On the cybertruck, the battery is the floor. The seat brackets are mounted directly to it. So dropping the battery means seriously rearranging the interior.

China is good at making stuff cheaply because they have very few environmental or labor regulations.  It’s not because their workforce is especially skilled, it’s because they have people willing to sit inside a press to place the next part, where the way you don’t die is remembering to duck.

For bonus points, buy a Lucid where they lose like $200k per vehicle made.

Whenever I’d go to the lake in my kayak, I always thought “man there’s a lot of money on display here” watching an top-trim pickup putting one of these in the water.

I don’t get it. The rules are there for safety and to avoid design loopholes, and reducing it to “have some gas, have at it” would probably result in teams gamifying stuff like having ultra-wide cars that are impossible to pass, or that put off huge aero wakes, etc.

My Tucson PHEV has a 13kwh battery. A usefully-ranged BEV equivalent would have something in the 70-90kwh, so about 5-6x the battery cost and size.

I wonder if GM guaranteed Honda a price for the battery packs, before they realized they suck at building them. So no matter the cost issues GM is having putting Ultium packs together, Honda gets the same price and gets to release their lower-end trim profitably.

Let’s say that everyone says “ack, I won’t take a cruise!”.

I always cringed whenever he was on screen in DtS. I couldn’t imagine working in an environment where the boss was liable to fly off the handle that often. I bet they lose (or fail to hire) a lot of talented people that don’t want to work in that environment.

If you’re a journalist testing a press vehicle, I imagine the logic is “oh excellent, I’m going to have a real story to tell rather than ‘I drove the car, it did car things’”

Tesla themselves track crashes that caused restraint systems to be activated and/or airbags deployed and found that Tesla drivers (not on Autopilot, for clarity) are involved in half as many of that caliber of collisions compared to the average American driver.

“Dragged woman 20 feet” understates what Cruise did here.

I really wish articles covering this would cover it accurately.

It’s Tesla’s problem if the high insurance payments dissuade people from buying their hard-to-repair car.

That’d be a really fat dead guy! To achieve the stated range, this thing will have to be ~60kwh (50% of the 120kwh base battery for the 50% range extension), and standalone 60kwh batteries are ~350kg or about 800lbs.

Gasoline trucks frequently get extra-range fuel tanks installed. At least in Alberta where oil workers commute 8hr to the oilfields in their oversized trucks (and then top up with free gas at the project site), just about everyone has enormous range-extender tanks in the front third of their bed.

Honestly, I am a bit surprised. The Cybertruck is cheaper than I expected it to be

I’m surprised by how far they missed the 2019-era 500-mile range goal.

If they bought the stock and Tesla issued new stock at the same time (as companies frequently do in order to raise capital), Tesla would have the money either way.

Maybe the border services have thermal imagers for catching smuggling that saw hot brake discs as it flew by, but they aren’t keen to reveal their positions and field of view.