The Real Reason Tesla Developed The Cybertruck!

The Tesla cyber truck is one of those products that people either love or hate. It's controversial, to say the least, and the

reason

is simply because it's different, it threatens the status quo and most people don't like that, but the other side of the argument sees that disrupting the status quo is an opportunity that could move the needle in a life-improving direction. The trick is being able to identify what new ideas will change an industry for the better and what ideas will create change. To make matters worse, the interesting thing about the Cyber ​​truck is that, contrary to what many people would believe, this truck was not specifically designed to be ugly or offensive, it is not just a huge troll of a billionaire gentleman who plays too many video games.

The Cyber ​​​​Truck is nothing more than the product of a first principle design that aims to create the strongest, lightest, most durable, powerful, versatile, efficient, cost-effective and long-lasting pickup truck ever made, so many had to come together different factors. To make this happen, today we're going to break down the engineering techniques that were used to make the Cyber ​​Truck what it is and why they are so important to the final design. Obviously, the most striking feature of the Cyber ​​​​Truck is its body, which is long and wide. and pointy in ways we're not used to seeing in vehicle design outside of a video game or sci-fi movie, so why does it look like that?

Well, again, I can assure you that this is not a troll either because given the design. Fundamentals established for this truck, there is literally no other way to look at it. We'll have to start with some materials science. The body of the Cyber ​​truck is made from a 1.8-inch thick sheet of 300 series cold-rolled stainless steel. It is not a typical material to build a car. This is unprecedented. There was the stainless steel DeLorean of the 1980s, but those body panels are significantly thinner and softer than the Cyber ​​Truck material, as we saw in the sledgehammer test at the Cyber ​​launch event Truck.

Thick cold rolled steel is incredibly strong and because steel is so hard that it cannot be stamped into a curved shape like a normal car body panel, it would literally break the stamping machine. The only way to shape this grade of steel is to bend it, so what they do is they first mark the metal using a laser and then they're going to put it in a machine called a rotary press. This is going to have a long, narrow die channel that sets the angle at which the metal will bend. and then there is a piercing tool that will hammer the sheet metal with a narrow edge that will concentrate all the energy exactly where they want the steel to bend and press it into the desired angle.

The manufacturing advantage of this process is also huge compared to traditional stamping, the Cyber ​​truck doesn't need a bunch of custom dies and stamping machines, just the press breaks at the desired angle, that's why the Cyber ​​truck ​It doesn't have curves because it would be physically impossible given the choice of material they made, but then why use such hard steel? Modern truck design has come a long way from the heavy-gauge steel bodies of yesteryear. The latest Ford F-150 uses an all-aluminum body, a very light but also very soft metal, something that has made the truck even more loose. truck from its intended purpose as a work vehicle try throwing a steel toolbox into an aluminum bed, the GMC Sierra has been experimenting with using carbon fiber and fiberglass composites in its new bed designs, all others go light while Tesla goes heavy or now we incorporate structural engineering your typical truck is what they call a body on frame design the frame is the structural heart of the truck the body and bed just sit on top they don't contribute To Structural Integrity The tensile strength of the truck comes primarily from two boxed steel rails that run from front to back and are joined at some points in between by lighter metals, so when you load the truck with cargo, Tow something heavy or go around a touring very fast there is very little weight distribution, everything is concentrated on those two beams, which means the entire cabin and bed of the truck are dead weight, they do not contribute to the structure, so in They actually become more useful load than the frame has to support.

One step up from that is the unibody design. This is how basically every non-truck vehicle is manufactured in a unibody, the lower frame and upper body structure of the car are joined together and are an integral part of the vehicle structure. , the top of the vehicle needs a strong structure anyway to deal with crash impacts and rollovers, so we might as well put it to work so that instead of the frame taking all the load, the energy is distributed towards the internal structure of the vehicle. vehicle, so now the roof, floor and trunk are doing their part to contribute to the overall strength of the vehicle and that means that no part has to be particularly strong on its own and that completely eliminates the need for steel high resistance. beams inside the vehicle and that means that overall the body and frame will be much lighter, but even the monocoque still has a lot of dead weight to carry, that's the outer skin of the vehicle, the way cars are made now, The body panels are plastic or super. thin aluminum, these panels have no strength or structure, they exist only to channel air around the vehicle and make it look pretty and because low quality metal is susceptible to corrosion and due to the customer's obsession with aesthetics, the entire body needs to be painted which is even more dead weight, think about how heavy a can of paint is, quite heavy and it also adds a huge amount of cost and production time to the vehicle and even with paint the body will still corrode and will rust.

In a decade or two, this is a problem Tesla had to solve to achieve the goal of making the best truck in the world. How to go beyond unibody. How to make a truck even stronger while making it simpler and less expensive. At the same time and the solution to that was the thick sheet of cold rolled stainless steel, a body material so strong that it would actually support more weight than it added, so now instead of the body structure being Inside, that is, an endoskeleton, the structure is formed. on the outside or an exoskeleton, that means Tesla can remove all that internal structure from the body and the body of the Cyber ​​truck is an empty box but it still has incredible strength, that strength comes from materials science but it also comes from the shape of the structure, then again why does the Cyber ​​truck look like this?

Well, if metal needs to be bent, then we should try to bend it as few times as possible, that means making a triangle, and it turns out that a triangle is also the strongest shape in geometry. If you look at the shape of the Cyber ​​​​truck and then look at a railway truss bridge, you will notice a lot of similarities, which is not a coincidence. The point of a trusty bridge is that it distributes the weight. from the freight train through the entire structure to those steel triangles, is the strongest way to make a bridge that is also lightweight and simple to build.

The same applies to a truck, so to summarize, yes, stainless steel is heavier and more expensive than aluminum but it is also much stronger and that allows Tesla to eliminate the steel beams from the traditional truck design and while eliminating the upper body structure of the unibody design and eliminating the entire painting process thanks to its incredible corrosion resistance. which offers high quality stainless steel, they also have a body that can be formed primarily from a single sheet of stainless steel, it just needs to be laser cut and bent a few times by the press where things

real

ly get crazy is when you start to factor in Tesla's other manufacturing advances that are already in production today: its Giga casting process and its structural battery pack.

The gigapress die casting machine is a manufacturing process that Tesla uses to form large sections of vehicle frames from individual pieces of aluminum that the machine injects molten. aluminum in a mold that solidifies into a large but complex frame component. Tesla is currently using this for the rear quarter of all Model Y vehicles, so the entire frame from the wheel well to the rear bumper is a single piece of aluminum and on some variations of the Model Y in Giga Texas as well It's doing the same for the front quarter, so the entire frame, from the wheel to the front bumper, is all one piece.

By making this change, Tesla has eliminated hundreds of steps from the Model Y manufacturing process. The vehicle's hundreds of robotic arms that would weld and join together hundreds of small stamped parts to create a frame are replaced by a few giant casting presses and the same will happen with the Cyber ​​truck, in fact, an unprecedented casting machine with 9000 tons. The clamping force had to be specially designed and built in order to make the giant casting that fits under the bed of the Cyber ​​​​truck because the exoskeleton surrounding the truck bed has the strength of steel formed into triangles, the bottom of the body is perfectly easy to manufacture.

Made from aluminum and the strength of the two together will be much stronger than a traditional pickup truck frame. The structural battery pack is the final piece of the puzzle. This is another manufacturing advance that Tesla has already put to use in certain variations of the Model Y. At Giga Texas they use their new 4680 battery cell, which is a very wide diameter cylindrical battery cell with a solid steel container, they sandwich those batteries between two sheets of metal and fill the gaps in between with a solid urethane foam to get a solid brick of metal that is filled with batteries and that is what connects the front and rear castings of the Giga.

This is very important if we go back and remember how the traditional truck carries its own body as dead weight, just as a traditional electric car carries its own body. Its own batteries as dead weight, as well as the frame and the batteries are separated, the structural package integrates the frame and the battery into a single component, so now the vehicle does not support the weight of the batteries, which are very heavy, The batteries support the weight of the vehicle. So when we add all this up, what we are going to find is that the Cyber ​​truck will achieve all the goals we set at the beginning: the strongest, the lightest, the most durable, the most powerful, the most versatile, the most efficient, the most profitable and the longest. longest-lasting truck ever made, at least compared to an equivalent modern electric truck.

I'm not saying it's going to be lighter than the lightest truck or last longer than the oldest truck on the road, but equivalent to its competition, the Cyber ​​truck will be a better truck because it's better designed, there's no way to circumvent it, so the

real

reason

Tesla

developed

the Cyber ​​truck was not just to build an electric truck and capture some of the market, but to completely revolutionize the way we build trucks and provide the world with the best purpose-built truck we've ever seen, but what do you think is the better Cyber ​​Truck invention or stupid ugly vaporware?

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