“I’d say it’s half full…”
Glass Half Full
Tesla’s Cybertruck has a mysterious, cavernous space inside its battery pack.
During a teardown of the unusual pickup truck by automotive engineer and car expert extraordinaire Sandy Munro and his team, they discovered that the vehicle’s massive battery pack is half empty, with tons of space above a layer of cylindrical, lithium-ion 4680 battery cells.
“I’d say it’s half full…” Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill tweeted in response, confirming that the battery pack is indeed not filling the space.
The discovery has led to more questions than answers. Is Tesla planning to double the size of the battery pack at some point, as many fans have since gleefully speculated on Elon Musk’s social media platform? Was the EV maker concerned about the weight of the already hefty, 6,600-pound truck? Or was it struggling to keep the battery pack cool? Is the cavernous space designed to be pressurized, potentially enabling the truck to “wade” through water?
Blank Space
It’s an especially strange decision considering that Tesla has already announced an extremely bulky expansion battery pack that eats up a large portion of the truck’s bed to push the truck’s range to a more respectable 440 miles. It’s unclear, however, if or when the extender will actually hit the market.
The existence of the range extender, though, does undermine the theory that Tesla is looking to somehow double the range of future Cybertrucks by filling in the empty space.
The truck has already disappointed with its less-than-stellar claimed range of significantly less than 300 miles on a single charge. As Electrek points out, its 123 kWh makes it the smallest battery pack of any electric pickup on the market. Was Tesla trying to save money on an already extremely expensive-to-build vehicle?
And in the real world, customers have found that after just 10,000 miles, the vehicle gets just over 200 miles on a single charge. In January, YouTube account Out of Specs Cybertruck was only able to cover 254 miles on the highway, well short of the truck’s EPA-rated range of 320 miles.
In short, we still don’t know why Tesla engineers opted to keep half of the battery pack of the Cybertruck empty, and all we can do at this point is make educated guesses. Was it an engineering compromise, a long-term design decision — or simply a matter of cutting costs?
Tesla isn’t in the business of talking to the media, so we may never get a definite answer.
More on the Cybertruck: The Cybertruck Seems to Be Breaking Down at an Incredible Rate
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