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 that’s only because it’s different. It threatens the status quo and angers most people.
But the other side of the argument sees the disruption of the status quo as an opportunity. It can move the needle in a direction that makes life better. The trick is being able to identify which new ideas turn out to be a good idea for the better.
What Ideas Will Bring Change The interesting thing about the Cyber Truck is that many people believe that this truck wasn’t specifically designed to be ugly or offensive, it was just a billionaire Edglord’s giant. Not a troll who plays a lot of video games.
The Cyber Truck is nothing more than a product of first principle design that set out to create the strongest, lightest, most durable, most powerful, versatile, most efficient, most robust… Several different factors had to come together to make this the most efficient and longest lasting pickup truck ever made.
We’re going to break down the engineering techniques involved in creating the Cyber Truck, what it is and why it’s all so important. Obviously the most striking thing about the Cyber Truck for the final design is that it’s wide and edgy like that. This is not what we are used to seeing in vehicle design outside of video games or science fiction movies so why does it look like this.
Again I can assure you this is not even a troll as there is really no other way to see the fundamentals that set this truck up we have to start with some physical physics Cyber Truck Made from 1.8 inch thick sheet of 300 series cold rolled stainless steel.
It’s not a typical material to build a car with, it’s completely phenomenal, stainless steel was the DeLorean from the 1980’s, but nails it much thinner and softer than those body pa Cyber Truck materials we saw at the Cyber Truck launch event I had seen Sledgehammer tested, this thick cold rolled steel is incredibly strong and because the steel is so rigid it cannot be machined into curved shapes.
a regular automotive body panel it would literally break the stamping machine the only way to make this grade of steel into shape is to fold it so they first score the metal using a laser and then they’re going to put it into the machine This is called press brake.
It consists of a long narrow die channel that sets the angle at which the metal will be bent and then a punch tool that will hammer the sheet of metal with a narrow edge that will all be centered. The energy is precisely where they want the steel to be bent and pressed into the desired angle, the manufacturing advantage of this process is also huge compared to traditional stamping.
The Cyber Truck does not require a custom die and a bunch of stamping machines, just press brakes with the desired angle, so there are no curves in the Cyber Truck as that would be physically impossible, given the material they are made of, But then why use such a hardened steel? Modern truck design has strayed away from heavy gauge steel.
The latest Ford F-150 uses an all-aluminum body, which is very light, but also a very soft metal, which has sidelined the pickup truck from its intended purpose as a work vehicle. Steele tries to throw the toolbox into the aluminum truck. Bed GMC Sierra is using carbon fiber and fiberglass composites in its new bed design.
Everyone is getting lighter while Tesla is getting heavier or now we bring structural engineering to their specific pickup truck they call the body the frame the frame design is the structural heart of the truck the body and the bed just sit on top they are the structural integrity Huh. The tensile stresses that do not contribute to the GTH of a pickup truck come primarily from the two boxed steel rails that run front to back and that are bonded together at certain points between lighter metals.
So when you load the truck with cargo or carry something heavy or go around a corner very fast the distribution of the weight is very poor it’s all concentrated on those two beams which means the truck The entire cab and bed are dead weight, they don’t contribute to the don structure, so they actually become more payload taking the unibody design a step up from the frame.
So basically every vehicle that is not a pickup truck is built in a unibody, the lower frame and upper body structure of the car are bolted together, they are integral to the vehicle structure, the upper body of the vehicle is a Strong is needed.
The structure is fine to deal with crash impacts and rollovers, so we can put it to work so that the energy is distributed throughout the internal structure of the vehicle instead of the frame carrying the entire load, so now there’s the roof and the floor and the trunk of the vehicle All parts are doing their part to contribute to the overall strength and this means that no one part should be particularly strong on its own.
This completely eliminates the need for high-strength steel girders inside the vehicle and means that the overall body and frame will be much lighter but there is still a lot of mass in a unibody that the vehicle can carry that way Cars are now made body panels are either plastic or very thin.
Aluminum These panels have zero strength or structure, they exist only to circulate air around the vehicle and make it look beautiful and because the low-grade metal is susceptible to corrosion and the customer’s obsession with aesthetics Occurs because the whole body needs to be painted. Which is even more dead weight.
Think about how heavy a can of paint is and it also adds a huge amount of cost and production time to the vehicle and even with the paint still on the body there is corrosion and rust. For nearly a decade, the problem Tesla had to solve in order to meet its goal of making the best pickup truck in the world was how to move beyond the unibody.
While making a truck more robust, it should also be simpler and less expensive. At the same time and the solution was a thick sheet of cold rolled stainless steel that was so strong it would actually carry more weight than was added to it rather than the body structure itself.
ide or an endoskeleton structure form the outside or an exoskeleton which means tesla can remove all that internal structure from the body and the cyber truck body is an empty box but it still has incredible strength that strength comes from physics but It also comes from physics the shape of the structure so why does the cyber truck look like that.
If metal needs to be folded then we should try to fold it as many times as possible i.e. making triangles and triangles is done only looking at the shape of cyber truck and then you see a railway truss bridge you will get the most Looks strong too.
You’re going to notice a lot of similarities which is not a coincidence the whole point of a trust bridge is that it distributes the weight of the freight train across the entire structure those steel triangles it’s the strongest way to build a bridge that Same goes for a pickup truck, lighter and easier to make, so stainless steel is heavier and more expensive than aluminum to refinish.
But it’s also very strong and has allowed Tesla to ditch the steel box girders from traditional pickup designs, while at the same time removing the upper body structure. Unibody design and finish full painting process for the incredible resistance to corrosion offered by high quality stainless steel, they also have a body that can be mostly made from a single sheet of stainless steel.
It only needed to be laser cut and bent a few times by the press brake, which is when you start to factor in Tesla’s other manufacturing advancements, which are already in production, their GigaCasting process and the structural battery pack GigaPress. Well, get really mad. Die casting machines are a manufacturing process used by Tesla to create large parts of a vehicle’s frame from a single piece of aluminum.
The machine injects molten aluminum into a die mold which solidifies into a large but complex frame component that Tesla is currently using for the rear quarters of all models. So the y vehicle is a single aluminum casting from the wheel wells to the rear bumper and they are doing the same for the front quarters on some changes to the Model Y at Giga Texas.
So by making this change, the entire frame from the wheel wells to the front bumper is a single casting. Tesla has eliminated hundreds of steps in the Model Y vehicle manufacturing process, hundreds of robo tick arms that stitch together hundreds of tiny stamped pieces. Stitches to make a frame will be weld and fasten will all be turned by some giant casting press and the same is going to be true for the Cyber Truck.
In fact an unprecedented casting machine with 9000 tons of clamping force had to be specially designed and manufactured to create the enormous casting piece that would fit under the bed of the Cyber Truck as the exoskeleton surrounding the truck bed consisted of steel formed into triangles. were involved. The underbody is made entirely of aluminum and together the strength of the two will make it much stronger than a conventional pickup truck frame.
The structural battery pack is the final piece of the puzzle. This is another manufacturing advancement that Tesla has already used on some variants of the Model Y at GigaTexas. They use their new 4680 battery cell which is a very wide diameter cylindrical battery cell with a solid steel canister, they sandwich those batteries between two metal sheets and they fill the void in between.