ford making mustang station wagon. Tesla says hold my beer.

I had one of these.


I've got to admit that this kind of works.

Uh...

the towing capacity on the triple seems fairly impressive... overall comparable to a 6.8L F350

Oh, wow, this is giving me an existential crisis. I mean, Syd Mead is a design genius and we have similar taste in cars.

I know Syd likes angular designs. After all this is a concept car design of his:

But I think that we can all agree Syd's design for a pickup looks waaaaaaaaay better than the Tesla.

75% of truck owners also use their pickups to accelerate less than half as fast off of a red light as my 20-year old 4-cylinder can. "Pickup" is false advertising

3,500 lbs load capacity (compared to a measly 1,000 lb half ton pu)
14,000 lbs towing capacity
0-60 in 2.9 seconds (with AWD tri motor)
500 mile range
source

And still coyote ugly as fuck

The stats are amazing, but gah, I still have to look at the damn thing.

I think we're so inured to the current crop of botoxed car and truck bodies that function over form seems "ugly." I think it's going to be a big seller.

It is going to be a big seller because it is a status symbol, and when status symbols are ugly and noticeable they sell better. If this had chevy or ford on it there would be no one buying it.

Apparently, you'll be able to play Mark Watney with the truck.

This is a not entirely accurate description of why the truck looks the way it does.

The reason why I say it's not entirely accurate is that having worked with metal stamping presses and knowing a bit about the auto industry's manufacturing process, you could give the truck a more normal design with conventional presses, you'd just have to add a few extra steps to the process. Most of the time, when a car company stamps out something like a body panel, they load a sheet of metal into the press, and it slams the dies into it at high speed and pressure, forming the part in one whack.

Other times, they will use what's known as "progressive dies" to stamp out a part. This means that you load the metal into the press and it stamps the part out to a percentage of the final shape, you then move it to another machine which stamps it out another percentage, and so on. With the type of steel that Musk's using for the Cybertruck, they could get a more conventional shape out of it if they used this method. Another method to reduce the number of passes through the progressive dies would be to do the scoring that Musk talks about , but again, that adds costs to the design.

Someone decided to see what it would look like if you painted it.






Interestingly, the accounting firm which wrote up the investment prospectus for DeLorean said that if they didn't paint the cars, they could only expect to sell about 9K of them. And that's about what they did. (I will say that a painted DeLorean is a stunningly beautiful car.) When I was at the Lane Motor Museum, they had a DeLorean and I wasn't at all impressed with the stainless steel finish on the car. I used to work as a finisher for a company that made stainless steel kitchen equipment and after grinding down the welds and buffing out the scratches, I'd have to blend the grain in the metal so that one couldn't tell exactly where the welds were. If I'd have tried to pass off something with the kind of finish that the DeLorean had, they'd have fired me.

If you want a Cybertruck, but can't afford one, you could probably import one of these from Brazil for next to nothing.

That is interesting, but here comes the problem. Impact will do much more damage to the car over all with this sort of design. One of the things about cars is they are designed to take a certain amount of abuse to the outer body as a cushion towards the base frame. This means that a low velocity impact is going to have most of the force absorbed by the plastic or thin metal exterior rather than the internal frame. That is huge in the durability of the car over a lifetime. This means if I hit a curb by accident every joint in the car does not get stressed like it does at the impact point.

What tesla is designing is a hard cage which will put force on every joint every time there is a vector force pushing on it. This means that instead of dealing with a small point of damage over time the whole car is going to take massive abuse over time. One of the things I like about the modern plastic car is swapping out the cosmetic parts is easy and does not involve huge amounts of welding and structural problems all over the vehicle. This makes fender benders much worse over all.

What you're describing is a common problem with all unibody vehicles. The difference between those and this monstrosity is that they have at least some parts which can be swapped out in an accident. Hit the front fender of a unibody car, and you just unbolt the damaged one and bolt on a new on, or pound out the dent. With this truck, if you get a dent, then they're going to have to cut off a section and weld on a replacement. It's unlikely that one will be able to pound out the dent.

Yes, but with hardened steel the impact forces are going to be far harder in all areas of the car. Over time this causes welds to fail, warping of weaker frame areas, and the destruction of adjoining points. I would also think using steel like that for the frame would drastically reduce the effectiveness of crumple zones to absorb impact forces and slow the rapid deceleration of the occupants making the inside of the vehicle much more deadly in a collision. Part of the design of modern cars is to have them cushion the blow to reduce Gforces and stress on the occupants in the instant of collision. Not to mention this may make the actual frame more deadly to occupants or other people in the accident. That vehicle coming into the side of another car is going to form harden steel shards which would rip apart modern impact absorbent materials.

I don't mind the ugly of the car, but I actually hope that the hardened steel tank aspect gets the car banned from roadways unless for use in law enforcement or security vehicles. Last thing we want is a bunch of dickless tesla morons driving around tanks that would rip apart other cars and make it likely to kill the occupants.

Ohh, another Brazilian truck which predates the Tesla! And this one has a winch on the front!

preaching to the choir! Making the roadways and parking lots more dangerous because those of us driving cars lower to the ground can't see through, over or around these fucking tanks.
I thought I'd seen my last tank when I left the sandbox - obviously I was mistaken.

In this case it is a sort of tank considering how it was made. If it had armor on the underside I would think about one of these if I were going to be taking a drive in syria. I am sure that it would make a lovely suicide bomber vehicle. At 35k perhaps ISIS would want a shipment of these things. Considering it comes with driverless AI tech and modern computerized functions this is the ground vehicle for the terrorists of the world. You can even have your drone take off from the back before you blow it up and take pictures of it. Given all the HP of the engine this thing is rrally a terrorist dream come true.

Holy shit, this thing could also drive through crowds given the strength of it, and it could be programmed from far away to do so. It would be hard to stop with the armor plating. Sure the windows are fail, but if you are navigating through programming, or by remote you don't need them. You add some run flat tires on that puppy and this thing can take out cop cars with ease.

Perhaps this thing needs to be really toned the fuck down.

Allow me to introduce you to Sir Vival.

Well, now.

Will we be getting "The Homer" next?

it looks like a bumper car!

You're not far off.

Still looks better than the cybertruck.

I really want to like Tesla as a company. I am really fucking trying. They do some interesting and cool things, but this is like the jar jar of cars.

Okay, how about this little number?


No? Then perhaps this baby.



Or this one:


If you'd prefer a Ford, I can offer you this hot little number.



In the import class, we have this VW


Or this Italian number


Give me time and I can dig up even greater abortions.

Totally with a paint job, or even that color.

I am not big on the big grill thing

I put a lot of crap in the trunk and back seat and it would all fall out when opening the car, so no.

Not this one

Paint it pink or purple and you have got a sale.

Maybe if I had a family.

Do beware I actually would drive a pimpmobile around if I liked it, and it would be gawd awful to most people. It is just I decorate myself and not the car most times.