6600 lbs is a fuckton of weight to be moving around off road in situations with soft ground where tires might sink into loose sediment/mud. It just doesn’t make sense to build an offroad vehicle at that weight level unless you are only ever going to drive on rolling dirt forest service roads or on wide open arid and extremely firm terrain.
Yeah I know a big chunk of that is the battery, but that is the problem, if you want to design an actually capable electric offroad vehicle I think you need to start from the design standpoint that the platform needs to prioritize being lightweight, which directly points to a small old school wrangler type vehicle or to committing to a solution like the newest AWD toyota siennas that most efficiently makes use of the design constraints of having a large flat battery running along the base of the vehicle. I mean even those only weight 4800 lbs (though they are a hybrid not a dedicated EV and the battery isn’t actually that big but you can imagine a similar vehicle with a much bigger one).
Yeah, unless you have really big tires to reduce ground pressure the EV off roaders will always have an issue. On the other hand the torque is great. I think the issue is having EVs that have more power then needed because beating a supercar is funny. If they made a small EV with just enough power for highway driving and good gearing for range you could have a good allrounder. But nope, gotta be giant, heavy and stupid fast.
Exactly an EV like this might actually be extremely practical for offroading as electric engines are so much simpler mechanically and you don’t need complex transmissions like you need with gas engines. You can beat the shit out of it more and you have unlimited torque.
Or go smaller and have trailered EV polaris type vehicles that you can just plug in when you park them in your driveway/garage.
Yeah it is so stupid, but I mean so is the fact that there aren’t car companies selling toyota yaris like EV vehicles for stupid cheap everywhere that aren’t anything special but are even cheaper to run longterm than a yaris or honda fit. The usefulness of that type of vehicle is so incredibly obvious, but in the US at least battery refurbished and replacement of used EV batteries on say a 10 year old nissan leaf quickly outpaces the value of the vehicle. It doesn’t make any logical sense to me and I hope that there starts to be a much bigger industry and the price drops quickly from companies taking perfectly good older nissan leaf type vehicles and putting a new battery in them.
Of course, taking a step back electric cars aren’t the real answer, busses are (at least for most of the US).
i think a big part of that weight with teslas is how they design drive units. Not having a mechanical drive train would help quite a bit, and free up a lot of otherwise unneeded room for changing up the platform handling. Also not being a cybertruck would probably be beneficial, im sure the body is pretty fucking heavy.
6600 lbs is a fuckton of weight to be moving around off road in situations with soft ground where tires might sink into loose sediment/mud. It just doesn’t make sense to build an offroad vehicle at that weight level unless you are only ever going to drive on rolling dirt forest service roads or on wide open arid and extremely firm terrain.
Yeah I know a big chunk of that is the battery, but that is the problem, if you want to design an actually capable electric offroad vehicle I think you need to start from the design standpoint that the platform needs to prioritize being lightweight, which directly points to a small old school wrangler type vehicle or to committing to a solution like the newest AWD toyota siennas that most efficiently makes use of the design constraints of having a large flat battery running along the base of the vehicle. I mean even those only weight 4800 lbs (though they are a hybrid not a dedicated EV and the battery isn’t actually that big but you can imagine a similar vehicle with a much bigger one).
Yeah, unless you have really big tires to reduce ground pressure the EV off roaders will always have an issue. On the other hand the torque is great. I think the issue is having EVs that have more power then needed because beating a supercar is funny. If they made a small EV with just enough power for highway driving and good gearing for range you could have a good allrounder. But nope, gotta be giant, heavy and stupid fast.
Exactly an EV like this might actually be extremely practical for offroading as electric engines are so much simpler mechanically and you don’t need complex transmissions like you need with gas engines. You can beat the shit out of it more and you have unlimited torque.
Or go smaller and have trailered EV polaris type vehicles that you can just plug in when you park them in your driveway/garage.
Yeah it is so stupid, but I mean so is the fact that there aren’t car companies selling toyota yaris like EV vehicles for stupid cheap everywhere that aren’t anything special but are even cheaper to run longterm than a yaris or honda fit. The usefulness of that type of vehicle is so incredibly obvious, but in the US at least battery refurbished and replacement of used EV batteries on say a 10 year old nissan leaf quickly outpaces the value of the vehicle. It doesn’t make any logical sense to me and I hope that there starts to be a much bigger industry and the price drops quickly from companies taking perfectly good older nissan leaf type vehicles and putting a new battery in them.
Of course, taking a step back electric cars aren’t the real answer, busses are (at least for most of the US).
i think a big part of that weight with teslas is how they design drive units. Not having a mechanical drive train would help quite a bit, and free up a lot of otherwise unneeded room for changing up the platform handling. Also not being a cybertruck would probably be beneficial, im sure the body is pretty fucking heavy.