27 Replies to “A Futuristic Blend Of Ugly And Useless”

  1. Look at the replies to those tweets! This stuff just plain doesn’t work but still the fanboys put their fingers in their ears. Hey what happened to the electric big rig project fraud boy?

  2. Towing a trailer that size with a car? It’s unsafe even if it is empty. The trailer pushes the car and going down hill you would lose control. You can see the wobble in the pics.

    A few head of horses in there and you couldn’t pay me to be in that thing.

    F150 at minimum. F250 with a 460 even better. Ha

    1. That trailer is empty? I thought it was full of batteries.

      I watched a guy nearly get flung off the road by the trailer he was pulling. He pulled out onto the road in front of me with a pickup pulling a low flat-deck with a bunch of big logs piled on it (way more than the truck/trailer combo was capable of). It must’ve been weighted towards the back too because the second he tried to go above 60km/h it started whipping back and forth and damn near flung him into the ditch. Good object lesson…I’ve always been careful to go a little heavier on the tongue (and of course not overload it).

  3. Been trailing horses for thirty plus years. What is that Gulag monstrosity they
    are towing? Leave the physics aside- weight, braking, road conditions etc are a
    given ( for those with comments sense) . But good grief – you cannot subject any animal (including Homo sapiens) to that kind of sensory deprivation without consequences. Typical progressive. Get out of your fkin bubble

    1. I doubt they had any intention of moving live cargo. I expect they wanted to hitch any old big trailer to demonstrate how useless the Tesla is in towing.

  4. Here in the luxury suburbs of the SF Bay Area … 89.6% of the pickup trucks here have NEVER had a trailer hitch installed on them, let alone ever pulled a trailer. The ONLY pickup trucks pulling trailers are driven by Central American contractors … both licensed/unlicensed (drivers and contractors licenses), and legal/illegal Mexicans and Guatemalans. They are the only ones pulling dump trailers loaded with lumber and materials or yard waste.

    The very few “white” contractors left in the business are all starched-shirt wearing “manager-builders”, who have never strapped a tool belt on in their entire contracting career. Those “builders” are the perfect demographic for a Tesla pickup truck. If they roll up to their prospective client who is most likely going to be a woke, high tech, software manager of some sort will effing wet their unisex panties when they see their “contractor” driving a Tesla truck. Wow! won’t their woke-envious neighbors be light-green with envy.

    Fortunately, they will be busy at the office when the REAL contractors show up with REAL pickup trucks and trailers (speaking Spanish) to do the ACTUAL building of their woke-project.

    Tesla is the perfect mirage-green truck for a woke-blind generation of adults who still like to play pretend games

  5. Keep on dreaming of the electric fantasy. If all vehicles in Ontario were electric it would collapse the grid and you would not be able heat your homes. The word of course is, stupid.

  6. As I said, that rig is ideal for pulling horses – especially big draft horses, so they can pull it back home after it dies.

  7. Well, that is the silliest truck “tester” I have ever seen.

    “The Tesla has so much power and torque, the Ram truck couldn’t keep up”.

    And then? In 12 minutes, it was out pf battery, and it took 35 years to get a tow truck to that location.

    Does it pull the load?
    Can it pull it uphill?
    Can it control the load being pushed downhill?
    Will it get to the destination?

    Nothing else matters. 0 to 60 is minus 45 years is a worthless statistic. If you have to use the emergency sand pit escape lane to stop your truck, you have failed.

  8. The hula girl on the dash was a nice touch.

    This wasn’t a serious road test in my opinion; they only wanted to show the extremely limited range of the Tesla when towing which eliminates it from any further consideration. It’s academic at this point but I wonder what the range difference would have been had they not accelerated going uphill and kept their speed down to the RV’s they passed. I would also have liked to see the grade they were towing uphill on. On a long 6% grade (e.g. I-8 between El Centro and San Diego) I drop my speed to 80 km/hr in third gear passing the big trucks but slower than cars and empty pick-ups. This pulling an Airstream weighing roughly 7,000 lbs. or slightly more with a fully loaded Ram Hemi.

    What blows me away is the loss of range towing a small trailer on the flats. Less than 1/3 the range over not towing is incredible inefficiency and makes any claims about towing capacity a joke.

    1. I hitch my 39 foot, 10,000lb 5th wheel to my 10 year old Ford F-250 diesel and pull it down the highway at 70mph, hill and dale, as far as I want. I could go faster, but the cops love pulling over trailers.

      My recharging is a pit-stop at the fuel pumps and maybe to drain the lizard, or purchase junk food. The truck can go all day long, and all night long, and all the next day, and so forth, limited only by driver endurance and engine heat. Climbing the mountains around Death Valley in summer might require me to slow down to 50mph on the upgrades.

      People forget that diesel is the preferred engine for towing (and trains, and ships) because of fuel energy density. You get more power and more MPG per cubic volume because there’s more calories in the fuel than gasoline, propane, natural gas or alcohol. Batteries do not have good energy density even compared to natural gas or alcohol. Obviously they can’t pull like a diesel.

      The Tesla-truck is a vanity vehicle for the Wokester Set. The pink-haired Oakville/Toronto answer to a Lamborghini. None of them will ever tow anything or see the dirt except for demonstrations and media stunts. For those the Tesla will be accompanied by a camera crew with a dinosaur burning chase vehicle and a trailer. For when the Tesla craps out or runs out of battery.

    2. The other joke was why they bothered off-roading that low-clearance Tesla. Anyone can see that it was pointless by looking at it. Those things are street legal, high torque, battery-laden, high cost, golf carts.

      1. No … the JOKE is … the Tesla, high tech, big-screen-illustrated, adjustable shocks/road clearance feature. The kewl component that raises your tires into contact with the fixed suspension tower. Yes … the paper-thin battery covers have improved rock clearance … but your tires will get shredded on the first bump … deflating the car bottom right into the rocks. So the Tesla “SUV” has an automated incineration feature? Good to know.

        I can only assume the Tesla “engineers” … are like “environmental sciences” graduates … they learned lots and lots about woke politics … but very, very, little about engineering or science

        1. “No … the JOKE is … the Tesla, high tech, big-screen-illustrated”…

          To sweeten the deal, Tesla’s towing package will come with a complete set of Lord of the Rings Special Extended edition!

          1. Something to do while waiting in the 1hr-long queue at the Kettleman City i-5 supercharger on Thanksgiving Holiday. Then, if you run out of juice … you can push your eco-car to the charger.

    3. I driven that road many times. It’s a nice work out for small trucks and cars. Most of all if it’s a hot day and you have the air-conditioning running.

  9. Drive for an hour-and-a-half, charge for an hour. Repeat as required.
    That reminds me of an old fable. My late 90’s Toyota Tortoise (a 4Runner) is looking pretty good after that video.
    And for extended range, all I need to carry is a can of gas, not a can of gas AND a 10 kW generator AND an extra meal or two.

  10. Jayzus Kate! As a professional expediter w/25+ yrs experience (https://www.yellowpages.ca/bus/Alberta/You-Holler-We-Haul-er-Trucking/5225155.html), if I saw that little SUV (I would assume it was gas) towing a tandem horse trailer I would be incredulous. If I knew there were horses in it I would I would not let him continue. I would go so far as to hook it up to my truck and take it wherever they were going. (Did that once for a truck that broke down in Calgary, August, two mules going to Kimberley BC. they sat at the dealer for 3 hours before calling me, watered and walked periodically). As I run the highways daily I observe all types of smaller vehicles pulling RVs over capacity. If they lose it, hopefully they don’t take out anybody else. Putting animals at risk unnecessarily, I would feel compelled to intervene Personally, I would not tow anything over 10,000, on a regular basis, without duals.

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