New WhistlinDiesel: Cybertruck vs. F-150 Frame & Hitch Video

[samroy92]

Yes, been driving my CT for 5 months now. The 2023 Chevy3500 I bought last year just sits in the driveway now (7mpg towing). Love my CT almost 13,000 miles already. Tows my tractor, boat and 4xjetski trailers no problem locally.

Now, I am for sure if I tried hard enough I guarantee I could break some shit on the Silverado ?

Also if these things really did bust towing 11k lbs on the highway hitting a large pothole... y'all would post it on here

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[HaulingAss]

We don't know it snapped. They said it hit a bump. Coulda just popped off the hitch. Also he didn't seem to drop it as far.

That all said, id like to see Tesla's response.

Tesla doesn't respond to bullshit like this. It lends credibility to something that has none.

 

[HaulingAss]

Next up:

We test the durability and leak resistance of your expensive Yeti cooler by dropping a Jersey barrier on it from 10 feet. Because you never know when a Jersey barrier might fall on your cooler.

I have to say, the few of you who appear to think this is a legitimate concern just won yourselves a spot in the latest edition of The Most Gullible People in the World.

And Whistlin' Diesel is laughing his ass off, all the way to the bank.

 

[HaulingAss]

issue is if you ever get rear ended dont think of ever towing with your Cybertruck after. Either a write off or unsafe to tow.

Bad advice.

The liable party is on the hook for making you whole. If you get rear ended, make sure the repair shop is competent to identify fractured castings, and that your truck is returned to it's previous condition.

Fractured castings are relatively easy to detect. Better advice: Make sure you have under-insured motorist coverage and a competent repair shop.

 

[PhilTmonster]

This guy is the biggest c you next Tuesday I have ever watched..

 

[HaulingAss]

The video (mostly*) debunked the poor argument that a steel F-150 chassis would snap if dropped on its hitch. However, that's an irrelevant strawmanish topic to the events the Cybertruck experienced.

He admits they dropped it on the hitch/ rear frame

He continues saying it snapped in half. The trailer receiver section broke off, not half the frame. It's not clear if the receiver is a critical cross vehicle structural component.

He tries to hand wave the F-150 braking on extraction which is when the frame broke. Note: a 11,000 pound trailer with maximum braking will only exert around 8k pounds of load. The F-150 with nose in the dip could have exerted more, plus the shock load of the chain would be multiples of the F-150 mass.
Note the F-150 is braking before entering the drip, chain is slack, and the pull angle requires a near perpendicular motion of the F-150 front tires:

The Cybertruck still pulls it up the culvert before breaking.

*Ways the video did not compare apples to apples:
F-150 dropped a shorter distance, (but rear wheels didn't hit )
The F-150 had a ball mount in the receiver vs hitting the frame
Biggie: The drop was using an excavator instead of free fall and it was supported by the chain all the way down.

The impact angle was different

Other test: Dragging a concrete block is less force

Basic differences the test couldn't control:
Vehicle weight

You make a lot of good points here. But it seems what actually matters is whether Cybertrucks in the real world are going to be exposed to such violent vertical forces on the receiver. By "real world" I mean not in a Whistlin' Diesel destruction video. Common sense says the castings reinforcing the steel receiver were designed to be strongest when loaded in a downward direction, to handle high tongue weights and bumps in the road.

Of course, if bottoming your receiver on a horizontal concrete beam after a 5-foot freefall is how you drive your truck, then maybe you should consider driving lessons! In the insurance industry that is considered collision damage.

I fully agree a steel frame is more resistant to this specific "use case", the question is who need a truck that passes this particular test? I buy refrigerators that I think will be efficient and run many years. If someone demonstrated it could be fatally damaged when dropped off a 2 foot drop onto concrete, it wouldn't change my selection at all, because I don't need a fridge that can handle a 2 foot drop onto concrete. It's a red herring. I don't need a truck that withstand a 5 foot vertical drop to a concrete beam either. That's a crash. As much as I push the limits of my trucks, I'm not going to be driving them over 5-foot vertical drops.

The fact that a few people here don't seem to understand how insignificant this, just boggles my mind.

 

[HaulingAss]

So overall I wouldn't second guess Tesla's strategy except for the fact that the truck costs so much which kind of negates the whole argument for a giga-cast assembly structure. Personally I am waiting for a revision of the truck because as Elon says "requirements are always wrong" and so all the FS CT owners as well as people like WD are helping Tesla refine the requirements and make a better product. I bought a 24 M3P instead so I can drive my cheap gas pickup less.

The "cost" of the truck does not negate the argument for giga-casting. You are confusing retail pricing with cost of manufacture (while simultaneously comparing apples to oranges):

1) EV trucks from legacy manufacturers are sold far below the cost of manufacture. Tesla is loathe to sell vehicles below the cost of manufacture and plans to be cash flow positive with Cybertruck by this fall.

2) You can't determine the gigacasting cost savings (or lack thereof) by the cost of manufacture of the entire truck. Because EV trucks from legacy manufacturers do not come with roll-top tonneaus, steer-by-wire, 48V architecture, 35" tires, heavy gauge stainless steel bodies, high end stereos, toughened glass, etc. ALl of these things cost real money to include.

You just get a lot more truck for your money with the Cybertruck, even with the current Foundation Series price premium. And Tesla can make the Cybertruck for less than legacy manufacturers can make their EV trucks, which as I pointed out above, are inferior in many respects. Never confuse selling price with cost of manufacture. All other EV truck manufacturers are selling them at a huge loss. That's why they refuse to make very many of them. Tesla will ramp the Cybertruck to high volume and solid profits due, in part, to the efficiencies of the gigacastings.

I could never go back to a flexi-flyer steel frame. I like a rigid chassis for handling dynamics, ride quality and cargo capacity. I could feel my F-150's frame flex during normal driving on paved roads, and I don't like it. The Cybertruck drives with the chassis rigidity of a million dollar sports car.

 

[mongo]

You make a lot of good points here. But it seems what actually matters is whether Cybertrucks in the real world are going to be exposed to such violent vertical forces on the receiver. By "real world" I mean not in a Whistlin' Diesel destruction video. Common sense says the castings reinforcing the steel receiver were designed to be strongest when loaded in a downward direction, to handle high tongue weights and bumps in the road.

Of course, if bottoming your receiver on a horizontal concrete beam after a 5-foot freefall is how you drive your truck, then maybe you should consider driving lessons! In the insurance industry that is considered collision damage.

I fully agree a steel frame is more resistant to this specific "use case", the question is who need a truck that passes this particular test? I buy refrigerators that I think will be efficient and run many years. If someone demonstrated it could be fatally damaged when dropped off a 2 foot drop onto concrete, it wouldn't change my selection at all, because I don't need a fridge that can handle a 2 foot drop onto concrete. It's a red herring. I don't need a truck that withstand a 5 foot vertical drop to a concrete beam either. That's a crash. As much as I push the limits of my trucks, I'm not going to be driving them over 5-foot vertical drops.

The fact that a few people here don't seem to understand how insignificant this, just boggles my mind.

Agreed, this video had nothing to do with anything relevant beyond confirming the senario we set forth in the original: dropped on its rear frame, F-150 hit the brakes when attached with a chain.

 

[eswimm]

It doesn't matter if the casting broke in his tests. He wrecked the Cybertruck when he dropped it on the hitch same as he wrecked the F150 at numerous points in both videos. There's not even a real argument about the issue, aluminum is going to crack when it is pushed beyond its limits and steel is going to bend. The only real question is if his unsubstantiated claim about another CT breaking the hitch off while towing is legitimate or not. I feel that such an incident would have surely made the news, so is it true or an utterly fraudulent claim? Breaking your hitch on a pothole is a problem, since that's something people are going to encounter in everyday use. His glorified destruction of the trucks is irrelevant to legitimate usage.

I think it's far more likely the incident he referred too involved the trailer coming lose for other reasons (if there was any such incident at all). If another truck actually experienced a similar failure while towing a (within spec) load, then there's a real problem that shouldn't be ignored.

 

[HaulingAss]

I will say during just modest off-roading in rocks I have hit my hitch receiver pretty hard a bunch of times, seems like a reasonable use case especially for long overall length pickups although not from the WD height.

If you have hit your hitch receiver as hard as Whistin' Diesel did by dropping the rear of the truck in a 5 vertical foot free-fall, then I think you need to reconsider how you off-road. It looks to me like they may have identified a way to break the receiver and then designed the "test fixture" consisting of the 6' diameter culverts and the concrete curb at the bottom to exploit that knowledge.

When they backed into the logs and tore off the plastic receiver cover, they acted all surprised that there was a receiver under that cover. But it looked to me like they were already intimately familiar with that area of the truck and were just feigning ignorance. That they had already studied the structure of the receiver and identified a way to apply an unnatural impact to it.

They knew exactly what they were doing and, even then, they needed to do multiple takes of the drop off the culverts to crack the receiver frame. The evidence of that comes from careful analysis of the drive mode and state of charge in various video cuts. It looks like the first drop didn't break the receiver due to the truck being in off-road mode (because they needed to do another take). We did not see this clip. They then drove it back to the top of the culverts with it in "low" suspension mode, not "Off-Road" (and the battery SOC was now 2% below where it was before the initial drop). This took a while to film and make happen so they could splice all the cuts together to create their desired fake narrative. The curb was not tall enough to impact the receiver hard enough to fracture it when the suspension was in Off-Road mode.

This is just a wordy way of saying it was hard for them to exploit the perceived weakness they found, and this is not the kind of impact that could normally happen, even during rugged off-roading maneuvers, unless one was doing incredibly foolish and reckless things with zero regard for the truck. This is not how truck owners actually use their trucks.

I might be a little concerned if they had been able to crack the casting with only an 18" vertical drop. But anyone with a knowledge of physics can tell you there is a world of difference between the impact forces involved in a 5-foot vertical drop and those of an 18" vertical drop.

 

[HaulingAss]

The only real question is if his unsubstantiated claim about another CT breaking the hitch off while towing is legitimate or not. I feel that such an incident would have surely made the news, so is it true or an utterly fraudulent claim?

One clue is this incident supposedly happened after Whistlin' Diesel released his video showing the Cybertruck bumper getting ripped off, almost like it was in response to that video, in order to re-enforce the existing narrative. I suspect the one photo I have seen that was allegedly taken by the person reporting the sighting was blurry and dark. It looked like an amateur Photoshop job.

If it is a real photo, it's probably just a case of the trailer coming off the ball and being only partially restrained by the safety chains. We would almost certainly hear a more official account if the entire Cybertruck receiver was so weak it tore off simply due to the truck hitting a pothole. I don't believe that for a minute. Sounds very fake. Remember the "wonky wheels"? Yeah, that investigation got closed with no action determined to be necessary. There is a group of cretins that love to drum up Tesla negativity out of thin air. It's a game to them and it gives them standing in the Tesla hater community when they are able to create a stir.

 

[samroy92]

This is the Rear Under Body frame rails, are these meant to be breakaway? Maybe its operating as designed for crash worthiness?

https://service.tesla.com/docs/Cybe...UID-0611074E-4F3C-417E-86AB-5BBC588393CC.html

 

[samroy92]

This is the Rear Under Body frame rails, are these meant to be breakaway? Maybe its operating as designed for crash worthiness?

https://service.tesla.com/docs/Cybe...UID-0611074E-4F3C-417E-86AB-5BBC588393CC.html

Never mind it looks like they sheared off the true rear casting assembly:

 

[Cyber Satoshi]

If this was a legit issue I feel like we would have seen it already. There has been a ton of towing achieved with these trucks thus far.

But with that being said... I'd probably buy a re-enforcement kit if it came out for this hitch now...

 

[REM]

If this was a legit issue I feel like we would have seen it already. There has been a ton of towing achieved with these trucks thus far.

But with that being said... I'd probably buy a re-enforcement kit if it came out for this hitch now...

I guess such a kit would be handy if you planned to lower the truck to lowest setting and spend several attempts slaming it on a concrete culvert?

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