Tesla has confirmed it has given up on plans to make a Cybertruck range extender to achieve the range it originally promised on the electric pickup truck.
It started refunding deposits for the $16,000 extra battery pack.
When Tesla unveiled the production version of the Cybertruck in late 2023, two main disappointments were the price and the range.
The tri-motor version, the most popular in reservation tallies before production, was supposed to have over 500 miles of range and start at $70,000.
Tesla now sells the tri-motor Cybertruck for $100,000 and only has a range of 320 miles.
The dual-motor Cybertruck was supposed to cost $50,000 and have over 300 miles of range. In reality, it starts at $80,000 and has 325 miles of range.
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Thank you kindly! It just seems so weird that Toyota and even Japan seems so gung-ho about it. I guess it’s a case of sunk cost fallacy?
Not sure. Toyota is a very conservative and risk-adverse automaker. My guess is that they thought it could work better in Japan, as they have less land area and more miles traveled by train. Hydrogen can kinda make sense for a service/fleet vehicle that works in a limited area and always returns to the same location at the end of the day. Hydrogen can be run through an ICE engine, or it can be used in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Plus, everyone else was doing R&D into BEVs, so doing a little into hydrogen makes sense. If you fall too far behind on BEV tech, you can just buy a competitor’s vehicle and reverse engineer it to catch up.
I’m not a business person. Take that all with a grain of salt.