Elon Musk’s Cybertruck: A Unique and Disruptive Vehicle

The world has been waiting for four years for Elon Musk to deliver an extraordinary vehicle with extraordinary technology.

Elon Musk and his team’s decision to choose the most common vehicle in the United States, the pickup truck, to elevate it to a superior product has surprised many people. There have been praises, criticisms, surprises, and excitement, but there has never been a pickup truck that has had such an impact on the market, among experts, critics, and consumers alike.

In a recent interview with BBC’s Top Gear, Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of technology and manufacturing, and Franz von Holzhausen, the chief designer, shared that: When researching all the pickup trucks on the American market, Tesla’s design team realized that they were all the same, boring, and had agricultural characteristics. Elon wanted a big enough difference, and especially not to follow everything that already exists and is currently on the market. That was the headline for Tesla.

Taking inspiration from stealth aircraft like the B2 or amphibious cars that double as submarines in science fiction movies, Franz von Holzhausen presented Elon with a design that came from another planet, and Elon did not hesitate to decide to make it. “Give me a prototype in 90 days,” Elon said. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of technology and manufacturing, recalls and tells BBC: “I told him that it would take at least 180 days for this prototype, but Elon didn’t agree. So we didn’t have time to discuss whether or not to do it, but only how to make a prototype in 90 days.” And the first prototype of the Cybertruck was completed after 93 days.

To have an unusual way of thinking, an unusual technology to produce an extraordinary vehicle, the team of Tesla and Elon also had to pay the price. It took 4 years from the time the Cybertruck concept was born, from 2019 to December 1, 2023, for the complete version for mass production to be introduced with some compromises or lowering of expectations. The starting price of the Cybertruck is now not $40,000 as Elon had once announced, but has risen to $50,000, with the highest-end Cyberbeast costing nearly $100,000. The drag coefficient is also at an acceptable level of 0.335 Cd. And the controversy still rages around the lack of safety for anything that the Cybertruck could hit, as the pedestrian safety regulations in the United States are still more relaxed than in Europe.

But what did Elon and Tesla do? A groundbreaking, unprecedented product with a length of almost 6 meters, weighing over 3 tons, four-wheel drive (optional), all-wheel steering, with the highest-end version 845 horsepower, accelerating from 0-97 km/h in just 2.6 seconds, and driving up to over 700 km on a single charge if you use an additional battery pack.

The development of the Cybertruck with an alien design posed a number of challenges in terms of technology, and Tesla solved them for the most part through methods that had never been done before.

The body of the Cybertruck is made of stainless steel, and they are too hard to be stamped like ordinary steel used to make car frames. Why stainless steel instead of ordinary steel? “We will have fewer scratches, dents, and even they have bulletproof capabilities,” Lars explains in an interview with Top Gear. They also share materials with Elon’s SpaceX spacecraft, and Tesla has developed a proprietary technology to bend stainless steel using a jig and compressed air (originally called Air Bend technology) like bending the parts of the SpaceX Starship instead of using a press (the stainless steel website BSstainless.com explains).

The thick and rigid Cybertruck body leads to an increase in the total weight of the vehicle, so instead of using the traditional body-on-frame type of frame, Tesla switched to using the exoskeleton type of body to bear the load. Tesla’s body has the same rigidity as a supercar, three times that of a Ford F150 (Lars says), it makes the pickup truck feel like a car. However, because the Cybertruck body is too hard, drilling through it is not possible, and attaching interior details on the doors, roof, and other parts is also a challenge that Tesla has to have its own technology.

How does a vehicle that is nearly 6 meters long run in the city? Thanks to the all-wheel steering system, the Cybertruck has a turning radius only as small as the Model S, which is much smaller than it. At low speeds, the rear wheels will turn in the opposite direction of the front wheels to reduce the

turning radius while at high speeds, the rear wheels will turn in the same direction as the front wheels so that the vehicle can change lanes faster.

Tesla’s driving technology is steer-by-wire, which means the steering system is powered by cables and electronic signals, unlike traditional technology where the steering wheel is directly connected to the wheels via a mechanical system. This electronic steering system was developed in the early 2000s by research centers and universities such as Swarthmore College. It was commercialized in 2013 on the Q50 model of Infinity/Nissan, but steer-by-wire has not yet been widely adopted.

Tesla’s steering system is based on a feedback motor mounted in the steering wheel, to give the driver a feel, along with a system of sensors and control motors located under the steering wheel and connected to each other by a computer system. This system allows the Cybertruck’s steering wheel to rotate to less than 180 degrees and the driver’s hands do not have to leave the steering wheel when turning. Unexpected forces from the road such as hitting a rock or obstacle are immediately compensated by the computer force from the control motor, preventing the steering wheel from being deflected. It also helps the system automatically compensate for the steering angle when it is slippery.

Because the steer-by-wire system is very compact and has no mechanical connection from the steering wheel to the steering wheel, the steering wheel can be placed anywhere in the car cabin from right to left or even in the middle. This helps to reduce production costs for different right-hand drive or left-hand drive markets.

With the largest windshield in pickup trucks, the Cybertruck’s glass is also custom-made, Franz, Tesla’s chief designer, told BBC. The side windows of the car are also resistant to major impacts, Franz once used a large iron ball to throw directly at the car window, but the car window only cracked, not shattered.

Although the driving range and acceleration performance in theory are no longer as large as previously announced, the flexibility of the Cybertruck is still at a completely different level than all other pickup truck models. Matt Watson of CarWow did an acceleration test between the Cybertruck Beast and the Hummer EV pickup truck (the power of the Hummer EV is 1,014 horsepower, torque of 1,485 Nm compared to 845 horsepower and 930 Nm of the Cybertruck) and the Cybertruck defeated the Hummer EV comprehensively.

Whether you like Elon and Tesla or not, whether you are a fan of electric vehicles or not, there is one reality that Elon is doing different things and creating unusual vehicles, something that happens only once in decades or even hundreds of years in the automotive industry and we are witnessing it in a very interesting way.

Conclusion

The Cybertruck is a groundbreaking vehicle that has the potential to disrupt the pickup truck market. It is unlike any other pickup truck on the market, with its unique design, advanced technology, and impressive performance. It is still too early to say whether the Cybertruck will be a success, but it is clear that it is a vehicle that will be talked about for years to come.