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The Cybertruck vs F-150 - the tongue-in-cheek challenge

Well, the Cybertruck vs F-150 discussion seems came to an end really fast, at least from Ford side. A Ford spokesperson told CNBC today that Madra’s tweet was “tongue-in-cheek to point out the absurdity of Tesla’s video, nothing more.”(Link) What does this mean? I guess Ford did the calculation and they know the results too, so “tug-of-war” became “tongue-in-cheek”.

Fans on both side are very keen to see the test and hopefully Tesla still will do it next week. An “apples to apples” compareison will be really difficult since there are so many variables in this equation, but one thing for sure. EV will win and all these fray will be very good for the whole EV industry.

Companies keep showing this kind of video for marketing purpose. Earlier this year, Ford acturally showed off an electric F-150 towing a line of freight train(over 1 million pounds) with steel wheels on steel tracks(Link). Sounds crazy, right? It’s just a marketing illusion. The coefficent of rolling resistance between the steel wheels and steel tracks is extremly low - about 0.0015 (that’s why we use them for trains). To pull a 1.25-million-pound train, it only requeirs about 1875 pounds of force (more information can be found here). This is actrually really reasonable force for a ~5000-pound F150.

While I’m mumbling about these tongue-in-cheek nonsense, Elon just tweeted that Cybertruck got 250K orders within 5 days. As I said, the number is not important any more. Nobody can stop EV anymore.

By the way, there was a 7 degree incline (take the trees at the background as references) when Cybertruck pulling the F-150. It’s not that important. I’m just saying….