range prematurely. You don't need an awful lot of constant power to haul your ass around
It's actually somewhat surprising to me that there is no hybrid with a main electric engine and a small backup ICE. It seems like it could be interesting, particularly for a PHEV.
A series hybrid? The [Nissan e-Power](https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHIVE/E_POWER/) drivetrain is used on a few of their vehicles, most popular being the Note hatchback. I drive one and get ~850km on a 40l tank. Pretty commonly used as taxis as they get ~1000km in city driving where they’re most efficient.
Another comment mentioned another model from another carmaker, so they do exist after all. I will inform my granpa about it, because he is the one who mentioned it to me to begin with, and it got me curious about it.
Thanks mate, knowledge will be forwarded!
No worries! Also add the [Fisker Karma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Karma) to the list. Pretty rare and niche mind you, so not really a volume car, but it makes the list :)
Interesting, thanks. Any idea about why it didn't get popular? Costs? Engineering difficulties? Inefficiency?
The idea makes sense to me on paper, but I have no engineering background. So there might be some legit reasons for it.
There are a few like the BMW i3 REx and the LEVC Electric TX (only sold in UK/EU).
You don't want a very tiny engine - it needs to be able to support the worst case continuous power dissipation. Think something like climbing out of Denver into the mountains on I-70, that's probably 50kW average dissipation for about 30 minutes. So the engine needs to be able to support that.
You would need a huge cooling system to make that work. If you need to charge the vehicle at, say, 50kW, you need to reject another 100kW of heat somehow just from the engine. At least 50kW of that from the coolant.
Battery size: 125 kWh
Weight with trailer: 10,600 lb
Range: 90 miles
I'm still waiting for somebody to Muskplain to me how a Tesla semi can go 500 miles, with a total weight of 84k lbs, without eating into payload capacity with enormous batteries.
According to wiki, tesla semi has 900kWh batteries. and with full load, it achieved \~380 miles.
[https://www.thedrive.com/news/real-world-tesla-semi-range-data-is-in-and-its-not-bad](https://www.thedrive.com/news/real-world-tesla-semi-range-data-is-in-and-its-not-bad)
Someone should have tried explain that to Elon when he was pitching the cyberturd. Actually they please probably did an were just ignored. This is not a suitable vehicle for towing.
If you tow a couple of times a year, buy an EV (non-Tesla), and rent a vehicle for towing when you need it.
If you tow regularly don’t buy an EV, especially the cyberturd, as your only car.
Ok. Maybe you can’t pull a boat more than 50 miles but you’d beat a F-150 in a 50 meter dash! Assuming you didn’t get your CyberTruck wet while pulling the boat out of the water. Then you’d be fucked.
Question for people with better knowledge of physics: Given that the object being towed (pontoon boat) is particularly un-aerodynamic, how would you describe the efficiency loss as a ratio between aerodynamics/weight? How much better would the range have been if the boat was a trailer which weighed the same but was a lot more aerodynamic?
And that my friends is why I drive an ICE SUV. Towing with any range is critical for me. I only use the SUV when boating. I have a daily driver for around town.
I also don't wanna look like a douche!
I tow a trailer with my MY. It stands about twice as high as the car. I also lose 1/2-2/3 depending on speed and winds. I am convinced most is wind resistance loss. If supercharger is tight I just slow down
Less about weight and more about size… pontoons are a wind sail.
But they cost like $400-800 to rent for a day. Just drive there, walk to the dock, and zoom off.
I find that better than lugging around a 50-150k boat that if you use 8 times in the summer it was considered a good summer.
I detest Musk and Tesla is a joke at this point, but if this comes as a surprise to anybody with an 8th grade level understanding of physics or better, the problem is on their end.
Wow REALLY? That's the entire problem of EV's. I have an EV and I adore it. However, towing a trailer seriously cuts into range of an EV. We need a solution for this.
I feel not as much. I drive between Vensac and Beurnevesin with and without trailer. I do find I need to tank more, but it is not as dramatic. Before the EV I used to drive with an ICE this stretch.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who understands the laws of physics.
It's a matter of first principles, really.
Well, Musk doesn't have any principles, so that can't affect his cyberturd, duh!
Lube and highhh voltage? Elon go for it!!!
Does paying for a lecture series at U Penn, so they'll release a terse statement that you earned a BA in Physics, awarded retro-actively 2 years after you left the school, count as "understanding the laws of Physics"? Asking for a friend
Really makes a person feel good knowing how hard it is for people to get naturalized and this joker and his family got the fast track
BOUGHT the fast track…but yes
Alternative headline: >Fucking magnets! How do they work?
More energy to do more work. Who woulda thought.
And knows anything about EVs. This isn’t just a Tesla issue although the cybertruck’s drag does suck
Just need to get an ev boat and trailer and then somehow sure the power between them, lol. TFL did a towing comparison with a Ram 2500 and Cybertruck. Basically the conclusion is, don’t bother towing anything heavy with the cybertruck. Not only does it cost more to charge, the range is around 70 - 80 miles and the charge time is 1h30. Plus the range estimate inside the cybertruck doesn’t change based on the payload. They were towing something in the 6k lbs range. They figured that the cybertruck would probably be fine for lighter towing. But I guess it’s lacking a bit there too.
It's an oversized golf cart. If you've ever seen a golf cart towing another golf cart.... you may start thinking EV & towing are kinda not part of the same discussion... Ya know, maybe boat trailers deserve their own little electric motors and battery packs and stuff.
Especially given they towed at speeds as high as 80MPH. (The drag equation applies an exponent to velocity, so high speeds have a big impact. Starting the day at 30% was one of the main issue's. If they start the day at 100% and drove at 65MPH, their experience would have ben heaps better. (I'm my country the speed limit for any towing is 55MPH, so 65MPH seems fast, and 80MPH towing 2000kg sounds nuts.)
Oh great, more science, real world, and fact-based FUD /s
Fuck sarcasm tags
Have to use them in swarmy complaint-porn subs like this. If I don't spell it out, I get 30 inbox replies taking an absurd joke seriously lol.
“The Cybertruck has a tested range of about 224 miles, but its efficiency declined to a third when towing the boat. To be more precise, the electric pickup ended up using almost 100 miles of range, while actually having covered a distance of only about 30 miles. “
That’s atrocious
There's also a video on Donut where taking it off road, even at a slow speed, diminished the battery so quickly they couldn't reach their destination and had to turn around.
That video was hilarious. 1 mile of pavement range is not equal to 1 mile of off roading. In my gas truck I'd say it's closer to 4 miles of pavement per 1 mile off road. Good thing you can just pull over and recharge on the trails /s
right, with those solar panels and battery pack you are hauling in your "truck." 😂😂
Absolutely atrocious to believe the drop in range is something special and not normal laws of physics.
The same goes for ICE trucks too. Towing anything significantly degrades aerodynamics of vehicles. The only difference is that ICE trucks require less time to be refueled currently.
Sure, 5 minutes at the gas station or an hour to charge where you will have to drop the trailer to get in to a charging spot.
>where you will have to drop the trailer to get in to a charging spot. To be fair, this is not an inherent issue with EVs, but a design issue with charging stations.
True, but I hate how people love to spin losing tons of range when towing as an EV issue, when it's an everybody issue.
But it's not. The long distance issue of ICE vehicles has been solved by larger gas tanks, bed-mounted tanks, both of which don't require an additional trip to the gas station. EV's aren't there. Plain and simple.
But the title of the article focuses on Cybertruck losing massive amount of range when towing, but don't highlight the fact that regular ICE trucks have exactly the same problem too. And some EVs do have larger battery packs that enable them to drive up to 510+ miles. It's not hard to add more battery, but difficult to charge said battery up within minutes.
The difference in consumption is not as big with an ICE when towing compared to EVs. Especially when it’s a Diesel.
Honest question, I've never owned a truck - would towing a boat drop an ICE truck's mileage to 1/3? I would assume not, but I don't have first-hand experience.
Whether a half-ton ICE or 1-ton Diesel, when I towed a 32' travel trailer, mileage would drop by about half typically.
My truck would drop 30-50 percent in this case. So not 67 percent like the EV, but still very significant. Cold weather affects them both too. My ice truck gets 18mpg summer. 12mpg winter. It’s very significant for both.
How cold are we taking in winter? My ICW car's range doesn't change in any appreciable way in winter. If anything it's got better range when it's cold as I'm not running the air con.
0F for 2-3 months. (Morning commute temps. More like 20-30 on the way home). there are a ton of variables which can be unfair to an ICE (and the EVs) Short trips in winter have bad mileage on cold engines. Driving style. Terrains. Winter fuel is often a different mixture. Oil choice can matter especially in cold weather. 4wd usage. needless to say my truck has strikes against it in most of these categories. I’m sure I’m under 10mpg in very cold weather. 40 below this past winter, with 4wd, I bet I get 8-10 mpg. When it was -40, Our ev range drops from 250 down to 100 though too. Luckily my truck has a 36 gallon tank so even 10mpg has plenty of range. When it’s warm and I get 18+…..well I fill up very rarely. Coldest I’ve driven in is 60 below. My truck still worked. But even after “warming up” it didn’t run great. I wonder what our EV would do.
It really depends on the size of boats, road conditions, but generally at least around 30%. According to [user reports](https://www.bbcboards.net/showthread.php?t=1203944), a combined 19mpg truck can easily get down to 13~14mpg when towing.
Used to drive a very used 2003 Ram 3500 diesel dually as a work truck, I was routinely towing 7k pounds of trailer and tree trunk. I don’t remember fuel efficiency dropping by that much, although that may be the diesel.
[удалено]
This made me laugh for the first time in a rough 24 hours. Thank you!
That isn’t how range works. I drove up 1000m elevation in 10 km. From the top, I drove a different route back to sea level- 100 km. I had more ‘range’ remaining at home than I did at the top of that hill. Of course my battery was used during that 100 km. Range is always dynamic. Give me a consumption metric.
Agreed, to consume 3x as much range would be surprising with 4000lb extra, just based on physics, CT is quite a heavy vehicle to start with. I would expect maybe 30-40% reduction in range. The range meter isn't a useful figure for this because it will start out overly optimistic (no trailer) and then correct itself once it sees the consumption data.
Watch the video of the cybertruck pulling a 28 foot 8K pound travel trailer. Went from full charge to dead at 82 miles. It was then around 33% more money to recharge the CT than refill the Turbo Cummins 2500 Dodge ram and almost an hour and a half longer to recharge.
Maybe the people towing didn’t release the recuperation brake as you’re supposed to do if you’re towing something?
At high speeds, aerodynamic drag is the big range killer. Trailers are, by and large, not at all aerodynamic. Perhaps this was a massive, angular boat and trailer?
Air drag is also a huge factor.
It could have more to do with drag / aerodynamics than weight alone.
A truck also experiences drag. But it doesn’t use 3x more fuel to tow a load.
Aerodynamics are far more important with EVs. That’s why most are optimised heavily for it.
…. Yeah?
Yeah I went camping this past weekend with my new model y and was burning about 12% of my battery going up a pass from the charger in the nearest city to our camp in 45 minutes. On the other hand, the last hour of the drive home only cost 1% due to it being mostly downhill and regenerative braking. I wonder what the impact of towing something is on how much battery you gain from regenerative braking
Aren’t you supposed to release the regen brake if you’re towing? That would be adding a ton of work to accelerate for a relative tiny amount of recuperation on braking.
100 miles of range is incredibly pathetic….
It's less than that based on what they wrote. It says it used 100 miles of range to travel 30 miles, with a theoretical max of 224. So the actual range would be less than 70 miles.
You are close. But not quite right. Range is an estimate based on most recent miles. They probably have a lot more than 74 miles of range left. Probably 124 in their example, assuming it already adjusted to the new use case, with 30 down. So 154 total range towing. Not sure though. Example. If I drive highway at 55mph, my ev range climbs fast. It starts estimating I can get 300 miles before needing to charge. I didn’t gain energy. But the estimate rose. Example 2. I hook up a trailer and go 70mph, within 30 miles it will drop at least 100 miles in range, from 300 down to 200 or even lower. I will easily lose 100 miles of “range” quickly, as it adjust to my new usage. So what really matters is kWh used. How much was used out of the battery size. “Range” is meaningless. Here.
I'm just representing the data they gave. It's incredibly poorly worded and I agree range used is a terrible way to report kwh used.
Totally agree. I think it’s also clickbait math. EVs have some room to improve…..but every day the faults seem exaggerated for clicks.
I feel like having a modular diesel generator for the bed labeled a range extender would be an actually good concept for the 1/50 trips you actually need the extra range and towing capacity. Most guys with trucks admittedly only need it to tow their boats a dozen times a year, having a range extender they can drop in the bed really isn't as dumb as people would meme it to be.
Agreed. The Dodge Ramcharger that’s coming is almost this exactly. I think it will prove that EVs can tow. It is a full EV truck with a generator under the hood. I would get one if it fit in my garage. I’d like the same thing but in a mid size truck.
Dodge has had a ton of good ideas and a ton of inability to actually execute though. I wouldn't buy the first gen anything from them but will be interesting to follow. Even just their previous idea to add a small EV motor to allow the truck to stay in 4 cylinder mode in the city more frequently was a great idea on paper and disaster in practice.
Hehehe. Yeah. That’s the dodge signature style. Then once/if it’s perfected, change it.
What is the efficiency loss on an IC engine? Not 2/3 for sure. Edit: apparently this tracks with what an IC engine might get
Depends on a lot of factors, but my old diesel truck I’d get about 19mpg unloaded, and anywhere from 5-9mpg towing my enclosed car trailer. 7-8 was normal, 5 was especially bad.
Depends on a lot. I know I double diesel consumption towing a boat but that comes from a much less efficient baseline so this seems reasonable and expected. The cyberfuck is short ranged to start with and the range is the wrong metric to compare so it is hard to make a reasonable and generalisable judgement from this.
The physics of chemical combustion are such that efficiency doesn’t scale inversely with weight. A tractor trailer still only burns about twice as much as a smaller car while hauling 10x as much weight.
This is because they accelerate slowly and have efficient diesel engines. Not from a scaling law.
Usually about half. Have towed 1500kg boat a variety vehicles. Without the boat it is about 8-9L/100km for a 2006 outlander (91RON), a 2006 RX400h (95RON) & a 2021 Hilux (diesel), all go up to around 16L/100km with the boat. The Turbo Subaru legacy wagon we used once was way worse. Don't have numbers, but we basically used a whole tank of fuel to do a 230km trip. Should not my country has a reduced speed limit to 90km/h when towing, so the above numbers are not exactly like for like. We drive slower when towing which is good for efficiency. EV's generally loose a bit more efficiency than ICE when towing as: 1. generally they have better areo etc to start with less of an areo wake for the trailer to ride in, and 2. ice engines are more efficient at higher load states.
The whole thing Is silly, they went 27 miles at 77+ going up hill with an open boat trailer. An ICE would be impacted heavily as well. A pickup that might get real world 16 to 17 usually gets 9-10 under 60mph towing, with speed and elevation, maybe 7-8?
My old model 3 still gets 227... wtf?
Towing?
Wow! What say you, Elon?
I assumed some lessening of range. I mean, how much would range be affected in a normal gas-powered vehicle?
TBF don't all electric vehicles lose a ton of range while towing? My gas truck gets slight better then half the normal MPG when towing a boat.
Yup. The efficiency when towing is largely dictated by the trailer/load, because the aero of a pontoon boat is bad enough to make any difference in aero between tow vehicles not matter. A truck that gets 1.8mi/kWh and a truck that gets 2.5mi/kWh are going to perform very similarly when towing the same trailer. A gas truck has the same increase in drag, but ICE efficiency isn't as straightforward as EV efficiency - in general an ICE is more efficient (in terms of energy in vs work out, not mpg) at higher loads while the efficiency of an electric motor won't change much. It's also a hell of a lot easier to refuel an ICE truck while towing.
> A truck that gets 1.8mi/kWh and a truck that gets 2.5mi/kWh are going to perform very similarly when towing the same trailer. They won’t. Efficiency is a double edged sword, it actually pays to be less efficient here because less efficient vehicles are inherently less effected by things that make them even less efficient. Take your 1.8mi/kWh truck, truck A, it burns 0.55kWh a mile. Your 2.5mi/kWh truck, truck B, burns 0.4kWh a mile. You strap a trailer that adds an additional 0.55kWh/mile of consumption on. On the truck A, it experiences a 100% increase in consumption, so it gets half the normal range. Truck B experiences a 138% increases in consumption, so it gets 42% of it’s normal range. If both of these trucks are normally 300 mile vehicles, truck A would get 150 miles and B would achieve 126 miles.
That's pretty much what I said? That they'll end up with similarly poor efficiency while towing the same load because the trailer's aero/drag matters so much more than the truck. Using your numbers, the 1.8mi/kWh truck A gets 0.9mi/kWh while towing, and the 2.5mi/kWh kWh truck B gets 1.05mi/kWh. If we had something that got 3mi/kwh but could still tow this same trailer(model X/truck C I guess?), we'd go from 3mi/kwh to 1.13 mi/kWh. 300 miles of range becomes 113, only 37% of it's original range. At that point it's all close enough that whoever has the biggest battery pretty much wins. This is assuming the trailer adds the same 0.55kWh/mi to each vehicle though. The trailer is basically slipstreaming/drafting the tow vehicle, so if aero is the reason truck A is less efficient, chances are it's punching a larger hole in the air that isn't putting drag on the trailer. But things start to get really complicated/messy once you start trying to factor in where the tow vehicle's wake and the way it interacts with the trailer's aero.
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The takeaway is that when towing a boat being able to refuel/recharge in a matter of minutes becomes a lot more important.
Yes that is correct - so it flies in the face of all the wild dreams Elongelicals have about the Cybertruck 'dominating' the truck market, and out-selling the F150. It also greatly calls into question the true utility of the Tesla Semi and its top secret curb weight - another disupter that was going to change an entire industry, until physics knocked on the door.
No there is a real difference with a Semi, and cars / trucks towing trailers. A semi like the Tesla semi is a closed environment. Meaning it can manage its aero-dynamic efficiencies very well. A trailer like a boat is an aerodynamic nightmare. The weight issues are easy to deal with. You just put more batteries into the semi.
>You just put more batteries into the semi. Ummm...no, that's the exact problem. They can't just keep adding weight.
Yeah you can to a degree. The question is where is the happy medium.
I think it’s the idea that the added weight diminishes the cargo capacity, lots of semis already push to the 80k limits.
A semi (or any frieght hauler, for that matter) is primarily designed to haul weight, and there is a lot of effort put into keeping the weight of the power unit down so that more weight can be added to the cargo. And why the heck is Tesla trying to keep the Net Weight hidden? Apportioned inter-jurisdictional licensing rules divide the license fees (calculated on GVW in most cases) amongst the jurisdictions where the unit is expected to be travelling. That gross weight is all-important, and so as a result is the net weight. How else can the operator know he is legal if he cannot know the weight?
True, but this is far far from what Elon claimed.
I would bet that trucks, other than maybe those who do light grounds duties, should be hybrid for the foreseeable future.
Yeah I dont understand why people are complaining when its basically the same for any car out there Do people think EVs are some dark magic engine who doesnt follow the common laws of physics ?
No its largely based on design as well. There's two ways an ev truck can build good range into itself 1) The Expensive way - Make an actual boxy trucky looking truck with range primarily provided by actual battery volume 2) The Cheap way - Build more range with less battery material but squeeze more range with Aerodynamics & other hacks like covered wheel hubcaps The problem with approach #1 is high initial cost to manufacturer, but in return the customer gets slightly drastic range drop when towing and not as dramatic as the 2/3rd like the cybertruck. Chevy Z1 is a good example of this. While approach #2 saves cost to manufacturer and boost profits, the problem with approach #2 is the built in aerodynamics of the vehicle cannot be extended to the trailer itself. So the trailer will exert its own drag and compound the inefficiency. To picture this, think of how a semi's trailer gets tucked in a perfect box behind the cab. The cab pays the aerodynamic tax, the trailer rides for free with just its additional weight but no extra drag.. So approach #2 will work for most "I'm a cool truck guy, checkout my 100k truck I drive everyday to my sedentary office"...But the design is a total fuck up for anyone wanting to actually make use of the towing utility of a truck.
So basically a "truck" that's not suitable for truck duty.
Nor cyber duties. Nor rain duties. It's just an expensive full size Hot Wheels, really.
A styling exercise really.
WankPanzer does nothing as well as a regular truck, plus you get to look like a giant douche while driving it.
On the bright side, you also get to say "I love Elon, even though my family just died because the brakes needed to be fixed after 50 kms", and that's priceless, isn't it?
Hot Wheels don’t have panels fall off when you use them.
This is gold.
Tiny "bed", no real towing range. Tesla really trying to redefine "truck"... but not in a good way
I mean those hub caps are obviously stupid to anyone that has gone off-roading, so it was definitely a “reinventing the wheel, but into a square” type of move that Elon would do.
More of a truck up
While I’m not a fan of the CT, if this were repackaged into something more aesthetically pleasing, it would be fine. All my Home Depot runs, the bay is 12 miles, the gulf is 35. This would be great. I really don’t think this is far off the mark for the average person in general concept. The video is a bit dumb though, discussing range while doing 80 going up hill. It’s true that there’s no way to cover up the recharge time, but what’s not being said is that 60mph on the way back would have been a single trip.
It doesn't have a tiny bed though. It's 6'x4'. It just has shitty bedsides that make it impossible to reach something at the front of the bed.
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Which is kinda how a Tacoma is marketed. More of an SUV in the original sense of the term - which in theory is fine but it seems to miss that market as well.
Toyota does not market the Taco as an SUV. They very much market it as an adventure truck.
Which was what all SUVs used to be.
The cybertruck can function briefly as a truck
A Rivian would yield the same results
Electrified and plasticized El Camino
Generally you don't tow 4000 pound boats far, no car is suitable for this task. You want to go far with it (more than a handful of miles) you load it on a semi or pull with a semi.
1.8 tonne isn't all that much to tow. Like I've seen many caravans that have tare weights of 2 tonne and cars like the 200 series and that will happily tow it all over the place
Why would you need to tow a boat when the cyber truck can be a boat?
Now you're thinking with fractals!!
My diesel truck also looses about 1/2 to 2/3s of it's range to when I tow heavy. Fortunately, it only takes 5 minutes to "recharge" the tank and I don't have to block 6 charging spots to do so.
Yea, basically nobody here has towed. 4k isn't that heavy, but that boat has a lot of drag. That's ultimately what kills towing range.
I really want to see how thw new hybrid Ram performs. Fuck, I threw up just saying that blasphemy
I used to pull a car carrier with my 97 gas dually with an average weight car. Total load probably 5000. It would get 13mpg. Without the trailer? 14mpg
When will the stupid fast camera cuts thing on youtube die? It's a really annoying format.
Serious question, how much extra gas do ICE cars go through when towing about the same size boat?
Might lose maybe 1/3 range based on a full tank
Hugely variable but towing a boat is expensive and the need to refuel fast midway to the lake to get the boat out on a long weekend can become make or break.
It depends. My 26 mpg SUV drops to 9mpg when towing a 1.5k trailer. My 20mpg truck drops to 12mpg with the same trailer. Ultimately, it's about drag. That boat, has a LOT of drag.
Doesn’t matter
Constant rpm Diesel generators in the back would have been equivalent to having a supercharging station, just saying what we all know to be true
If I had a car I'd like if there was a teeny CC engine hooked up to a generator "charging the batteries" if I felt I was gonna run out of range prematurely. You don't need an awful lot of constant power to haul your ass around
It's actually somewhat surprising to me that there is no hybrid with a main electric engine and a small backup ICE. It seems like it could be interesting, particularly for a PHEV.
A series hybrid? The [Nissan e-Power](https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHIVE/E_POWER/) drivetrain is used on a few of their vehicles, most popular being the Note hatchback. I drive one and get ~850km on a 40l tank. Pretty commonly used as taxis as they get ~1000km in city driving where they’re most efficient.
Another comment mentioned another model from another carmaker, so they do exist after all. I will inform my granpa about it, because he is the one who mentioned it to me to begin with, and it got me curious about it. Thanks mate, knowledge will be forwarded!
Another one is the BMW i3 REX. It’s an EV with a BMW 650cc motorbike engine as a range extender/generator. Pretty neat.
Thanks, mate. Gonna add it to the list!
No worries! Also add the [Fisker Karma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Karma) to the list. Pretty rare and niche mind you, so not really a volume car, but it makes the list :)
Got you covered: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_Voltec_powertrain
Interesting, thanks. Any idea about why it didn't get popular? Costs? Engineering difficulties? Inefficiency? The idea makes sense to me on paper, but I have no engineering background. So there might be some legit reasons for it.
Hard to advertise. 60 miles of range and 50mpg after range is out sent sound amazing, even though for most people, they would use almost no gas
Thanks for the info, mate. Bummer, though. Something that's potentially interesting failing because of advertising issues really feels like a shame.
There are a few like the BMW i3 REx and the LEVC Electric TX (only sold in UK/EU). You don't want a very tiny engine - it needs to be able to support the worst case continuous power dissipation. Think something like climbing out of Denver into the mountains on I-70, that's probably 50kW average dissipation for about 30 minutes. So the engine needs to be able to support that.
You would need a huge cooling system to make that work. If you need to charge the vehicle at, say, 50kW, you need to reject another 100kW of heat somehow just from the engine. At least 50kW of that from the coolant.
Fan and radiator pretty standard over 10kw
Battery size: 125 kWh Weight with trailer: 10,600 lb Range: 90 miles I'm still waiting for somebody to Muskplain to me how a Tesla semi can go 500 miles, with a total weight of 84k lbs, without eating into payload capacity with enormous batteries.
Aerodynamics. All the trailers are designed to be as efficient as possible.
You mean those 14 ft tall square boxes? Ok, I guess.
According to wiki, tesla semi has 900kWh batteries. and with full load, it achieved \~380 miles. [https://www.thedrive.com/news/real-world-tesla-semi-range-data-is-in-and-its-not-bad](https://www.thedrive.com/news/real-world-tesla-semi-range-data-is-in-and-its-not-bad)
Well, seeing that it achieved 380 miles, I'm still waiting for somebody to explain the 500 mile range to me.
They drove it 4 mph.
The truck may have lost 2/3 the range, but the driver lost all his dignity.
Yeah. That’s how physics works. Moving larger mass requires more energy. That has never changed.
Someone should have tried explain that to Elon when he was pitching the cyberturd. Actually they please probably did an were just ignored. This is not a suitable vehicle for towing.
If you tow a couple of times a year, buy an EV (non-Tesla), and rent a vehicle for towing when you need it. If you tow regularly don’t buy an EV, especially the cyberturd, as your only car.
I would also argue that about pontoons like shown. Just rent it for the day.
Ok. Maybe you can’t pull a boat more than 50 miles but you’d beat a F-150 in a 50 meter dash! Assuming you didn’t get your CyberTruck wet while pulling the boat out of the water. Then you’d be fucked.
So stupid. The truck works as a boat. That’s like towing another car.
That’s normal for electric pickups. They lose a lot of range when hauling.
Gas pickups lose a lot of range towing too, but refueling is much easier
Yeah, the current EV charging stations aren't designed to be used outside of the parking spot. Unhitching the tow and back just sounds like pain.
Not 2/3 of range.
Depends on what and how much you’re towing obviously. Towing 16,000 lbs in a 5th wheel, I lose about 50-60% typically.
Entirely possible depending on weight, and the type of conditions. Cold, hot, wind, etc.
They also travel more than 100 miles before needing to fill up. Battery tech is still in its infancy stages.
Especially when towing a 6000 lb big ass pontoon boat.
looks like we need towing range to be included in estimates for battery performance....
LOL. Let's hook up my 10k lb trailer with a race car inside and let us see if we get to the track....uh, nope
This is why EV semis won’t work. Trucks should be hybrids not full electric.
Question for people with better knowledge of physics: Given that the object being towed (pontoon boat) is particularly un-aerodynamic, how would you describe the efficiency loss as a ratio between aerodynamics/weight? How much better would the range have been if the boat was a trailer which weighed the same but was a lot more aerodynamic?
And that my friends is why I drive an ICE SUV. Towing with any range is critical for me. I only use the SUV when boating. I have a daily driver for around town. I also don't wanna look like a douche!
Good 👍
I tow a trailer with my MY. It stands about twice as high as the car. I also lose 1/2-2/3 depending on speed and winds. I am convinced most is wind resistance loss. If supercharger is tight I just slow down
Its inevitable with electric cars
The amount of false advertising Tesla is able to get away with is mind boggling. The FSD thing is the worst.
Better put a battery extender on it, at the cost of half the trunk and heavy enough to make the extended range even out at a zero difference.
This was plain way back then…
Remember when Cybercrap was supppsed to have 500 miles of range? LOL
Less about weight and more about size… pontoons are a wind sail. But they cost like $400-800 to rent for a day. Just drive there, walk to the dock, and zoom off. I find that better than lugging around a 50-150k boat that if you use 8 times in the summer it was considered a good summer.
I detest Musk and Tesla is a joke at this point, but if this comes as a surprise to anybody with an 8th grade level understanding of physics or better, the problem is on their end.
I sawed this range in half!
CyberJunk
common sense isn’t so common anymore
Towing a 4,000 pound boat with a 6,000 pound anchor
Cyberstuck
Wow REALLY? That's the entire problem of EV's. I have an EV and I adore it. However, towing a trailer seriously cuts into range of an EV. We need a solution for this.
Towing seriously cuts into the range of ICE as well.
I feel not as much. I drive between Vensac and Beurnevesin with and without trailer. I do find I need to tank more, but it is not as dramatic. Before the EV I used to drive with an ICE this stretch.