The road to a production Cybertruck has been bumpy. Almost as bumpy and uneven as the primary Cybertrucks coming out of the Austin Gigafactory, which have reportedly been so bad that they prompted Elon Musk to send an urgent email to Tesla employees. Within the message, Musk demanded greater precision within the production means of the EV pickup, with Musk occurring to reference the famously tight tolerances of Lego blocks and soda cans to encourage his staff to construct higher Cybertrucks. It goes without saying that the time to ask for “sub 10 micron accuracy” from your individual company, let alone the suppliers constructing parts for the thing can be several years ago, before the automotive was “headed for production.” But we’re all learning as we go on this life.
But a greater Cybertruck would only be possible through a whole redesign, in response to Fast Company, which cites automotive designer and the Autopian contributor Adrian Clarke. The problems come all the way down to the impossibly flat body panels of the Cybertruck. Given the design of the EV, small imperfections inherent within the production process are all of the more clear, as Clarke tells Fast Company:
Professor X believes that Tesla can attain such precision, but Clarke questioned the demand in an email he sent me today. “Is completely infeasible for production. Body panel tolerances are measured in whole mm to permit for variance in assembly and the tolerance stack!” This can also be nonsense because, as he points out, it doesn’t consider the thermal expansion and contraction of vehicles that come into play throughout the manufacturing and operation of the vehicle.
Musk is aware of those issues, but he seems convinced that tighter tolerances can be the fix the Cybertruck needs — again, the thing is supposedly near production and is notably not a single stamped/moulded/solid piece. This ignores other practical problems which have led to multiple delays in bringing the EV to market. Per Fast Company:
Musk promised this pickup in 2021 and didn’t deliver. Then he said production was coming in 2022, but that yr got here, and it got delayed again to early 2023. Now it’s been delayed again till “late 2023.” Tesla blamed the provision chain, but Clarke and others within the industry are skeptical it’ll ever occur—a minimum of, not with out a serious redesign. “As soon as we saw [the Cybertruck], everyone I do know within the industry began laughing. We just thought there is no such thing as a way they’re gonna give you the chance to get that into production.” There’s no way, he assures me, since it’s not going to pass crash regulations, it’s not going pass pedestrian impact regulations, and, more importantly, it’s going to be extremely hard to make those “those dead straight panels.”
Still, Musk is soldiering on with the Cybertruck despite its unprecedented design, which stays unprecedented for good reason: it makes production difficult and repairs nearly unattainable.
I get the impulse to design something easy and clean. Really, I do. But there’s a difference between something minimalist and something reductive. The Cybertruck strikes me as an attempt at the previous that went off the rails and arrived on the latter. A nasty joke that began with Elon Musk or another person at Tesla saying “what if we did this as an alternative…” followed by uproarious laughter at crudely drawn lines and 4 circles. Behold, the Cybertruck, said some genius and nobody dared to query the so-called Technoking.
The issue is that the bit went too far. That’s, if the damned thing ever makes it to production.
This Article First Appeared At jalopnik.com
