From the arstechnica story: "Musk made much of this at the time, claiming that the body and bed of a conventional truck did nothing useful. `They are carried l

From the arstechnica story: "Musk made much of this at the time, claiming that the body and bed of a conventional truck did nothing useful. `They are carried like cargo, like a sack of potatoes,' he said in 2019." This is wrong headed. Indeed, the "body and bed" are not part of the stressed chassis in a conventional truck. This is a feature: trucks are made like this to isolate high stress to the frame. Trucks are expected to deal with enormous loads; certain medium duty trucks have towing capacities over 3.5x their own mass, and the frame actively flexes under these conditions. The last thing you want is a bunch of coachwork bending around with the frame. They're also designed thus to adapt: beds and cabs vary based on model, and can be subsequently modified. That's part of the value proposition of a truck. So this isn't so much a truck as an electric Hummer: the ultimate embiggening of the passenger car.