3 ms·

I'll be really curious about how this pans out. It seems like they vastly over-engineered it, but maybe I'm wrong.

• Robotbeat 9y ago
  They need a huge battery to make long-haul feasible (both from a range standpoint and a charging speed standpoint) and to make the battery last longer even on short trips. And you have less resistive losses if you use multiple motors (or, say, one large motor) than one motor (or a small motor) for the same load due to: Power loss from resistance = I^2*R (resistance increases, but current decreases proportionally for the same load, so your power loss reduces). So if you're going for efficiency and long-haul battery life, you already need a big battery and lots of electric motor power. You can leverage that for really strong regenerative braking, which translates to extremely long brake life and further efficiency (as well as being quieter). This also means you can go faster up AND down hills (speed down hills for trucks is limited by brake heating... if you're doing regenerative braking, very little heat is generated). Also, by using multiple model 3 motors, they can get access to economies of scale that a small-run truck usually can't, which means you can afford to spend more on putting more motor in there. So you end up with a truck that can do 0-60 in 20s with full load due mostly to other engineering considerations.