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Cybertruck’s Active Suspension Height & Damping Control System Discusson

TL;DL: Estimated Cybertruck suspension height adjusting range: 8.0’’ to 8.5’’.

The unveiling event of Tesla Cybertruck was rather short and a lot of Cybertruck’s features are underestimated. The “active suspension height & damping control system” is one of them. John D. brought a video to Elon on Twitter yesterday showing the tailgate of a fully loaded (3,000 lbs) Ford F350 got deformed during a twisting frame test. This seems a realistic scenario (one of guy in the video said he has been in this kind of situation before) and John wants to check if Tesla Cybertruck will be able to handel this.

Elon replied by saying “That’s why Cybertruck has active suspension height & damping control”. This suggests that Cybertruck will be able to automatic adjust the suspension height of all four wheels independently and keep the truck fram leveled in this kind of situation. Excellent solution, now the question is how big is the suspension height adjusting range. While Tesla did not release more detail, we can still dig some information out from the unveiling event.

I took four screenshot of the unveiling event (video from TopSpeed.com) with different suspension height and scaled them using the Cybertruck body lenght (213.7’’) as a reference. I then measued the distance between the top edge of the wheel center to the top edge of the wheel fender for all four images (the absolute number doesn’t matter, only the changes matters). By comparing these numbers, we found that the suspension height adjusting range is about 8.5’’ for front wheel and 8.0’’ for rear wheel. These should be enought to handel the situation shown in the video.

I personally feel Cybertruck’s Ultra-Hard 30X Cold-Rolled stainless-steel Exoskeleton will also be very improtant for reliability in this kind of situation. In any cases, electric vehicle has much less mechanical parts than ICE vehicle and there are far more room for other useful features, so anything is possible.

By the why, image (c) shows that the loading mode provides about 3.5 degree loading angle. These are estimated numbers of couse, but still they are all exciting numbers. Not so sure how it compares to other pickup truck out there (I found some very small adjusting range for other pickup truck).

Anyway, exciting news everyday!