Glamping with Tesla's Cybertruck and trailer concept

By Henry Farkas

Glamping, a word that combines the terms, glamour and camping, refers to going to campgrounds but having the amenities normally present in a hotel.

Tesla has an interesting Cybertruck trailer concept. It's a large trailer about the size of a tiny house. It’s a nice looking trailer and it reflects the angularity and aerodynamic shape of the Cybertruck. In Cybertruck patents, Tesla shows the Cybertruck pulling a weight of 20,000 pounds, however the official Cybertruck specs say it can tow more than 14,000 pounds. I interpret that as a max weight of between 14,000 pounds and 15,000 pounds.

Now, remembering what we learned in high school physics, you’ll recall that how much weight a truck can tow has three components. The truck has to overcome rolling resistance, air resistance, and gravity. Now rolling resistance increases gradually depending on both the weight of the trailer and the speed you’re trying to tow it. It’s a linear increase. While there’s more rolling resistance at highway speeds than there is at parking lot speeds, it’s not all that much more.

Tesla's Cybertruck trailer concept

Then there’s air resistance. That’s not related to the weight of the trailer at all. Air resistance is related only to the cross sectional area of the trailer, the aerodynamic shape of the trailer, and the speed of the tow. Air resistance increases as the square of the speed, so that’s a much more significant factor at highway speeds than at low speeds, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the weight of the trailer.

A few months ago, Ford came out with a publicity stunt involving a prototype electric Ford F-150 Lightning towing a million pounds of railroad cars when they were empty. Then they loaded one and a quarter million pounds of pickup trucks into the railroad cars, and the electric Ford towed all that, too (you can watch the full video below).

It was supposed to demonstrate something. All it demonstrated is that Ford likes to lie to people who don’t remember the physics they learned in high school.

The tow was done at slow speeds on steel rails with steel-wheeled railroad cars. Of all the land vehicles currently in use in the US, trains have the least rolling resistance. Maglev trains have less rolling resistance, but they’re not in use in the US. And anyway, maglev trains don’t roll. They float on a magnetic field. So all the electric Ford had to do was overcome a certain small rolling resistance. Admittedly, you or I would have been unable to start those train cars rolling by pulling or pushing by hand, but probably any pickup truck could have done it. It didn’t have to be a Ford.

The reason there’s a weight limitation for towing a trailer is that roads aren’t level. On hills, there are two considerations. The truck needs to be able to tow the trailer up any hill it might come across, and it has to be able to control the trailer when going down any hill it might come across. So if Tesla says the Cybertruck is rated for 14,000 pounds, then it really shouldn’t try towing 20,000 pounds even if that seems possible on level ground or mild hills. But there is a way around this limitation in the era of electric vehicles.

What I’m going to tell you does not come from Tesla, or any knowledgeable source. It comes strictly from my imagination so take it with a grain of salt.

Cybertruck trailer concept

The way the Cybertruck can safely tow a load that’s higher than its rated maximum towing weight is if the trailer has its own batteries and its own electric motor(s). There would, of course, have to be coordination. The trailer would have to respond to the truck driver’s control input, but that’s not difficult to arrange. If the trailer had batteries and motor(s), the range between recharges would not be degraded by towing. If the trailer could be recharged separately from the Cybertruck by a second Supercharger stall, then the length of time to recharge wouldn’t be prolonged.

Now let’s talk about what the trailer could include. I looked up the weight of a standard 30-foot travel trailer. The weight averages around 5,800 pounds. So that leaves plenty of room for amenities. The trailer could expand, for example. It could expand upward when parked, or sideways. Lots of travel trailers do that. So instead of being 30 feet by 8 feet, it could be twice that. Perhaps it could expand sideways on both sides, That would make it 30 feet by 24 feet.

Add to that interior room, an extra roof to cover an outdoor patio, another 8 feet by 30 feet. Cover all that roof with solar panels, and you’d have lots of electricity while you were at the campground. Excess solar electricity created in the daytime would be stored in the trailer’s batteries at night.

Then there are other amenities. In addition to the normal water tanks for drinking, bathing, and other cleansing purposes, there could be a hot tub for two. That would hold 150 gallons of water, 600 pounds. Tesla is good at making heat pumps. Heat pumps can be used to heat or cool the trailer depending on the outside air temperature. If the trailer is parked near a stream or a lake, the heat pump might be able to exchange heat or cooling with the body of water if that would be more energy-efficient than exchanging heat or cooling with the outside air.

While traveling, there should be enough outside video cameras so that the driver would not have blind spots next to or behind the trailer. These should sync with the Cybertruck’s display screen.

The Ford F-150 Lightning has a helpful feature for hooking up the truck to a trailer. The driver first cranks up the trailer’s hitch to the proper height. Then he drives the truck to the front of the trailer so he can see the trailer hitch in the rear camera display. At that point, the truck itself backs up until the truck’s trailer hitch is properly aligned with the trailer’s hitch receptacle. Tesla should do that for the Cybertruck in a software update.

Finally, there should be Internet access via Starlink.

Imagining Tesla’s Robotaxi Network Charging Stations

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

It was a rainy April 1st when a news-searching author went on a delve into the depths of April Fools to find fact from falsehood. And while we found a lot of fantastic jokes, we also found some good ideas.

So, with a shoutout to MarcoRP on X, whose April Fool’s Joke gave us a good run for our money for a couple of minutes, we thought to ourselves - what would a Cybercab Charging Station / Cleaning Hub really look like?

Cybercab Wireless Charging Sites

Now, before continuing, we’d like to point out that the image up top is a joke from Marco - it isn’t an accurate or real site map submission from Tesla. However, it gave us the impetus to think critically about what is required for a Robotaxi fleet, based primarily on the Cybercab, to be able to service a city.

Requirements

Tesla will likely need to charge a small fleet of Cybercabs at a single time and in a single place. That means that the site needs to be large enough to cover a major metro area while also still being compact enough to not cost too much money to build out.

In addition, we need to factor in charge times. The Cybercab is likely to launch with a battery around 50 kWh, which will result in a range of approximately 300 miles. With that much range, the average Cybercab may not need to charge more than once or at all during daytime shifts, so instead, most of the vehicles will charge overnight.

MarcoRP

Math and Charge Times

The overnight charging means that most of these vehicles could be charged slowly. When we did some back-of-the-napkin math last year, we determined that Tesla’s wireless charger will likely peak around 17 kW (for comparison, Tesla’s Wall Connector at 32 amps charges at about 7 kW). If we scale Tesla’s wireless charger down slightly to 10 kW, accounting for some energy loss and the potential size of the site, that means a Cybercab will be able to charge in about 5 hours.

Tesla’s upcoming V4 Supercharger unit can currently handle 1.5MW per cabinet, but this slower-speed charging is A/C, not DC, which means there is a step-down loss of about 3-5%. Let’s make that a comfortable 10% for any other overages, but we can estimate around 1.35MW of power. That 1.3MW will easily handle charging up to 100 Cybercabs at once - all wirelessly, using Tesla’s unique beam-forming and beam-steering technology to keep efficiency high at every single stall.

Within about 5 hours, a whole fleet of 100 Cybercabs could be charged overnight when electricity rates are cheaper and still be out in time for the morning commute.

While this is all just hypothetical, it really does make sense that Tesla will be establishing these sites that won’t require much space or a ton of energy.

Tesla recently curtained off a large section of the parking garage at Giga Texas, as well as some of their chargers on the eastern end of the facility, leading us to believe they may just be testing this at scale internally.

There’s a lot to look forward to with Tesla’s V4 Supercharger deployment coming this year and with Robotaxi launching in just a couple of months.

Tesla Announces 2025 Q1 Numbers: Lower Than Expected, but the Worst May Be Over

By Not a Tesla App Staff
Not a Tesla App

Tesla released its Q1 2025 delivery and production numbers this morning, reporting 336,681 vehicles delivered and 362,615 produced—marking the company’s weakest quarter since 2022. Deliveries declined 13% year-over-year and fell well short of Wall Street estimates, which ranged from 360,000 to 370,000. Some analysts had forecast as many as 407,000 units.

Despite the shortfall, Tesla stock is actually up about 4% this morning, not only suggesting the market had already priced in weaker performance, but that this may be seen as the low point for the company. Tesla began delivering its refreshed Model Y in March, and production across all four Gigafactories was impacted by several weeks of downtime as Tesla retooled lines to accommodate the newer model. However, there’s no doubt that there is some brand impact from Elon Musk.

Comparing Numbers

Most of the deliveries—323,800 units—came from the Model 3 and Model Y lineup, while the “Other Models” category (including the Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X) accounted for 12,881 deliveries. That’s a 31% drop for Model 3/Y and a sharper 45% drop for the Other Models category compared to the previous quarter. However, comparing it to a more applicable Q1 2024, these numbers are only down about 13% for the Model 3/Y and down about 24% for the Model S/X and Cybertruck.

In terms of production, Tesla built 345,454 Model 3/Y vehicles and 17,161 from its “Other Models” line. The company attributed the production drop to the Model Y changeover but said the ramp is “going well.” This still leaves a large gap between production and delivery numbers, although they may not be as large as many had feared.

Q1 2025

Q1 2024

Q4 2024

Model 3/Y Deliveries

323,800

369,783

471,930

Model 3/Y Production

345,454

412,376

436,718

Other Models Deliveries

12,881

17,027

23,640

Other Models Production

17,161

20,995

22,727

Total Deliveries

336,681

386,810

495,570

Total Production

362,615

433,371

459,445

Cybertruck

One major weak point in Tesla’s numbers seems to be Cybertruck deliveries. While Tesla previously expected the Cybertruck to sell more than 250k units per year, we’re already seeing a decline in numbers. This is likely due to several factors, including the higher-than-expected price point of the truck, the unavailability of the RWD model, and the Cybertruck’s polarizing design, which may attract unwanted attention right now.

While the Cybertruck was ramping up production in 2024, making the lower numbers reasonable, the deliveries for Q1 2025 dropped drastically compared to the previous quarter. Cybertruck deliveries are estimated to be in the 5- 6k unit range for the quarter.

The good news to take away here is that the Single Motor variant of the Cybertruck appears to be nearing release. The price of the RWD version is expected to be about $60k USD before any incentives.

Q1 Earnings Call

Tesla announced their quarterly numbers this morning and posted on social media that they’ll live stream their Earnings Call on April 22nd.

This post was later edited to change “Q1 Earnings Call” to “Q1 Company Update.” It’s not clear whether there’s any significance in this change, but it could mean that Tesla has more to announce during the call.

The Company Update will occur on April 22nd at 2:30 PM PT / 5:30 PM ET. The standard Q&A session with executives and Musk is expected to follow the release of additional financial results for the quarter.

Tesla is set to launch its long-awaited Robotaxi service in June, and a cheaper, mass-market model is also planned for this year. With delivery numbers coming in soft and the refreshed Model Y just hitting the road, all eyes will be on forward-looking commentary during the update.

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