Cybertruck Delivery Event Watch Party | Tesla Motors Club Podcast #55
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Hello, welcome to another episode of the Tesla Motors Club podcast. I'm Doug. I'm Mike. And I'm Jerry. Today we are doing a little launch party for the Cybertruck delivery event. Episode number 55 starts now.

Well, welcome. Welcome, gentlemen. Good morning. Jerry, long time no see. Yeah. Hopefully this thing starts on time. This is a Tesla event, though. Yeah, we have Tesla time to deal with. Yeah, it is a Tesla event, and they do have a track record of being a little bit late, so we'll see how that goes. And the other thing about it is it's streaming exclusively on Twitter instead of YouTube. It's X. It's X.

Okay, X. I don't know that I could ever actually call it X. Gee, I wonder why they did that, you know? Yeah, well, it makes sense. If I ran another company that did video presentation, I would want to have that synergy between my companies. The only complaint, though, is that, okay, well, this is not a product that's as good as YouTube yet, and also...

It does kind of hurt. Like, I definitely feel like it hurts SpaceX. I watch every launch I get a chance to watch, especially the second test launch of Starship. I actually went down to Brownville, Boca Chica, and saw that ship as a full stack three months ago. And it was amazing to watch it launch. But the best coverage wasn't SpaceX because the quality just wasn't there. We'll see if this works out.

You know, the pieces of the car flying at you don't, you know, embolden you into a lot of comfort. Really? Doesn't that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling? Yeah. This is what happens when you hit a bumper or something like this. I don't know. I think it's kind of cool. Yeah. It's techie. That's for sure. I'm sure they had a lot of meetings about this.

um i'm not sure that they have any meetings about anything um but uh it's it's cool i mean what really is the point of this vehicle i feel like it's just mainly about building excitement and and hype or whatever so people are certainly excited about it i went out of my way to my local mall and saw the cyber truck in person um

We had one at the local service center all set up that you can go down and walk around. You couldn't actually get into it. They had it roped off. So, yeah, that's how they had it. And what's funny is that the people, the Tesla employees there, they didn't know anything about it. Or like the people that come to visit know more about it than they do. So, yeah.

Well, do you think that's true or were they just told to keep their mouths shut? No, I think they legit don't know anything about it. Just like we don't know anything about it. I will say it is different in person. Here's a picture I took yesterday. Like from this angle, it looks pretty short, but actually the thing is quite long, but yet it's shorter than you expect it to be. I'm taller than it, I guess. For some reason, you feel like it would be like one of these. It looks tall. Yeah.

A huge F-250 looking type thing, but it's not that big. But it does seem quite long. Do you get a sense of how big the seats were? Are these like the same ones you'd find in an X or a 3 or a Y or something? You know, I guess so. I wish they had like a window down or something so you could see it a little better. So here's a question I'm going to throw out only because it's been all over Reddit and everywhere else I've looked, and that's the range. There's been a whole lot of talk about the range. Yeah.

Yeah. The consensus seems to be about 300 miles. That's what it's looking like just from leaked photos of people who've been test driving it just either yesterday or this morning. Marcus Brownlee, he shared a photo of just the steering wheel. And I'm sure he and other people got vehicles to test and also their embargoed probably till after this event or maybe tomorrow. But you could see a corner of the screen.

And it looked like that car was charged to like 90 something percent. And it said 260, 260, I guess. It's a little bit of a ways from the promise. For me, the most shocking thing about the Cybertruck, I mean, obviously it looks kind of wacky and interesting. It's Blade Runner-esque. It's sort of a retro futuristic look. It evokes the brutalism of the 70s. Oh boy.

with a lot of concrete construction. The thing is, though, the future that this kind of look stems from is a dystopian future, right? So I don't know what really is on Elon's mind there, but...

Or Fritz, right? He's the designer guy, right? Oh, Franz, you mean? Franz. When you said Fritz, I thought you meant Fritz Lang, you know, the guy who directed Metropolis back in the 20s. No, no. Franz, I'm sorry. Right. So anyway, for me, the most shocking thing was they said the base price was $39,000. And to me, that was amazing. Wow. If they can pull that off, that's great.

And I kind of really doubt it. And then also at the highest end, the highest end version was supposed to have a 500 mile range. So the cheap one, I forget what it was, if it was 250 or 300, but the highest end was to have a 500 mile range. And I don't know if Elon expected technology to be different, but I just don't necessarily see how they pull that off. But that's the kind of thing that you want in a truck, I guess.

Well, you need the range because as soon as you start towing something, your range diminishes rapidly. I was wondering that. Does anybody have any experience towing with an ICE like a Ford 250 or something like that? I mean, is it like halved? No. It's not halved, but it's a different equation, really. I mean, I used to drive a 150 and I used to drive a Ranger when I downsized.

And when I towed with the Ranger in particular, it was a little V6, so it didn't have a lot of them. I'd take maybe a 20% hit on my mileage, 25% hit, depending on what the load on the trailer was. It didn't seem to care how bulky the trailer was. It was all about the dead weight. Yeah, it's not bad, though. I mean, it really is a different equation. In an ICE car, think about gasoline has the energy equivalence of 33 kilowatt hours per

per gallon. Think about actually a pretty good EV, right? With a pretty long range has something around 100 kilowatt hours. So the equivalent of three gallons, three gallons of gasoline, and yet they're getting over 250 miles of range, right? That's because the efficiency is rather high. The car is getting maybe

I don't know, effectively 20 or 30% motion out of all that gasoline energy. And realistically, it might be even less. But so the added inefficiency of towing

doesn't make that much of a percentage hit as driving an electric vehicle where you're 80 to 90% efficient. And then now you have something that is really putting a load on either the rolling resistance, the increased inertia, and also drag. Got it. Makes sense. Yeah, just looking at the chat, it looks like a lot of people kind of agree with you guys, what you said about the efficiency of that. So good to know. I've never towed anything, so.

Yeah, and now the experience with EVs, like with the Ford F-150, and I guess people have towed with Model Xs, yeah, their range gets basically cut in half. I will say this, and this was an observation from my own towing days. Like I said, my Ranger would take a hit, but the F-150 that had more torque and power available didn't take nearly as much of a hit for a given weight. Oh, okay. So if you got extra power, it doesn't seem to matter much.

So, hey, let's talk a little bit about the Cybertruck while we're still waiting. I have these photos. Let me just sort of go through there. A couple of things that were interesting to me. One... Do you have one of the front camera? I do. We'll get to that. I'll just sort of go through these in order. And I'm watching the Cybertruck thing in another window. I'll bring it up as soon as it's live, just so viewers know. Anyway, so one thing I noticed here was...

Wow. Look at these scratches, right? Um, and it seemed like this looks like, I don't know, just a brush. It looks like someone hit it with a cartwash. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Um, or stainless steel, maybe, you know, uh, you know, scrap pad or scotch brite or something even, uh, fingerprints off.

The people working there at Tesla at this particular showroom, they said they weren't even allowed to touch it. I do know, you know, I posted some pictures in the forums under the Cybertruck of one that we saw at the Supercharger. It seems to be a fingerprint magnet. So maybe that's why they don't want them touching it. That makes sense. I believe it.

But if you look at it in general, there's a lot of weird kind of marks on it. And I guess that's just what you expect with stainless. Yeah. Is this raw stainless or is this actually like a clear coated? No, it's just stainless. Raw? I don't think there's anything in particular on it. I think that's probably part of the reason it's a fingerprint magnet. There's a grain to it. Sure. So there's actually microscopically, there's a lot of surface area. Yeah.

So there are things that will just basically hold those oils. First order of business, I guess, would be ceramic coated. Yeah, I would think a ceramic coat might actually be helpful in this case. Anyway, it was interesting to see. Definitely, you know, I ran my hand across it when it was at the supercharger down by us. It definitely felt like a refrigerator.

It's got that same texture to it, yeah? Yeah, yeah. It feels just like your refrigerator. You know, the brushing you can sort of hear. Sure, sure, sure. It was definitely an experience. This one looks a little bit better. Yeah. The alignment here in those corners looks better than the one we saw. Yeah. Where the, what do you call that in the back? The tailgate? Where that lined up down there, it didn't quite, it was a little misaligned. Mm-hmm.

well is that our charge port there yeah so i believe this is the charge port and we've seen pictures uh of it open it's your standard tesla charger that an interesting thing about it is they don't have the tesla logo

pretty much anywhere on the car except maybe on the parts like themselves. Is that a good place for the charge port though? Not in my mind. It seems to me that they went out of their way to not have anything that goes through the doors. Like, you know, on the Model 3 you have a side marker

right no stamping holes right and you have a door handle too right uh but the side marker that has a camera in it instead that camera is in here in the in the center here yeah um and that was a a feature i hadn't quite noticed before i'm not convinced that's a good idea for a truck that people are going to be driving through mud yeah but any anywhere you put that if you put it here get just as dirty if not more so um yeah

At least it won't get knocked off there. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Or it would be a lot harder. You'd have to take off the whole... Take out the tire in the process. Yeah, and the garnish. There's been talk of losing the side view mirrors. They're easily removed if they ever get approval to remove them. I assume that they don't actually need another camera and that this camera is fine for the side view, right? Yeah, that's probably more of a...

DOT type thing or something like that. So I don't think they need to add another camera here because I think this positioning is fine. Don't some cars in like Japan, I've seen renderings or pictures of ones where they have just a little stock sticking out there with the camera. Those are all concept cars as far as I can tell that do that. But Tesla could choose to do that. But the point is that the vehicle will already have this camera. So it might as well do double duty. And I think this is a fine position.

they might as well just have that i don't think they need to add another surely probably a wider field of view than you get with your side mirror today you know yeah because it's looking behind you but it's also got a pretty wide angle out here and yeah if you look at the yeah how much clearance they gave it there it is a wide pretty wide lens yeah i guess with these hardware four cameras they have the sort of red hue i assume they're using a high index uh ruby lens

which is something you would see on higher end binoculars for the last, I don't know, probably 50 years. Anyway, in person, it looks interesting. Let's see. Here's that massive wiper blade. Yeah, the massive wiper blade. This is going to be a great episode, and I just realized for the audio version. You got it.

That is a big wiper. Imagine it's only going to cut this arc. Right, right. It only gets two-thirds of the window? Yeah, probably. So imagine this arc here. Right. The passenger isn't going to have a nice view. The passenger doesn't get to see where you're going.

Hang your head out the window like a dog. That's right. There were rumors at some point, like since it's so long, that there might be an extra articulation. So in the path of the rotation, it would swing out and sort of get more. But it doesn't look like it.

Some people were saying there's two blades in there. I don't. Yeah, they could be just two blades side by side. Yeah. Or maybe it's a long. Well, the side blades are stacked one on top of the other. I think that's what it is. It's just so long that they stack them. But imagine in the middle, they need some overlap. Yeah. Those of us with early Model 3s are going to be very curious how the water actually comes out of the.

the blade when you go to clean the window. I'm sure it's a similar idea that it's piped through and they might have a little jet here. The X does that though. The X pumps it through the blade. Does it? Yeah. It actually works well. Yeah, the early 3s had a big dry spot at the bottom because they just give you water. The 3s have, at least my 3, has a nozzle on the wiper.

Well, I upgraded mine. I've got four nozzles now, or is it five? Well, okay. The very newest ones, they bumped up the count. Okay, well, that's good. But the thing is, very quickly, they got clogged. And so instead of actually spraying the window, it just kind of dribbles over the window while I do it. And I had the mobile service guy come when I got the upgrade to the hardware three.

And I said, oh, can you look at my windshield wiper? Because I used to spray on it, and it just did that dribble. And he's, oh, that's within spec. That's normal. Yeah. Within spec. Well, that's what it turned into. But that's not what it was. So I was a little disappointed with that. You think they could have just had a second wiper, which you see often. Like a smaller wiper, right? Yeah.

They could have mirrored this on the other side and just had them sequenced. Oh, go switch back and forth. Like you see on buses or something, you know. Yeah. So that you could have gotten a little more coverage. Well, I wonder if the water actually on the X, the wiper is a special wiper. It has holes in the wiper itself that where water drizzles out. It actually works quite well. So one thing I was trying to point out here in this photo, there's a dent here.

Oh, you're right. I just looked at it. Wow. Now you see it. That isn't going to buff out either, right? You've got to hammer that. Yeah, you'd have to hammer it. No paintless debt removal there. Well, I mean, in my work, I don't know if they banged it from the back.

I think it would be neat if someone had some electroluminescent wire and just kind of lit the whole outline of the thing. And the seams would be very Tron looking. That would be really the cyberpunk theme going there. Well, the other thing, they need some lights on top above the windshield to get that apocalyptic survivor sort of look. Oh, I'm sure some third party will have it out within days. Oh, yeah. I think this car just begs to be customised.

There'll be tactical bumpers and tactical lighting. Camo wrap. I like Kevin Dean's comment, whether the odds Twitter will be overloaded and crash. That's a reasonable question. You know, when Tesla first did these things, most of their live events, as far as the production for what went online, like

broadcast live was terrible until they started doing it on YouTube. They used to try to actually serve them themselves and then they did Vimeo for a little bit and that was an improvement. And then they just started doing YouTube. But when they tried to do it themselves, it would crash. Every one would get... The order of magnitude to do a scaled event like this is tough. Hopefully Twitter will handle it. If we look at this right now, it says 100,000 or so. 107,000? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so the few remaining IT folks are probably sweating bullets right now. I really do like that little logo they used in the live thing. Well, so that is basically the logo of the car. And what's interesting is for our audio viewers, it's basically a side view of the Cybertruck. And what I've heard is under the, actually I've seen a picture of it under the charging port door. Yeah, instead of having the Tesla T there is this Cybertruck logo.

Is there a spot for a hitch in that thing? There has to be. Let's see. Yeah, there could be a lot of upset people. I mean, I'm sure there's something. The license plate goes on top there. I try to get a little bit of cover. Oh, it looks like something's going on. Okay, let's see what's going on. Welcome to the Cybertruck delivery event. So I'm going to do it from the back of the truck here. Hey, hey.

So once in a while, once in a long while, a product comes along, something really special, a really unusual product comes along. But these things are rare. It's very rare that a product comes along that is...

seemingly impossible. We have a car here that experts said was impossible, that experts said would never be made. I think it's our best product. I think it's the most unique thing on the road. And finally, the future will look like the future. So what we're aiming for here is something that has, that's more truck than truck. And so what we have here is something that is a better truck than a truck,

while also being a better sports car than a sports car in the same package. So first of all, let's, you know, they talk about how, you know, trucks are tough. That's one of the defining characteristics of a truck. So how tough is this truck? Let's find out. Oh, no. So we actually had to come up with a special ultra strong Tesla designed steel alloy.

So this alloy, this metal did not exist before. We needed something that you could actually manufacture but that would have basically no corrosion, that didn't need paint, but you can still make it in volume. And part of the reason that it has this angular shape is you can't actually stamp these body panels. The body panels would break the stamping machine.

I should say also, because of the steel exoskeleton, it actually has more torsional rigidity than a sports car. It has more torsional stiffness than a McLaren P1. So that's a big deal. Now you may remember an incident four years ago. Didn't quite go as planned. With a steel ball? Yeah. Four years ago. Maybe we should try it again. Oh, yeah.

I'll give him points for uh, be willing to do this. Oh yeah, there's no way there's no way they will necessarily- Wait, that's a tennis ball, right? It's a baseball. Oh, come on. That's not the same test. And he whiffed it. He didn't really even throw it that hard. Oh, come on, man. Yeah.

Oh, big deal. He's still doing terribly. I think we could probably have a pro pitcher love it. It would still work. So anyway, the glass is tough, basically. That's what we're saying. So you don't have to worry about rocks hitting the glass and cracking the glass. This glass is basically rock-proof.

It also makes the car very quiet. So the thing that you'll appreciate when you drive the car is how smooth and quiet it is. It doesn't feel like a normal truck. It's smooth as silk and silent when you drive it. And yeah, so...

in terms of toughness. And then things like rollover, because the center of gravity is so low, it doesn't roll over. And if you're ever in an argument with another car, you will win. In movies, you sometimes see the hero or heroine hiding behind the car door while being shot with bullets. That doesn't actually work unless you're driving a cyber truck. So if Al Capone...

showed up with a Tommy gun and emptied the entire magazine into the car door, you would still be alive. So, you know, and so people say like, well, you know, why'd you make a bulletproof? I'm like, why not? Do you want to, how tough is your truck? Because the other trucks, the bullets go through both sides. So you shoot a bullet, it goes through both sides of the car. And, you know, you just never know. I mean, sometimes you get these like late civilization vibes,

You never know when the apocalypse could come along at any moment. And here at Tesla, we have the finest in apocalypse technology. Strength is great, but is this perhaps just a show truck? Just a showpiece? Or it can't do actual work? How does it work as a real everyday truck? It's got over a ton of payload capability, but you could really put more than that in it.

You can tow over 11,000 pounds. And it's got a super-tough composite bed, no liner needed. The bed is six foot long, four foot wide, and you can fit four by eight pieces of plywood in with the back down. So this, you have here a car that is, you know, bullet tough. You know, I like that phrase, TM. And...

You couldn't take that one through. Can out pull an F-350 diesel. Has a massive towing capacity, massive bed. It's basically an incredibly useful truck. It's not just some grandstanding showpiece like me. It's actually very useful.

I should say it has an adaptive air suspension. So no matter what the load is, you can always have the... It can set the ride height at any... at low, high, anything. It'll automatically adjust the damping according to how much load it's carrying and the road conditions. It has a 17-inch ground clearance. That's a true 17 inches. Typically with a truck, you'll get the differential hanging down low, the rear differential, and that's what you'll high-side on a rock.

But this has a completely flat bed, so you could drive over basically anything. We actually took the Cybertruck on a Baja rally drive. So this is insane off-road capability. It has locking differentials, rear torque vectoring, and the crazy thing is they'll do this all in comfort. It has steer-by-wire, which is...

It's one of the things where most people don't know what that means, but it's how modern jets are designed. The steer by wire, which gives you variable gain. So if you turn the wheel, the steering yoke, a small amount in the parking lot, it will turn the wheels a lot. But if you turn it on a highway, it turns the wheels a small amount. So it dynamically adjusts how much the wheels turn according to what your speed is.

And this actually makes it very easy to drive. And it has a turning circle less than a Model S. So this thing can practically turn and rotate on a dime, basically. That's a problem. It has incredible low-speed maneuverability. And then there's a lot of advanced details under the skin. It's the first time that a car is moving to a 48-volt low-voltage architecture from 12 volts, which has been around for 100 years. Okay.

We have Ethernet comms, distributed controllers, allows for 70% less wire in the car. And it's really the internals are as advanced as the externals. It's a whole new step change in the technology. So let's take it to the racetrack and see how does the Cybertruck perform against a Porsche 911. And I should say this is an actual Porsche. We literally just got it from the dealer.

2023 Porsche 911. This is going to be embarrassing the first time this happens in real life. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I have a lot further in my Model 3. I can just imagine the truck. Yeah. Jeez. But wait, there's more. Oh, it's totally... All right, that's good. All right. Yeah. And that's the showmanship there. That's awesome.

Props to that. Is the 911 like the spare you get? It can tow a Porsche 911 across a quarter mile faster than the Porsche 911 can go by itself. Alright, thumbs up for that one. This is tougher than bullets. Tow pretty much anything faster than a 911 while towing a 911.

So, uh, and deliveries begin now. Thank you. Asterisk. Delivery DNA. Yeah. Not a mention about range. Yeah. Or cost. Yeah. That's what people really want to know. Some random person. These are the actual owners. We're handing over production Cybertrucks to their actual owners. Thank you for buying Cybertruck. Still haven't said how much. Yeah. So Elon, every time you buy one, he shows up at your door. Yeah.

I'd buy one just for that. I mean it's gonna be amazing to see all these cars driving around. I mean this is really gonna change the look of the roads. I mean in a parking lot one of them does not look like the other. I think that's a plus, that comment. I'd like to see more variety on the road. Well, me too. Alright, thank you everyone. Thanks for coming to the Cybertruck delivery event. And you're witness to... what? That's it? Oh, one more. Range.

Hey, that's Ira Aaron Price. He was a board member and he spoke at our event in 2016. All right, thanks everyone for coming to this delivery event and I appreciate your support. And this is really going to change the look of the roads and finally the future will look like the future and it's really going to be something special. Thank you.

I'm bringing up the Tesla site right now to see if there's a price on it. Rear-wheel drive, available in 2025 with a 250-mile range, is $49,890. So that's a car that'll never be built. That's right. All-wheel drive, which is delivered in 2024, 340 miles, estimate, is $68,890. I was guessing $75,000, so I was close.

cyber beast which is the high-end uh doesn't say any motors it has uh 96 390 cyber beast is a tri-motor okay so here we go rear-wheel drive yeah they'll they'll never build that they'll do it i don't know that they'll get this price though if they're not going to deliver the 2025 i bet they push it because they're going to be pushing the all-wheel drive just like they did with the y's

Yeah, they may decide that nobody wanted them like they did with the... Because you couldn't get it. Because you couldn't get it several times. They did that with the Model S back in the day with the 40 kilowatt hour battery. Wait, wait. That is the probable savings price. Let's click the purchase price at the top there, Doug, and...

Oh, that makes a lot more. Look at this. 60,000 all-wheel, 79. This makes more sense. Yeah, and then 100K for the Cyber Beast. I said 75, and it's coming in at 79 for the mid-tier. So what were they? Did they even say what they're delivering right now? No, not that I heard. Hey, interesting. The top speed is considerably lower. Just in general, 112.

That's interesting because the drag coefficient says it should do better. Yeah, I wonder if it's artificial limiting, you know. I mean, a Rivian is 0.28 and a Ford Lightning is 0.44. So the Lightning's got the drag coefficient of a brick. Or an F-150. Well, not much difference. The range, that's crazy short range for the rear-wheel drive, though.

And then if you tow anything with it, you're talking probably 100 miles, 150 miles. Well, range 250. Well, I say that because we were at the Supercharger a week ago, and there was a guy with a Model 3 towing a small trailer. He had an extended range, but his range with the trailer, a very small trailer, was 100 miles. Wow. So...

What speed? Do you know what speed he was going? 65. You couldn't go much. Yeah, you couldn't go any slower. You'd get run over. So anyway, that's pretty interesting. They didn't get the 39. Not even close. But that makes more sense. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, it's been four years. That is disappointing. And yeah, will they ever actually make it? They'll make it if they ever get their production done.

worked out, which clearly they haven't yet. The range is disappointing. Yeah, the range is disappointing. But price-wise, I've had contractors come and show me their new Dodge diesel Ram that he spent $110K on or something like that. Well, a Rivian, I mean, a Rivian's going for $95K to $98K. Is it? Yeah. For the high-end Rivian. Yeah, the high-spec R12. I priced a Lightning about a month ago when Ford dropped their price.

And to get the Lightning in today's market with a few bells and whistles, not a lot, but I wanted the power pack in the bed so you can charge other cars and things. And I wanted to be able to reverse power the house. Came in at 70K, or sorry, 74K when it was all said and done. And that was their bigger battery pack. So that's comparable to the... To the rear wheel drive.

Is it rear wheel? No, the rear wheel. The price initially, 60K, is comparable to the Lightning, but the Lightning's kind of useless at that price point. I'm sorry. I saw a comment. I guess this is a joke. It said, if you scroll all the way down in the main page, they say 440 plus miles with range extender. I'm sure you're joking, right? Yeah.

I mean, it's got the power walls and bolted in the back or something. No, it's a little generator you're putting the bed. Yeah. Main page, not water. All right. We're looking. Let's see if it's there with the range extender, like a gas range extender. I feel like I'm being, uh, I think it's a power wall. They dropped in the bed. I think I'm, Oh yeah, that would make sense. Yeah. They could do that.

Power walls, what, 10K of battery capacity? No, 14. 14? All right. 14 each. Oh, so you could stack them in the bed. There you go. You have 10K capacity back there for power walls. I believe you can hook seven power walls together. Oh, so I could put two in the bed and have a trailer with two more on the back. Yeah.

Might take a while to charge it at the supercharger. OK, so Michael Lee mentions the steer-by-wire is a big deal for me. I hope that tech comes down to the future Teslas. So I would really like to know exactly how that is being implemented, because I tend to think there still is a steering column, right, that gives you a mechanical connection. Yeah, but it's just turning like a rheostat or something. Yeah, I was thinking a pot at the end of it. Wow. Would that make sense? Well--

It would probably be a digital encoder, but... I mean, it's possible. But I find it hard to believe that you'd lose the mechanical connection. I don't know that they're allowed to do that yet. Well, you know, they didn't mention it, but supposedly the rear wheels turned too much. Now, that would be steer-by-wire, the rear. Yeah, so since you've got to go that way... That would be fine. But I would think that you'd still have some basic control if the thing died, right? Yeah.

Well, you may very well. It may have a default mode where it goes back to some mechanical. And it could just be like a variable ratio or something. So Seb's got a screenshot and he's got range extender 440 plus miles. That's interesting. I want to know what they mean by range extender. Well, that's kind of an interesting question, isn't it? I assume the range extender would just be batteries in the bed.

More than likely. But I mean, I wish they could have been a little more realistic at the launch. That was four years ago. Not just on pricing, but range. That's a little bit disappointing. On the site, they also, remember I mentioned earlier, I think before we went online, that would be neat to have a light bar above the windshield. And they're actually showing it. They have that as an accessory. Okay. Is there an accessories page already? Yeah.

Well, let's order one and we'll see if we get there. There are a number of accessories that Tesla is going to first party offer, which typically the third party does that. And things like the light bar, that's not legal in every state. So it makes sense to have that as an accessory where you could buy it in states where it's legal and maybe buy it out of state if it's not legal in your state and just leave it off until you drive out or whatever.

So it looks like they're showing a light bar and then kind of a tent thing that hooks into it. A spear. Okay, yeah, maybe this is it. Here we go.

Yeah, keep going down. Okay. Built for any planet. Why even say that? That's nonsense. It's not going to survive. Well, the good thing was it would work on Mars. It would not work on Venus, okay? No, that's a little too hot. It would not work on Venus. A little too much pressure, a little too hot. And I'm sure there's liquid cooling that would just boil away if it were on Mars even, so...

Uh, no paint, no chips. Okay. Good idea. Shatter it. Yeah. That baseball is baseball. That baseball is what does somebody say? It was a weak sauce. Uh, and the way he threw it too was so, so, so limp. Yeah. I was like, what are you doing, buddy? Yeah. I didn't want to say it, but yeah. Okay. Travel up to 340 miles on a single charge enough to get you to the back country and beyond. Uh,

recover 136 miles of range with just 15 minutes of supercharging. Okay. Okay, that sounds reasonable. Now, that's for the Cyber Beast range extender. I wonder if you can get that on the other ones. Look at this. It says 470 and then not available on the rear-wheel drive because they don't want you to buy it. So I guess what's going to happen is these two will be available soon and this one they probably haven't finished engineering yet.

So Rocky brought up an interesting point. They had cut off orders for quite a while, so I thought maybe they would honor the original price for the early reservations. I mean, we're looking at if we reserve it right now, but he's got a point that if you had your reservation in for the last three years, four years, are they going to hit you with the new price or do you get the original price? I'm sure you're not going to get the original price. What's previous history tell you, Mel? I mean...

I mean, they've done this many times, so you're not going to get the original price. Well, so that was interesting. I'm still not going to order one.

For the streets of L.A., you never know, you know? Well, I mean, that's a valid point, you know, driving through downtown L.A. You know, it's, I think it's interesting. I'm glad for it to exist. I do, I feel it is a little bit of a distraction. Like, the design aesthetic isn't necessarily one I would like to see through the rest of the Tesla range.

I don't really care for that to be what the 2027 Model 3 looks like or whatever. But you know what this will do is this will push the other manufacturers forward, whether they liked you or not. I mean, you got the truck that's really fast. It's got some very interesting tech in it.

For roughly the same price they're charging for their current old school selections. Yeah, that's an interesting point because I remember seeing something on an F-150 thing and they were showing like a 1930s Ford and a 2014 or whatever it was at the time. And it was like, okay, but you can definitely see you started here. There's a family resemblance there. Did some tweaks, right? You're two generations down the road, right? Yeah.

married somebody else that had a bigger nose and that's right or whatever well i will i really would like to see what the insurance on this will cost because it's not going to be cheap i mean there are other exotics and expensive things and i'm sure oh yeah oh yeah i'm sure it'll be fine yeah i molly you're right yeah it certainly seems to have quite a bit of demand i just wish tesla focused on the things that matter i just

I mean, it's my opinion. It matters a little bit more. The lower price, more volume vehicle, I think is more important. I think getting the semi right, which is taking longer than it should, I think is more important. But this gets people talking about Tesla. So there's something to that. Tesla doesn't really pay for advertising, but this is a way of generating brand awareness. So

I guess you could sort of redo the equation on that. I just think it's going to take them a long time, and it's definitely taking them a lot longer than they wanted for them to figure out how to properly manufacture this thing. And it seems like it's going to be difficult to manufacture after at least paying lip service earlier to designing for manufacturing and what they talked about when they went through with the Model X about how that was. This is Gen 1, so we'll have to see what kind of bugs arise when they roll this out for actual people to putz around in.

Yeah. And so it's interesting that people that got it, I recognize at least one board member and probably people that are related to employees or so there are people that are close to the company. Oh, they're not going to give one of these to Monroe? Let them tear it down?

He will get one as soon as he can, I'm sure. Yeah. As soon as he can buy one. They'll probably have a bounty out for one or two. I'm sure they will. If Tesla will allow them. I guess they retracted that disallowing of people to resell. They did. They did disallow and backed away from that. I mean, that was just too embarrassing. You bought something, but clearly you don't own it if you're not allowed to sell it, right? You don't actually own it, but you're renting it or something. Yeah.

That sounds like Elon. It sounded like a good thing at 3 a.m., and then he thought about it at 10 a.m. Wow. Or people reacted to it, and then they sort of... I didn't see a lease option for the truck. You didn't see a non-purchase option, then? I can't imagine there won't be one. Maybe it's just not available yet. Yeah, they have no reason to lease it now. The demand is high. People are interested in it. Yeah, there's no lease. I put all my information in, give them my credit card, off you go.

Yeah. Well, anyway, that happened. So short event for Tesla. Let's think. Now, what's important now? In a previous show with Mike, we had predictions on how many they will make by the end of first quarter next year. Yep. I still think it will be below 10,000. It will be that order of magnitude. I would agree with that. But, you know, they're going to have to get the line up and running, whatever they're doing. They're working with the new material.

They're working with a lot of new things. This is not a 3 to Y level change. No, this is a C change. Now, with the Y, though, there was the talk of, like Elon wanted to go to 48 volts then, and he got talked out of doing that because it was a little too much.

too many extra things. Part of that was what they learned from all the extra things they tried to do with the X. And here's the Y, which is supposed to be essentially another three, but a little bigger. And that's what it basically is. So it's nice that they've done that. And these are things I would like to see filter through the rest of the line. Making the low voltage stuff 48 volts means that for the same amount of power, you can have less copper, right?

And, uh, wire aircraft have been doing 48 for a long time. For years. Yeah. You know, airliners, they have to, because they'd have to carry so much more wires over 12 volts, you know, it would cut into their payload. Right. And there's mass associated with that. Oh yeah. So Jerry, how many do you think they're going to deliver in the first quarter of next year? I think if they get 5,000, they'll be lucky. You know, you're optimistic. Yeah.

Okay. Like I said, lucky. I suppose they could get a few more out this year. And given the way they did this event, I'm glad it was just 10. I didn't need to sit and watch 20 people be delivered like that. This seemed a lot more tightly controlled. This was controlled. They weren't allowed to drive it themselves. And instead of having 20 people or whatever it was at the Model 3 event, just walk out to their cars and drive away, they...

So my thought on that is these first 10, 20, or however many they've got behind the scenes are probably mostly hand-built. I mean, they probably ran it through the assembly line as much as they could, but I'll bet money it's mostly hand-built. And they're probably not done yet, which means they have the employee driving just in case. The owner is the owner, but you don't get to take it home today. That'd be my thought.

And I guess we'll find that in the next few days. Yeah, there's the other point Doug brought up about certification of a drive-by-wire system. So you've got to push that to Texas DOT or whatever.

Yeah, but people are driving them on the road. That is true, but with manufacturer plates. Yeah, I was going to say, that's a manufacturer plate and that's a different beast. Yeah, the certification is not to, I don't think, final delivery, just the average guy. So let's see, just to see what's going on on Twitter here. We do have images like this, but these may be the 10 that they went out. He's making a point of making it look like they're all on a production line here.

Is that really a production line or did they just make them and then just line them up? Well, how many you got? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, yeah. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven maybe in this photo. So that's probably the ones that got quote unquote delivered. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, they probably ran as much through the line as they could.

But I doubt seriously it was end-to-end production. Yeah, I'm not sure I'd want to have one of those 10 as an everyday driver. Oh, there's Dirty Tesla. Yeah. What was he asking for? 10 micron? What was the spec he wanted? Oh, yeah. He basically... Some insane spec. Yeah, he wanted precision to the...

to i don't remember but whatever it was it was the kind of thing where if i were machining optics it would be pretty good and also pretty expensive things would take precision costs money i mean to get that level of precision takes a lot more time these are cool pictures yeah this is dirty tesla and he's at the scene so it looks like they have so that's the rear so they've got giga castings for the rear that's interesting

And this looks like a single motor. Is this the front or the rear? This is the rear. Yeah, this is the rear. And that looks like a single motor setup as opposed to the dual motor. That's the flat X. Yeah. And so here's the other thing I was curious about was this window. Does that come down or not? It looks like it doesn't.

Because people that want to camp in the car or whatever, they want this window to be able to come down so that you get the HVAC into the... Yeah. So when they have like a tent or something. So I don't know if that's actually happening or not. So what's going on here? It looks like they have...

They have a line. Yeah, but this could be a dog and pony show. When the Model S, back when they first showed the betas and they had an event at the Fremont factory, they had all the machines just going through cycles and flashing lights, but nothing was actually doing anything. And they had a press, and the press was going boop, boop, boop. But yeah, nothing was actually being built in there yet. No metal going in, and the car comes out. And yeah, for this line to be real, these...

Well, I can't quite tell what's going on there, but that's, you know.

It's cool. And there's that front camera, Mike, that you asked about. There it is. That is offset, right? It's not in the center? Yeah. Okay, let's go ahead and talk about that front camera. So it looks like the license plate would be right here in the front. So that's center, essentially. Sure. And then this camera is to the side of it. But if you actually had a plate mount here, it feels to me that it would occlude some of the view of this camera. I assume this camera is like a fisheye.

So you can sort of see left and right, not just straight in front. At least that's what I would hope. Unless the plate gets recessed.

Yeah, I was wondering about that myself. Because if you look there, there's kind of a bend in that piece of material there. Yeah, and also it seems like US width as opposed to European. But I suppose European could just sit above maybe right here. Well, that's a US spec bumper. All you do is change the bumper. Okay, yeah, I guess they could do that. Okay, so that is a gigacasting there. You can see it's all one piece. Yeah. Right.

That's impressive. That's the front of the vehicle then. That's impressive. So on the Ys, they're using gigacassines front and rear. And I think they want that rigidity because of the motor. So here's the front drive unit. I'm impressed with Tesla is how compact the motors are versus the amount of power they can get out of them. I don't think this is a newer motor than what's going on in the later Xs. Here are the seats you're asking about.

And that's the battery pack. They seem kind of wide. They seem reasonable. People were disappointed because they kind of wanted a front bench. Well, I thought that was original spec. Yeah, perhaps. That's kind of a retro thing. Does anyone offering a front bench now? I don't know. Would you meet all the safety standards if you did something like that? Yeah, I don't know, man.

Yeah, that seems a tough nut to crack. Here's like, this is another accessory that Tesla's going to have. So yeah, the question is, will the HVAC work through there? It'll pop up. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that's a cool accessory. And it's nice that it's designed for it. But yeah, I don't see anything. This part looks to be above the... That's the roof, isn't it? Yeah, so this looks to be above the... So I guess, what would you put on here? Would you actually be able to sit on that? Is this...

Is this sturdy enough for someone to sit in? So it looks like it's not connecting to the HVAC at all, right? Because this window looks above the whole vehicle and this is a solid piece here.

So that's a little bit of a disappointment, I guess. Yeah. That looks pretty spacious. Looks like it comes with padding and everything, too. Padding, and they do this polygon. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty neat. Yeah. So, hey, it's cool. Just execute and do all the other things that you promised to do. Easier said than done.

i'm sure here's marquez brownlee complaining says tesla cyber truck is notably the first time that tesla is straight up not delivering on some of the key specs they promised promised specs 500 plus mile range 70 000 delivered 340 mile range 100 000 uh you can buy your wrecks

Someday. Yeah, Tesla and others have taken the stance that the thousands of pounds of extra battery required to deliver 500 miles of range with today's battery technology is not worth the hit to driving dynamics. At this point, I can't be surprised if Roadster 2.0 has nowhere near 600 mile range either. Yeah, of course. He did say that with the Roadster. I didn't remember that. Yeah, 600 mile range, and that was 2017? Yeah.

when that was uh good luck with that so it's uh yeah it's been six years for that one i i gotta say though i i will agree with that statement to some degree oh did we find oh we finally get to see this crash there's the crash videos that uh that april fool's joke where it just kept going and then just stopping right before looks pretty rigid i don't think you can fake those right i assume the dot has standards on those yeah so my question is about the front crumple

Side impact looks pretty good. Yeah, that looks nice. Yeah, it didn't intrude into the cabin at all, I don't think. I've got to say, the rollover test is impressive. We've seen the ones with the X, right? Yeah, pretty much all the Tesla rollover tests look like that. Yeah, they just don't roll. All that mass is way down here. I've got to say, on that front collision, I was expecting more of a crumple zone.

But if it meets spec, it meets spec. Yeah, I'm still curious about things like pedestrian safety standards. Anyway, we should start to wrap. Let's see if there are any other comments that should be addressed here. So Stefan says, yeah, the vehicles are probably hand-built and not going home today. I would guess that that's probably true. Rocky says, someone just posted that on the website. It shows the Cybertruck being able to backfeed your house through the Tesla universal wall connector.

I really wish mine could do that. Yeah. There is a NEMA 1450 outlet in the bed, so I guess you could certainly do that. Now what you do is you take your mobile charging unit and you plug that into the outlet and then you plug it into the vehicle and then it just charges itself. Self-charging. Perpetual motion. Yeah.

Infinite loop. But what do you have to buy on the home site? Rocky says, it said if you already have a Powerwall that has a necessary interface gateway that just needs a wall connector. Yeah, that makes sense. You need some smarts to do that in a reasonable way. And in which case, yeah, the battery just kind of acts as another Powerwall. But yeah, you need the brains.

So, okay. Well, Hey, how about we wrap up? Thanks guys. Definitely a lot of fun. Yeah. This was a more interesting event. We kind of complained about the AI event because it was so late in the evening and so long. And I think you were there with us, weren't you Jerry? Yeah. For that event.

That's what I do all day. Yeah, it was so long. Whereas this, we basically just had two questions from the presentation. What's the actual range? What's the cost? And they didn't answer it in the presentation for some reason. Probably they anticipated that there might be a not so happy reaction from the audience. So they just skipped it altogether and you can go look it up on the website sort of thing. And that's probably a wise decision. But hey, yeah.

That was interesting. And thanks, everybody, for coming. And thanks to our audience and people that commented. And thanks to our producers. So anyway, see you guys soon. Thank you. OK. Cheers.