taraf
Weight wise it’s totally in line with the other electric pickups, it’s actually lighter than a few of them (and smaller than the F150, despite people thinking it’s huge).
The crappy snow/ice and offroad was true at initial release, but a software update a couple months into sales enabled the virtual diff-lock, and it’s pretty good now. The factory tires aren’t the best in snow, you’ll want proper winter tires like on any vehicle.
The tonneau thing I’m torn on. I love the power cover and the fact that it is like a massive lockable trunk, but yea having a camera replacing a mirror is definitely odd. It’s one of those things I’m sure you quickly get used to, and I don’t know how else you’d have done an enclosed cover like that unless it was several inches shorter, or you had some glass panels at around that height in the tonneau
It does get subjected to some unfair/unrealistic tests on youtube. Like someone pushing down with 10,000lbs on the hitch, and complaining when it snaps off that it can’t handle it’s 10,000lb tow rating. This ignores the test was actually testing tongue weight, and the truck took almost 10x it’s 1,000lb tongue rating before breaking.
Tesla didn’t do themselves any favours hyping up features it didn’t end up delivering on like the bulletproof glass (metal body panels actually do stop a 22 and 9mm, but glass doesn’t), the misleading faster-than-a-911-while-towing-a-911 (they said it was ¼ mile but it was just ⅛ mile), range extender (cancelled and would have taken up a lot of bed space anyway), and lower than announced range in general.
We should always be grateful though that Tesla pushed for a full 48v low voltage system on this vehicle. The whole industry has been saying they wanted to do this for decades and no one ever worked up the courage to do it (you need all new relays, window motors, switches, etc, and no suppliers were making anything 48v, due to chicken-egg issues). Hopefully this will enable other manufacturers to start transitioning. You can save a decent amount of weight since the cabling can be so much thinner, and motors also can be lighter. The vehicle communication network is also a great idea, replacing miles of cabling with an ethernet-like network. Steer by wire I also think is a great innovation, it has been dabbled with in the past but this was the first true steer by wire car without any sort of mechanical backup. We’ve had this in aircraft for decades (airbus aircraft) and it’s proven incredibly reliable. Getting rid of the need to turn the wheel round and around several times to go lock-lock is nice.
But the looks are certainly going to be something most people don’t like. It looks like it was an initial mockup of a design and they never refined it into a production model. The weird sharp edges, panel alignment, etc. I’m just weird though, I also thought the Pontiac Aztek got way too much hate for it’s looks.