hey everybody's going from tested and it is like 12:15 a.m. after the evening of
a cyber truck unveil and I bumped in an old colleague this Ryan McCaffrey who we
just work together yes over in the videogames business you ve
had oxm now you're a GN but people might most know you from you're very
successful podcast in this context in this context the context here we are
ride the lightning ride the lightnings your podcast you've had so
congratulations by the way on all the success yeah it's been super fun to just
cover this it's it's it's it's like covering video games and that there's
just something new and fun literally every week with this company it's wild
and so much speculation so many teases and ome videogames are perfect analog
because what was shown today look like it came out of video game like cyberpunk
2077 your you could not be more accurate yeah I mean that's that's exactly
correct it's Elon promised it would be a polarizing thing that like we'd never
seen in a regular car before that it came straight on a Blade Runner and it
looks like it came straight at literally off the Bladerunner set I mean you could
list all the 80s movies that this kind of angular cyber truck references or
kind of knowledge is you know from the DeLorean which you had a DeLorean you
drove it for a very long time I had that car for 12 years so this what's wild is
I feel like the spirit of DeLorean Motor Company which died 40 years ago has been
absorbed into it's like Tesla's carrying it on because the Model X has the going
doors and now the cyber truck is a stainless steel body it's it's awesome I
love that part of it so let's run through some of the highlights from
details of the car it is a pickup truck four doors six seater which is
interesting three in the front so the center console is a seat that folds down
has six and a half foot bed for the pickup truck equivalent but because
there's a cover that covers the back there's no actual real rearview mirrors
on the either the side on this model or even in the center it remains of course
the the next raishin roadster which is again also not
yet on the road also does not have sideview mirrors for in that cars case
it's for aerodynamic reasons they're trying to eat every ounce of speed and
and drag coefficient out of the out of it that they can so the American
government they know some some places in Europe we've got to catch up here so
we'll see if if the legislation has caught up by the time roadster and cyber
truck are actually ready to hit the road otherwise they're gonna have to put
mirrors on it which just isn't gonna work with this thing yeah
you can't put what are they gonna look like they're just gonna look at a place
no matter what I mean I think they're betting on autonomous driving by a time
this comes out for at least four freeways and that's why you know the
rear view mirror in the center is a video display it looks like it's very
high refresh rate it doesn't look like this eye tracking for like parallax but
it looks like you know it's a rear-view camera that's always the Chevy bolt have
something similar to that I had something you can switch okay so I
display yeah yeah which i think is super cool yeah and they're obviously you I
you user experience things that they'll figure out i speaking of the - it is
17-inch like the model 3 with a little bigger a little bigger 15 right 17-inch
little bigger in this car for a much bigger vehicle makes a ton of sense and
in this pre-production version that we were a little test ride in it looks like
it's a new UI yeah and it looks really slick too like I wonder if this is just
something that the design team is playing around with or if this is in
some way shape or form either a little or a lot a sneak preview of version 11
that will we'll probably get in about a year from now because Tesla like Apple
does kind of yearly major OS release big long rumored refresh for s and X
bringing it something more like the three very minimal information on the
left side and the bottom big graphic like 3d graphics for navigation on the
center it was in a dark mode obviously because it was at night but uh very you
know it's very like model 3 but the next version yeah and no no signal stalks in
this car so you you select the gear Park reverse neutral Drive by touching the
screen which I think that's a cool like great we can get rid of that but I
know how it's gonna work for a autopilot how are you gonna turn on autopilot and
turn it off when you want it off and B what about turn signals how are you
going to activate your turn signal so that remains to be seen
right well what did the turn signals even look like because the back is very
one long LED red LED just like the front has the long strip of this bright light
yeah white light very minimal in terms of controls very reminiscent of the new
the new roadster in terms of the steering wheel it's sort of the
roadsters it's like a steering yoke you know but it's all carbon fibre and like
it's very kind of racecar looking this the the steering yoke and this to me
looked like if the roadster yoke and the model three steering wheel had a baby
because it kind of had that had scroll wheels on it
and it kind of had a little bit of a more of a model three wheel look to it
but in yoke form right and I got to right in the back middle see - it's very
spacious like a lot of headroom was what my takeaway away and a ton of headroom
in the first row because the way that sloped glass it Peaks over the over the
first row and then it's starting to slope down so taller people want to ride
in the front but yes still plenty of headroom right exactly they were saying
the six foot driver would have no problem
you know let's see riding in there and also massive piece of glass above the
passenger rear seats yeah for me I don't know about how you felt but as cyberpunk
and Blade Runner as the outside looks I actually think beat the interior felt
and looked even more so more cyberpunk but and III think I like the interior of
this thing even more than I like the exterior the interior I think is
gorgeous in that like you said that the just two huge pieces of glass and the
it's very spacious and wide and and the that this we haven't yet talked about
the the - yeah this is some sort of this unconfirmed but I've I asked what it was
the driver said oh it's something special either didn't know or didn't say
but then I'm seeing another report from someone else that's here that says it's
it's some sort of paper-based thing so I again I don't know if that's true I
don't want to spread hearsay but it looked like a marble like sink from
it from a very high-end like hotel bathroom I think that's a good analogy
the high-end hotel kitchen countertop because while it's not granite or actual
marble and that someone was able to confirm it for me it is porous so some
type of new material that has and just like the model three has the wood they
want that's why they want texture yes right in that - part the rest of it was
the kind of the Swedish material the synthetic leather you know vegan vegan
leather they're not gonna introduce any animal products back into them so it's
all all synthetic I'm sure but yeah the seats felt fine I mean I was we were
both in the middle seat so that's kind of hard to judge in the back of the
front seats did inherit some of that like low poly look now I think my
suspicion is that may not last just like when they showed the Model X they had
the real shiny you know bucket seats and that could have just been for the
pre-production model all this stuff everything is subject refinement and
change yeah yeah I mean they've got two years before this thing hits the road it
inevitably will undergo some some tweaks and changes I mean our guests are the
are the tires like custom because they like match the pattern match those
proprietary wheels so I mean yeah that there's a lot that remains to be seen on
this thing but the price way less than I thought I think that's the that was a
big surprise right 39,000 for the base model which is single motor miles 250
miles it goes up to 500 which is the tri-motor
when that's a big question cuz when we wrote in was the dual motor I think
they're still figuring out what does the third motor how to integrate they're
still working that's the the presumably it's at least a variation of the plaid
chassis and interface that's being tested at the Nurburgring with the Model
S now and that's the test bed for the Roadster and then presumably some
version of it will go into the tri-motor high-end version of the cyber truck as
well which is why the highest q here is gonna ship the latest in 2020 to the
opposite of what tesla usually does they usually do the most expensive one first
for a number of reasons yeah and so right now you can put a downpayment one
hundred bucks for the 39,000 model they hope to get to
be in production by end of 2021 which in Tesla time means probably you know
spring 2022 at the earliest but the other thing that the thing I've learned
over the years about Tesla is they may not be good about hitting deadlines the
way they say production deadlines but everything that Elon said they're gonna
do I can almost guarantee you history tells us now they're gonna do it
they have never like really dumbed something down that the production car
is almost always better than what the prototype was it was true with the s it
was true with the X other than the lack of total fold down 2nd row seats and
arguably the even the like my performance model 3 is better than the
the model 3 alpha prototype that I wrote in here three years ago and we don't
know what the landscape is gonna look like three years from now just this week
we had electric cars announced from Ford from Volkswagen and there's lots get me
you know competition from Audi other high-end car makers and and of course
traditional car makers turning to electric vehicles for even like trucks
so yeah we don't know by the time 2021 comes around I know design is
controversial I think they're leading totally into it
yeah and and that is there you know bold decision it is gonna be a creative risk
but that's Tesla that's Elon yeah yawns gonna do he's not afraid like
this this car for better for worse would never get made at any other company I'm
very confident in saying that there's just no way it would be it would have
been rejected but while it was on paper I also want to say that there are they
had a VR demo here which is interesting and I talked some engineer's they made
it in two weeks this demo and does use the same CAD models that they the design
team used for the actual cyber trucks so they don't know if they can release that
so the outside world because it would have the same assets for people that
kind of aid there they had that for them here at the model y unveiling too and
they never released that so I wouldn't get my hopes up ya know those needs kind
of be in there and kind of see the whole thing virtually and you know it's all
very high-tech VR you know electric cars yes yeah Blade Runner props if they
really went all out with this event Ryan thank you so much for chatting with you
afterward I know so late but people definitely check out your podcast ride
the lightning thank you guys the website is just you can find it on any major
podcaster is to search ride the lightning Tesla on episode 200 which was
a few months ago I had a one-hour interview with Elon Musk so that's as
good a place to start as any if you want to check out my podcast awesome and I'm
sure we'll of much more to talk about and think about with the cyber truck
this is literally hours after the unveil think you're gonna Ryan take it all
there for watching and see you next time