The Craziest Tesla Pickup Cybertruck Design Prediction You’ve Read This Month

by Rahul Sonnad

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Elon and Kimbal Musk have both stated that they think the Cybertruck will be the best Tesla product so far. This is a bold statement. Especially because Elon thinks that a Model 3, which you can buy today for $50k, will soon be worth $200k a few years out and the Model Y would be worth even more by this logic. Now that type of appreciation is a darn good product feature and a hard one to top. Which leads to the question of how can the Cybertruck be a better product than the Model Y, the Semi and the Roadster?

Over the last month, there has been a lot of speculation on the Cybertruck’s specs and design. Everything from range. price, towing, payload, cabin design, cargo configuration, style, energy efficiency, power supplies, off roading and even waterproofing.

I’d like to speculate on a fundamental design element of the truck, that hasn’t been suggested on the common Tesla channels. The thinking behind this is related to Autopilot, or more specifically, the “full self driving” that Tesla expects autopilot will soon enable.

Right now Autopilot is a driving convenience feature for Tesla owners, but Tesla’s plan is to have Autopilot support full self driving with no human drivers. Elon has stated that the value of a car with full self driving is going to be about 5 times that of a car without this full self driving feature. Of course, if Model 3 and Model Y can reach the level of full autonomy, the pickup will clearly inherit this feature.

According to Elon’s schedule (which some may argue is slightly optimistic) this will happen in the next two years. So in his mind the Cybertruck will be released into a world where it can technically drive itself anywhere quite well, and in at least in some places — where the law allows — to do so with no human driver behind the wheel.

Assuming Tesla’s thesis around the advancement and economics related to full self driving is correct, let’s consider how much value full self driving would add to a pickup truck. Unlike a car, the way pickups are used is often for storage throughout the day. While you usually don’t hang out in your car all day, your pickup is full of stuff that may never get fully unloaded. So if you have a pickup truck that can drive itself (it would sure make it easier to get to the job site, especially if it’s a long way away), but then it’s stuck there, and for most of the hours of the day you get no value from the full self driving feature. Your 5x economics can’t be realized.

So how would you design a pickup truck that leverages the economic potential of Full Self Driving? Possibly by stealing a page out of the Tesla Semi design playbook, or rather any semi design playbook. What if you make the bed a trailer that can detach from the cabin, and stand by itself.

Now you can haul your tools to the job site, and then the cabin can detach. Then the cabin could drive you to Home Depot to buy a few things you need, and stop by Chipotle for the lunch run. Hook the cabin up to the Tesla Network, and now it can Uber people around. Hook it up to the Tesla cargo network, and now it can hook up with with other trailer beds, and move them around. Maybe Home Depot owns a few of these that they load up everyday, and wait for cabins to come and make deliveries. First Home Depot might buy a cabin or two, but over time, there will be a liquid market for mobile cabins that are ready to tow beds in an Uberlike on-demand model.

On your Tesla app you would just add your trailer to the Tesla network, and now you can put the GPS coordinates and orientation of where you want it to go and the app will tell you the estimated arrival time based on cabin availability. One cabin could potentially power a large number of beds.

To do this the cabin and the trailer bed would need to automatically dock. Now does Tesla know anything about automatic docking? No, but Elon has dabbled in the space (and maybe this could even be the feature that brings LIDAR to Tesla — jk).

To make a detachable trailer bed you’re going to need at least four wheels on the cabin and two wheels (and probably one motor) on the trailer. That would allow for a stationary bed. Clearly the cabin will need batteries, but there might not be enough room for a ton of batteries in just the cabin — like not enough to pull airplanes or rockets. So you could put more batteries in each of the trailer beds, and then when you are pulling a bed that’s loaded with heavy rocks, it can effectively provide its own energy.

When the trailer bed is sitting it can power tools for days and days until it runs out of energy. It’s a powerwall on wheels. You could even charge other cars. You could charge a cabin from the trailer bed and maybe choose to draw the power while driving from either one or both batteries.

In this scenario, Home Depot could get a supercharger with a long cord, and charge 5 beds that they load up everyday. The cabin wouldn’t need to worry about charging, so it would never have to stop working. This would mean that if you plug a charging cord into a trailer bed that’s docked to the cabin, then they would both charge from a single cord.

Pushing this concept, you might want to have a few different bed types. First, there’s the classic open bed, and then enclosures of different heights to make lockable portable storage and power units. So if you’re leaving the trailer overnight somewhere, it will be secure and people won’t steal all your stuff.

Eventually Tesla could sell a bed skateboard, and anyone could turn the trailer bed into a police car, an ambulance, an RV, an armored personnel carrier, or even a mad max fighting vehicle. You could also have a big battery bed with a 300KwH battery, which might let you pull 300,000lbs a long way.

Now you may be thinking “I don’t think Elon inhaled enough to build a truck like this”, but the key concept here is that the pickup is just a little Semi. Same design, but with batteries in the bed, and the flexibility to eventually extend the variety of beds in any direction you can imagine.

One more thing. If the bed had another wheel or two (maybe retractable one), then you could independently summon it and move it around your job site with the app (assuming it had sonar, a few extra cameras built in and you bought trailer summon). If it’s just moving slowly you might be able to take all the old v2 autopilot chips that are going to be upgraded and use these for people who want summonable beds. Seems like there will always be a lot of old chips that are getting upgraded on a wide variety of other cars to put into these trailers. Now this goes against Elon’s statement that they wouldn’t unbundle Autopilot features, so there’s an even higher chance that it’s not in the near term cards.

Now objectively speaking, none of this has a high likelihood of being revealed this week, but it’s a fun thought exercise. To me it’s the feature that would radically transform the utility and economics of a pickup truck, by leveraging autonomy.

And if it’s not revealed this week with the first cybertruck, it seems that full self driving will lead towards this type of design in future truck-like vehicles. We can at least hope…