There’s been lots of talk about the Tesla Cybertruck’s off-road capability. First, the vehicle struggled to go up a basic slope at a California off-road park; then Ford CEO Jim Farley publicly poked fun at the Cybertruck and I made it clear that The Cybertruck will still kick the Ford’s F-150 Lightning’s ass; then there was a video of a Cybertruck getting stuck in snow and being pulled out by a Ford; then there were various other videos of the Cybertruck seemingly struggling in the winter. So if the Cybertruck is so bad off-road, then what’s with this new video from Tesla showing the truck climbing up one of the most challenging off-road obstacles on earth? Let’s take a look.
I’ve written about the Tesla Cybertruck’s off-road capability a few times because I have a background in off-roading, and there’s lots of bullshit flying around that needs to be broken down. My first article was in response to all the fanboys claiming the Cybertruck was going to be the best off-road vehicle ever. It’s not. It’s too big, and its four-wheel drive system probably isn’t ever going to match a fully locked system when it comes to rock crawling.
Then Ford CEO Jim Farley tweeted that video of the Lightning handily climbing a grade that had apparently made a Cybertruck prototype struggle in another online video.
This time, I defended the Cybertruck because I know it has more off-road potential than Ford’s offering, the F-150 Lightning, largely due to the Tesla’s favorable geometry. The title of my article was “Ford CEO Takes Shot At Tesla Cybertruck With Off-Road Video Of F-150 Lightning, Which Is Going To Get Its Ass Kicked.”
F-150 Lightning does it all. 👍 pic.twitter.com/uCMUSxUIpj
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) November 15, 2023
Here’s why I claimed the F-150 Lightning would get its ass kicked by the Cybertruck:
The video shows a prototype Tesla Cybertruck. It won’t take much to vastly improve that traction control system to better get the motors’ power down to the ground to propel the vehicle forward. That’s just software. Is it going to be as good as a mechanical locker? Maybe not! Or maybe Tesla will actually offer a locker for the two wheels on the same axle — regardless, even if the Ford’s traction control system is better than the Tesla’s, torque transfer is only a small part of the off-road equation. The biggest slice of the off-road pie is all about geometry, and in that area, the Cybertruck is probably going to demolish the F-150 Lightning.
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To be clear, the Cybertruck’s geometry — even at max ride height — isn’t going to be amazing, simply by virtue of it being a pickup that needs four doors and a bed, but there’s no way it’ll be as bad as the F-150 Lightning’s, so when the time comes for a head-to-head, I have no doubt that the Lightning will be left in the dust. But for now, while Tesla is still working on the Cybertruck, it’s Jim Farley — who runs a car company that sells an EV pickup truck that you can buy today at a dealership — who fairly gets to have a bit of fun on Twitter.
When it comes to off-roading, geometry is king, and if you’re Ford, and your F-150 Lightning has a giant battery pack hanging way down low to the ground, you should be careful not to brag too much. Like I said before, all it would take was some software to get the Cybertruck leagues ahead of the Lightning. And I think we might be there:
Obviously, this is a Tesla-produced video; it’s an ad, so we need to take it all with a grain of salt. It’s also worth noting that even Kia managed to get a lightly-modified Sorento (hardly a true off-road vehicle) crossover up Hell’s Gate:
But you can just look at that Cybertruck video and see how effortlessly it climbed that tricky grade versus the Sorento.
You see, the reason why Hell’s Gate is so challenging is that it’s absurdly steep, and it requires a vehicle to drive up a V-crack, then a bit farther up the right wall, then drive back down into the V-crack and ultimately to the top of the hill. This means tires are going to want to lift off the rock, and if you’ve got just a standard open differential, then a lifted tire on an axle will spin up way fast, taking away the power that the other wheel on the axle — the wheel on the rock that you need to propel the vehicle up the grade.
The obstacle is a test of a few things, really; there’s geometry, of course (you’ve got to keep the bumpers from hitting the rock); there’s torque at the wheels, of course (you need to crawl up the grade nice and slowly); and there’s articulation (i.e. can you keep the tires on the ground). If you’ve got a vehicle that doesn’t have a ton of suspension flex – like the Cybertruck and other fully independent suspension-equipped trucks – then traction control really becomes the ticket to making it up the grade (i.e. can you make sure power is sent to the wheels with grip, and in a controlled and predictable way?).
The Cybertruck Hell’s Gate ad shows a vehicle slowly ascending the grade in a reasonably controlled fashion. It’s still not perfect.
The truck starts ascending the grade favoring the right wall. This takes some weight off the driver’s side tire, and you can see that tire flare up (i.e. spin quickly). This isn’t what you want when you’re trying to ascend a steep grade slowly and in a controlled manner; you want the tangential velocity of your tread to roughly match that of your vehicle (which is done effectively via a traditional locked-differential system; Tesla has to try to do this using sensors — a difficult challenge). You can see the truck quickly slide over to the driver’s side of the V-crack:
At 31 seconds into that video, you can again see the truck favor the right wall (that’s the right line, from my experience), resulting yet again in the driver’s side tire wanting to lift. As a result, the tire again spins up, and this time the truck bounces a bit up and down. This is not ideal, as this type of bouncing is the leading cause of axle shaft failure. Still, the bouncing isn’t egregious based on what I see here.
Then at about 38 seconds in the truck lifts that driver’s side tire way off the terrain, and while the truck seems to handle that reasonably well, it does look like the vehicle speed was a bit high here, likely due to the driver trying to make up for that lake of propulsion from the front left tire. With an ideal system — for example, a fully locked center/front/rear diff on a typical 4×4 — the driver really wouldn’t have to apply any more pedal when a tire lifts off the ground; the tires with grip will continue to move the vehicle up the grade at the same rate so long as one tire has good grip.
Still, overall the Cybertruck seemed to handle what is, frankly, a pretty challenging grade, with relatively little drama. It’s not really a grade that you can ascend without drama unless you’ve got a decent traction control system, so whatever issues Tesla was having before in that California off-road park, it seems the company’s engineering team has solved some of them.
I myself cannot wait to put the truck to the test off-road; I just need to find someone who’s got a truck to lend me…
Is it true they are closing down trails in/near Moab this year?
Yes, because of irresponsible behavior and environmental damage. However, it’s only a small percentage of the entire trail system…like 10% or something.
10% isn’t too bad. Hopefully after they clean up any damage they can reopen the trails.
Somehow, that brain of mine first read “…Kia managed to get a lightly-modified Sorento (hardly a...” as “…Kia managed to get a highly-modified Sorento…”, and I went into full battle-whine mode.
Re-read. Always re-raed. Alsway de-read !!!
I have zero knowledge of the way traction control works in electric vehicles, but wouldn’t it just take a few lines of code to have an “all diffs locked” mode in an EV with four motors? Just get them to spin all at the same rate, all the time this mode is engaged – more throttle, faster forward motion.
This. Waiting for someone to enlighten us
I asked this on a previous article about the Cybertruck and it was pointed out that you can’t just set the electric motor to run at a given speed, you only control how much power is being sent to each motor. You basically need an electronic diff like most AWD vehicles these days where you read the wheel speed and adjust power delivery on the fly. That obviously can be done, but it’s still not as good as a fully locked diff.
Sure you can, you just need a motor with a built in encoder that is counting revolutions. Servo motors like these are used all around the place for automation as they allow you to move things precisely without relying on timers, position switches or caring about what you’re moving around.
That’s only true if they were using servo motors, which to my knowledge they are not. Maybe someone building a dedicated off road EV will some day though.
You can still have a rotary encoder on any motor type.
Okay I feel like I need to clear up a whole bunch of conflicting info about EV traction systems here.
yfn electrigg vehicule nerd
So for instance let’s say the Cybertruck is all “electronic lock” only, no clutches between the two sides. You hit the touchscreen slider gesture facial recognition dongle that says “lock (idk how teslas work). All 4 wheels are sent the same velocity command and they do their darndest to keep up.
You climb the hill and hit a rock that is pretty big. The torque demand on that wheel momentarily rises above what the motor can put out as it’s being forced into the rock. The inverter cannot supply any more current to make torque, so that wheel experiences a steep drop in velocity as a result.
I expect this will feel somewhat like if a manual locking hub isn’t quite tight and that half-shaft “slips” a bit.
I would think because the cyber truck uses induction motors for the rear axle they would require motor slip to produce torque, and if wheel torque varies quickly then you would have lots of slip due to the wind up that a 4 wheel locked vehicle would not.
The Rivian on the other hand has 4 wheel synchronous motors which should be able to output a specified speed independent of the wheel torque as long it remains below the maximum. But from videos it looks like it still doesn’t function as a locked vehicle because the tires will spin when they lose traction.
It also could be that at such slow speeds there aren’t enough steps (motor poles) in the motors to have smooth application of torque. More steps (poles) in the motors would hurt top speed. Really they might just need a low range, which would be impractical on a vehicle with 3-4 independent motors.
This is a Tesla produced video, so for all we know that thing only had enough batteries installed to make it to the top. They could have stripped literally a ton or more out of the test vehicle. I truly don’t trust anything from any company led by King Baby Musk.
Let’s see this reproduced with a production truck and a passenger in it. Then I might believe it’s true.
I get it. But Hell’s Gate isn’t actually hard, so if a barely modified Sorento can do it, a production stupidtruck should do this without much issue. It looks scary, but it’s not that technically challenging or impressive to me. If anything, I’m wowed by the complete lack of wheel travel. I feel like most trucks (excepting the Maverick, Ridgeline, etc.) have more wheel travel and could do this even easier.
I finally saw two of these on a transport truck the other day!
Yeah.. they absolutely look as stupid in person as they do in pictures.
Wow! These AI vids are getting really good! 😉
I don’t care if it can crawl up the side of the Empire State Building, it’s ugly as hell.
Sounds like Tesla is embracing the MVP (minimum viable product) common in software – just get a working thing out there and add features (or tuning) later. Definitely a different approach than normal with “physical things” like cars. Just have to hope the features and fixes people want make it off the backlog and into prod.
I, too, work in Agilefall. Nice to meet a fellow practitioner!
I hate this trend so much. As a gamer, car enthusiast, and IT professional, I have to experience it on all fronts. OTA updates and day 1 patches just enable companies to put out unfinished products, letting the consumer/end user find and report the bugs instead of doing proper testing and bug fixing.
Wonders if a Chevy Citation could climb Hell’s Gate……..hmmmmmm (◔ૂ◔)
“Looks” like that Utah “art installation” from a few years back fallen over.
Picture caption is wrong. “Looks dialed in” That look will never be dialed in.
It was certainly phoned in….
I saw the video and thought maybe an electric vehicle has finally been dialed in. I was unimpressed with other EVs off-road capabilities, including the Rivian and Hummer.
Yeah but normally this happens before SOP…
They are going for the video game dev method of “we can patch it out later”
Yeah, but can it do hell’s gate faster than Rory driving trailmater in reverse?
Won’t be impressed by this until I see it go up dragging the Turdmeister up by his ankles. And that still probably won’t seal the deal.
Glad that some folks here like their Teslas.
But I would rather trust the Wizard of Oz to tell the truth than Cyber Boy. YMMV.
Truck goes up hill? BFD….
I was driving a new Range Rover this weekend. It does stuff. So much stuff.
I suspect the Venn diagram overlap of the number of people who can afford.a Cybertruck and the number who actually want one will remain a tiny segment. Throw in a third circle for people who will off-road a Cybertruck and that overlap segment will shrink to total insignificance.
This is completely pedantic but I just learned this recently: It’s only a Venn diagram if there’s overlap in all categories shown; otherwise it’s a Euler diagram (all Venn diagrams are also Euler diagrams, but not all Euler diagrams are Venn diagrams).
I do agree with your sentiment though!
Pretty sure this would still be a Venn diagram–there should (in theory, at least), be overlap in all of these categories. There’s gotta be someone who can afford a Cybertruck, wants one, and will offroad it.
Aw, damn. You’re right. A tiny overlap is still overlap.
It’s still a nice thing to remember. You often hear things like “the Venn diagram of people who [blank] and people who are [blank] is two circles with no overlap.” Euler diagrams deserve some credit, especially since the Euler circle completely contains the Venn circle on the Euler diagram of Euler/Venn diagrams.
Respectfully, please go to hell.
Why? I’m being supportive of your pedantry!
Consider me enlightened.
Pedantry for the win.
I am not sure I understand; please provide some sort of illustrative diagram.
https://mdmhirogoto.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/chapter-5-2.png
In case that link doesn’t work, short summary:
if you have circles with no overlap existing as part of the same diagram, it’s not a Venn diagram. Venn diagrams must have overlap.
No, no, I wanted a diagram of the types of diagrams – I guess it would be a Euler, with the big circle being Eulers and the little circle inside being Venns.
Please also include and indicate in Venn form any circles that are non-Euler.
For a moment there I read your name as VennGuy.
I bet that the segment of people that will never off-road it will still find the fact it *can* off-road very important to their purchase. Consumers love knowing that their stuff is super capable, even if they never use it. Think about all the sports car buyers who just want to cruise up and down Santa Monica, but still buy the fastest thing available despite being less comfortable, less attractive and less practical.
As an autopian I enjoy using vehicles that “can’t” or at least shouldn’t. Move 1000 miles in a compact sedan? Off road in a Buick. Drive my slow car fast (where safe). It strikes me as fun and as a bonus I learned how to fix radiators, thermostats, half shafts, brakes, rotors and door handles!
I didn’t enjoy moving in a sedan but when you are poor you got no choice.
I fully agree, shoving everything I owned in a 20-year-old A4 was a point of pride for me, and I just “downgraded” to half the power from my last car because it wasn’t exciting below 100mph. 200 feels like kind of the sweet spot for me, I’d buy a BRZ if the insurance premiums weren’t so insanely high on those. I like pushing a vehicle’s limits, not just knowing they’re higher than I’ll ever reach. A fast car only lets you stretch how brave (ahem, stupid) you are, a slow car actually lets you exercise skill.
Same with off-roading, what’s the point of buying a vehicle so capable that you have to drive 10+ hours to the nearest challenging trail? It’s such a waste to visit the “outdoors” inside an air-conditioned, noise-insulated, hyper-capable apartment on wheels. The best times I’ve ever had off-road were in a one-seater buggy with no windshield, no diff, a CVT and 14bhp.
You’ve got some nerve writing anything almost vaguely positive about the Cybertruck, DT.
Haaahrumph! Haaahrumph!
Call me old fashioned, but when I was in product development, the intention was to engineer for well-foreseen issues like taking a truck off-road *before* the on-sale date, not just release betas on the public.
For better or worse, Tesla is sticking to their philosophy of acting like a tech company.
I think that pretty much all companies/products used to be released as you describe. Today there is just too much emphasis on being first rather than being best.
First is more important because you can always lie about being the best, at least for awhile, and especially if you own a massive social media platform, too.
I think you’re right, but what’s funny about this was 1) the CT was already super late, so who cares if they took another month to get the calibration dialed in better, and 2) the Lightning was already on the market, so they were never going to be first anyways.
In any case, it doesn’t matter, no one who wants one of these is going to be bothered in the least by any of this.
It’s an odd characteristic of the world we live in. Nearly 100% of these will be purchased for daily driver trips for groceries and commutes to work with a few percentage points of contractors (maybe) if they want some extra visual attention for their electric business.
But there will be plenty of YouTube channel reviews that will highlight deficiencies in areas that won’t matter to anyone considering one of these things.
And yet the press from a bad YT video in performance or utility will still have a negative impact on the perception by the mall crawling crowds. Why are we considered the most intelligent inhabitants on Earth again?
Because we control the media.
Dammit, I’m going to rely entirely on non-human media from now on. I hear whales have a pretty good pod cast.
Never fear because A.I. is here!!!.
Very good!
I might also catch the trout live stream. Spiders have a pretty good web presence, too.
I hear birds posted pretty reliable tweets before it was renamed.
COTD, and I don’t usually say that about puns, but this is just a perfect response. 😀
GM and Chrysler push products out the door with design flaws and then never fixes them.
It’s a good point. As long as continuous improvement is the goal we should applaud this more. There’s a few too many instances of updates to remove features because they decided they should charge monthly instead of a single payment at purchase for me to like it but the potential is there for a better ownership experience.
I mean, I get your point, but if it was fully competent on the road or on basic dirt roads even before these updates (assuming they’re 100% software updates only), I’d say that’s the important piece. Anyone who’s doing terrain like this on the regular is probably looking for things with better geometry, anyway…right?
The ability to remotely update significant aspects/functionality of vehicles truly is a sea change. Yeah, better if it was good by default, but…it doesn’t look like the lack was a safety issue first, for example.
Except when you are Tesla and just view customers and public roads as a paid-for beta….
As long as Tesla buyers don’t care, they will keep doing this.
This will come in very handy for owners on their way to the mall.
*on their way to film their next YouTube/Tiktok/Instagram video
And Home Depot for that one box of screws.
That whole truck is a box of screws.
I LITERALLY went to Home Depot yesterday for one box of nails (not screws). Buy I did so in a Jaguar XJR. Left the truck at home.
I did so in a Jaguar XJR. Left the truck at home.
That’s better?
Not better from a gas usage standpoint. But better from a which would I rather drive? Definately. LOL
Only in America…