Dunking on the Cybertruck just feels like bullying now. It’s low-hanging fruit, and everyone has already piled on. But it isn’t bullying to point out how catastrophically the wealthiest man in the world has failed. After all, you can’t “punch up” any higher, especially when the Cybertruck epitomises everything wrong with Tesla and Musk’s egotistical and megalomaniacal leadership. It is a symbol of the rot at play, not just within Musk, but within the tech industry and wider economy in general, because if this is what the richest man in the world can produce, how close can we really be to a meritocracy or a healthy economy? And nothing proves this more than a recent lawsuit filed by grieving families, who lost their children to a Cybertruck fire.
Warning, this next part gets a little graphic.
The day before Thanksgiving, in Piedmont, California, four young adults were driving in a Cybertruck when it crashed. It was being driven at high speed when it lost control and hit a wall and a tree — which is a serious crash, but one that is easily survivable in a modern car. While the three occupants escaped mostly unharmed, the compromised battery pack ignited and filled the cabin with smoke. This meant the electrically operated doors stopped working, and because the internal manual releases are hidden and difficult to find, this effectively trapped the occupants inside. Luckily, there was a friend following them in a car behind. The friend rushed to help but couldn’t open the doors from the outside, so they grabbed a branch from the tree and tried to break the glass. It then took “ten to fifteen hits” for the glass to finally break. Sadly, they could only get one of the passengers out due to the intensity of the fire. The three left in the car died from smoke inhalation and experienced burns to their bodies.
This shouldn’t have happened. It was a bad crash, but one that the passengers should have escaped from with only minor injuries. How could it have gotten so bad?
Well, it’s almost like the Cybertruck was designed to kill people this way.
Let’s start with the battery. Tesla uses lithium-ion batteries, which, when punctured or crushed, rapidly and violently combust, causing the entire pack to explode if one cell goes. This is one of the main reasons why much of the EV industry is turning to LFP cells, as you can literally drive a nail right through them, and they won’t even begin to smoke. But lithium-ion batteries can be safe if the pack is designed not to take structural forces, is inherently thermally efficient, uses non-flammable materials, or is properly insulated from the rest of the car.
Tesla didn’t do that with the Cybertruck.
Instead, it sets its entire battery pack in flammable polyurethane resin and uses it as a structural, load-bearing part of the vehicle’s chassis. Tesla did this to make the vehicle easier and cheaper to produce. However, given that it is a load-bearing part of an incredibly heavy vehicle, huge forces are applied to the pack during a crash. The polyurethane resin is flexible to a point and able to absorb some forces, but beyond a certain point, or if a force is applied suddenly (like during a crash), it will crack or fail to deform quickly enough and transfer these forces into the cells. When that happens, it will rupture or crush the cells, causing them to burst into flames. Polyurethane is also an insulator, meaning more heat will be retained within the pack, causing more “thermal runaway”, making it more likely for all the cells to ignite. Afterwards, temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Celsius, and because polyurethane ignites at around 400 degrees Celsius, the resin the batteries are set in will burn fiercely too, releasing highly toxic gaseous substances. Unfortunately, there isn’t much between this polyurethane and the inside of the car, given that the battery pack is a structural component, so the smoke, toxic substances and the heat of the fire get pumped directly into the cabin.
It sounds bad, but it gets worse.
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