**The Science Behind Towing: A Study on the Davis Dam Hill Grade**

In this experiment, we put two vehicles to the test: an F-150 and a Tesla Cybertruck. The goal was to analyze how each vehicle would perform when towing a heavier load up a steep incline. Our starting point was the Davis Dam hill grade, which proved to be an even steeper incline than expected.

**Assumptions and Simplifications**

To make our calculations easier, we assumed no load transfer for the F-150. This made math simpler, but also gave the truck a slight advantage in this scenario. We also ignored rolling resistance, as it didn't significantly impact the results. By doing so, we were able to focus on the forces acting on each vehicle: what was the truck pulling against its rear tires, and what was the Tesla pulling against?

**Calculating Forces**

For the F-150, we calculated the force pulling it forward by multiplying the weight of the vehicle (2,000 pounds) by the cosine of 5 degrees. This gave us a force of 1,900 pounds in that direction. For the Tesla Cybertruck, which was going uphill, we calculated the force pulling it forward by multiplying its weight (6,000 pounds) by the cosine of 5 degrees. This resulted in a force of 5,977 pounds.

**Gravity's Role**

However, gravity was also at play. We calculated the force pulling each vehicle down the hill by multiplying their combined weight (11,000 pounds) by the sine of 5 degrees. For the F-150, this gave us a force of 959 pounds in that direction. For the Tesla Cybertruck, it resulted in a force of 9,957 pounds.

**Advantage of the Tesla**

By subtracting the forces pulling against each vehicle from the forces pulling forward, we found that the Tesla Cybertruck had an advantage of 2,026 pounds over the F-150. This significant difference proved that the Tesla was able to pull the F-150 uphill with ease, primarily due to its greater weight on the driven wheels.

**A Missed Opportunity**

While this experiment showed the Tesla's impressive capabilities, it also highlighted what may have been a missed opportunity for Tesla. The truck's styling, which is highly polarizing and designed more for internet hype than practicality, detracted from its functionality as a work vehicle. With a traditional truck bed that's only accessible from the side, workers would be limited in their ability to do meaningful tasks with the vehicle.

**Conclusion**

Our experiment demonstrated the Tesla Cybertruck's impressive capabilities, particularly when it comes to towing heavy loads up steep inclines. However, this comes at the cost of practicality and usability as a work truck. If Tesla's goal is to transition people over from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, they may have fallen short with their approach. While the truck is cool and has impressive range and performance, its design prioritizes style over substance.

**Additional Reading**

For more content like this, be sure to check out our videos on a Tesla being towed by a Ford Raptor and why that stunt was pointless, as well as our analysis of Ford's F-150 stunt where it pulled a million pounds on a train.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome if you watched the tesla cyber truck reveal then you likely saw the viral video of a ford f-150 being pulled by the cyber truck in a battle of tug of war and the purpose of this video is to explain to you why that demonstration was completely pointless it seems no electric truck can be launched today without some gimmicky marketing stunt to go along with it first we had the ford f-150 pulling a million pounds and now we have the tesla cyber truck pulling a ford f-150 now a lot of people saw this video and they jumped to the conclusion that well of course the tesla cyber truck won its electric electric motors have great low end torque internal combustion engines typically do not so what we saw happen was a result of the tesla having so much low end torque versus the ford f-150 and this is not true this is not why we saw that happen and so to explain this you need to understand that the torque that a vehicle is actually putting to the ground starts at that engine and then it works its way through some gears and those gears multiply the torque before it ultimately reaches the ground this happens with electric cars as well you start with that electric motor it passes through some gears and then eventually it reaches the ground and these gears are what give you your wheel torque which is ultimately the force that's going to be accelerating you forward so let's compare the tesla cyber truck versus a ford f-150 and look at the gearing advantages here so with an electric car typically you're going to see a single reduction gearbox one speed and for teslas that gearbox is generally about a 9 to 10 to 1 gear ratio they might use something slightly more aggressive for this because it's a truck but regardless we're going to go with an assumption of something close to what they typically do with a 10 to 1 reduction so the motor sends torque to this gear reduction box then it goes to the wheel so what this means is that you multiply your motor torque by 10 times before it reaches those wheels now you will lose some torque because of the radius of your wheels however in this we're just going to assume that we have the same size tires for both the tesla and the f-150 and so we can assume that the torque advantage will be simply a result of the gearing so if we look at the ford f-150 and we don't know exactly the spec of this truck tesla didn't release it but if we assume you know it's got its engine whether it's a six-cylinder or v8 or whatever it may be it's going to send that torque then to a torque converter now torque converters can multiply the torque somewhere around two to one it could be a little bit less than that it could be a little bit more than that but it acts like a gearing difference where you do have torque multiplication then it goes to the transmission and in the transmission of the ford f-150 with the new 10-speed transmission it's about a 4.69 to 1 gear ratio for first gear now this could be slightly lower if they were using the 6-speed but not a huge difference either way and then from that transmission your torque now goes to the rear differential where you have your final drive ratio in this case we're going to assume it's a 3.55 ford does have more aggressive gear ratios than this but we'll just assume it was a 355. so the multiplication of the torque coming from this ford engine is 2 multiplied by 4.69 multiplied by 3.55 and so when you do the math that works out to 33.3 times so the engine torque coming out before it reaches those wheels is multiplied by 33 so there's plenty of torque here in this scenario for this ford to accelerate in low gears and this isn't even assuming it's in a low gear ratio if it was a four wheel drive vehicle that would multiply this even further so the whole point of this is to say that torque was not the reason here of what you saw happening the f-150 is capable of putting plenty of torque down to the wheels because it multiplies that engine torque through the gearing in the drivetrain okay so if torque wasn't the reason that tesla won this tug of war why did it win and so we're gonna compare the forces that are going in each direction so the tesla of course wants to go this direction we need to figure out what that force is and then the truck of course wants to go this direction so we need to figure out what that force is and so the maximum force that either of these vehicles are capable of putting down is equal to the weight of the car the normal force multiplied by the frictional coefficient of the tires for the purposes of this video we'll just assume both of the tires are equal in this test they both have the same amount of grip so then all this demonstration comes down to is the normal force now we're first going to assume that this truck has four-wheel drive and is operating in four-wheel drive i don't believe that's the case in this video but first let's analyze it with that being the assumption so an f-150 is typically gonna weigh about 4 600 pounds depending on the options you can get them at about 5000 pounds so we're gonna give the tesla the benefit of the doubt say this is a heavy f-150 which makes it more challenging for the tesla and say it weighs 5000 pounds in reality i bet this number was less so the maximum force that this truck can accelerate with is equal to the amount of weight over driven wheels multiplied by the frictional coefficient so in this case the maximum force that the ford can accelerate with is 5000 pounds now the tesla on the other hand we don't know how much it weighs but we do know that a model x weighs 5 500 pounds and we're going to assume that this is the dual motor out of the three options single duel and try of the tesla cyber truck by the way it's really cool that for the first time i can actually accurately draw one of the cars that i'm talking about in a video on a whiteboard so regardless we're assuming the model x or the model x is about 5 500 pounds i would say best case scenario this truck is going to be 6 thousand pounds i would i would really assume it would be significantly heavier i would guess sixty five hundred to seven thousand pounds is what the actual weight of the dual motor and tri-motor especially are going to be uh but we're gonna give this you know make it a little bit harder for tesla here and just say it only weighs 6 000 pounds so then in this case the maximum force that the tesla is capable of accelerating with is 6000 times one and so that's a six thousand pound force that the tesla is able to accelerate with a thousand greater than the f-150 so all we learned is that the tesla is heavier than the f-150 nothing really amazing here as far as the vehicle itself it's simply able to accelerate because it weighs more because it can put down a larger force now if you watch that demonstration though it looks like the ford f-150 is actually rear-wheel drive only and the reason i say this is because you see only those rear tires spinning as the tesla is pulling along you see the front tires spin backwards which if they were attached to a drivetrain would not work and then you also don't see any 4x4 label on the side of the truck so that all leads me to assume that this is in fact a rear-wheel drive ford f-150 and in this case it makes this demonstration even more pointless because now we only have based on the f-150s weight distribution 60 on the front 40 on the back because we only have 40 percent of the weight on the back and we can only accelerate with the weight on driven wheels we take forty percent of five thousand that's two thousand multiply that by one and our maximum force that the truck is capable of accelerating with is two thousand pounds force and so you know this is a third of what the tesla's capable assuming it weighs 6 000 pounds so it's just a silly demonstration to do because obviously the tesla's going to win this it has three times the weight in this case on top of driven wheels so we're not learning anything here but jason bro the tesla pulled the f-150 uphill okay let's assume tesla wasn't working the angles there because that's kind of what i saw happen and let's assume they weren't trying to be deceitful and they actually did pull a truck uphill great it's a simple thing to analyze just like this we just put it on a little bit of an incline and so in this case we're going to use a 5 degree angle this is steeper 8.75 percent grade this is steeper than the industry standard towing test on the davis dam hill grade and so this is a pretty steep incline i'm confident that it's steeper than what we saw happen in the video so that's what we're going to analyze and for the f-150 we're going to assume no load transfer this makes the math a little bit easier but also gives a slight advantage to the f-150 in this scenario and then we're also going to ignore rolling resistance because it doesn't change the math all that much so once again we need to calculate our forces what's the truck pulling this way what's the tesla pulling this way and then we also are going to have gravity pulling everything back and so for the f-150 that force is 2 000 pounds that's the amount of weight we have resting on those rear tires the driven tires and then we're multiplying that by cosine of five to get our component in this direction uh and so that is going to give us 1900 pound force that the truck is going to be pulling this direction for our tesla cyber truck which is going up this hill we are looking at 6 000 pounds the weight of the vehicle multiplied by cos cosine 5 and that is going to give us 5977 pound force in this direction and so then we also have to account for gravity so all of this is trying to pull the tesla truck down that hill so we've got 11 000 pounds combined five thousand here six thousand here we're multiplying that by sine of five that's going to give us our gravity component in this direction not in the vertical direction and so that will give us a force of 959 pounds and so that is going to be included with this here and so what we're going to do is take 5977 we're going to subtract what the truck is pulling against it and then we're going to subtract what gravity is pulling against it and so that is going to give the tesla an advantage of 3026 pounds so what this number proves is that it was very easy for the tesla to pull the truck uphill simply because it has more weight on the driven wheels so the only thing we learned from this video is that the tesla truck is heavy that is all that we learned tesla's truck is heavy that's it and so this isn't even necessarily a great thing to learn right because cars shouldn't be that heavy uh the more weight they have the more energy it takes to move them around and you know the handling suffers all kinds of things like that and so while i do think that this is a very cool truck and it's impressive and i do like tesla i own one i have a model 3 performance i think it's a fantastic daily driver i think they really missed the mark here on this truck because the styling is just so polarizing that i really have a hard time believing they're going to get traditional truck buyers to convert over to electric so if tesla's stated mission is we're going to you know improve the speed at which sustainable transportation occurs and you know improve that transition over then creating this super polarizing super weird looking truck that doesn't even have access to the side of the bed if you want you know grab something out of it and actually do some work with your truck i think they're really missing the mark here of what their stated goal is now if their stated goal is to just kind of make some cool truck that the tesla fans out there are going to obsess over and talk about that's polarizing and builds hype on the internet they have nailed it that's exactly what they're doing but if they're genuinely trying to transition people over from internal combustion engines to an electric truck at a good price which if their pricing holds what they claim it will be which is not guaranteed then they actually have come in at a really good price on this truck really good range really good performance and then they kind of butcher it all with the styling because it's so polarizing and it's not even that necessarily useful from you know a worker's point of view of having a truck bed because it's only accessible from the rear and it's at this weird slant and so i i'm a bit disappointed by the truck itself because i don't think it's in line with what tesla's stated mission is i think it's cool i just don't think it's doing what tesla says they are attempting to do so i appreciate you all for watching if you want to see some similar videos to this i've got one on a tesla being towed by a ford raptor i also have one on ford's f-150 stunt and why them pulling a million pounds on a train was pretty pointless as well so thank you all for watching if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them belowhello everyone and welcome if you watched the tesla cyber truck reveal then you likely saw the viral video of a ford f-150 being pulled by the cyber truck in a battle of tug of war and the purpose of this video is to explain to you why that demonstration was completely pointless it seems no electric truck can be launched today without some gimmicky marketing stunt to go along with it first we had the ford f-150 pulling a million pounds and now we have the tesla cyber truck pulling a ford f-150 now a lot of people saw this video and they jumped to the conclusion that well of course the tesla cyber truck won its electric electric motors have great low end torque internal combustion engines typically do not so what we saw happen was a result of the tesla having so much low end torque versus the ford f-150 and this is not true this is not why we saw that happen and so to explain this you need to understand that the torque that a vehicle is actually putting to the ground starts at that engine and then it works its way through some gears and those gears multiply the torque before it ultimately reaches the ground this happens with electric cars as well you start with that electric motor it passes through some gears and then eventually it reaches the ground and these gears are what give you your wheel torque which is ultimately the force that's going to be accelerating you forward so let's compare the tesla cyber truck versus a ford f-150 and look at the gearing advantages here so with an electric car typically you're going to see a single reduction gearbox one speed and for teslas that gearbox is generally about a 9 to 10 to 1 gear ratio they might use something slightly more aggressive for this because it's a truck but regardless we're going to go with an assumption of something close to what they typically do with a 10 to 1 reduction so the motor sends torque to this gear reduction box then it goes to the wheel so what this means is that you multiply your motor torque by 10 times before it reaches those wheels now you will lose some torque because of the radius of your wheels however in this we're just going to assume that we have the same size tires for both the tesla and the f-150 and so we can assume that the torque advantage will be simply a result of the gearing so if we look at the ford f-150 and we don't know exactly the spec of this truck tesla didn't release it but if we assume you know it's got its engine whether it's a six-cylinder or v8 or whatever it may be it's going to send that torque then to a torque converter now torque converters can multiply the torque somewhere around two to one it could be a little bit less than that it could be a little bit more than that but it acts like a gearing difference where you do have torque multiplication then it goes to the transmission and in the transmission of the ford f-150 with the new 10-speed transmission it's about a 4.69 to 1 gear ratio for first gear now this could be slightly lower if they were using the 6-speed but not a huge difference either way and then from that transmission your torque now goes to the rear differential where you have your final drive ratio in this case we're going to assume it's a 3.55 ford does have more aggressive gear ratios than this but we'll just assume it was a 355. so the multiplication of the torque coming from this ford engine is 2 multiplied by 4.69 multiplied by 3.55 and so when you do the math that works out to 33.3 times so the engine torque coming out before it reaches those wheels is multiplied by 33 so there's plenty of torque here in this scenario for this ford to accelerate in low gears and this isn't even assuming it's in a low gear ratio if it was a four wheel drive vehicle that would multiply this even further so the whole point of this is to say that torque was not the reason here of what you saw happening the f-150 is capable of putting plenty of torque down to the wheels because it multiplies that engine torque through the gearing in the drivetrain okay so if torque wasn't the reason that tesla won this tug of war why did it win and so we're gonna compare the forces that are going in each direction so the tesla of course wants to go this direction we need to figure out what that force is and then the truck of course wants to go this direction so we need to figure out what that force is and so the maximum force that either of these vehicles are capable of putting down is equal to the weight of the car the normal force multiplied by the frictional coefficient of the tires for the purposes of this video we'll just assume both of the tires are equal in this test they both have the same amount of grip so then all this demonstration comes down to is the normal force now we're first going to assume that this truck has four-wheel drive and is operating in four-wheel drive i don't believe that's the case in this video but first let's analyze it with that being the assumption so an f-150 is typically gonna weigh about 4 600 pounds depending on the options you can get them at about 5000 pounds so we're gonna give the tesla the benefit of the doubt say this is a heavy f-150 which makes it more challenging for the tesla and say it weighs 5000 pounds in reality i bet this number was less so the maximum force that this truck can accelerate with is equal to the amount of weight over driven wheels multiplied by the frictional coefficient so in this case the maximum force that the ford can accelerate with is 5000 pounds now the tesla on the other hand we don't know how much it weighs but we do know that a model x weighs 5 500 pounds and we're going to assume that this is the dual motor out of the three options single duel and try of the tesla cyber truck by the way it's really cool that for the first time i can actually accurately draw one of the cars that i'm talking about in a video on a whiteboard so regardless we're assuming the model x or the model x is about 5 500 pounds i would say best case scenario this truck is going to be 6 thousand pounds i would i would really assume it would be significantly heavier i would guess sixty five hundred to seven thousand pounds is what the actual weight of the dual motor and tri-motor especially are going to be uh but we're gonna give this you know make it a little bit harder for tesla here and just say it only weighs 6 000 pounds so then in this case the maximum force that the tesla is capable of accelerating with is 6000 times one and so that's a six thousand pound force that the tesla is able to accelerate with a thousand greater than the f-150 so all we learned is that the tesla is heavier than the f-150 nothing really amazing here as far as the vehicle itself it's simply able to accelerate because it weighs more because it can put down a larger force now if you watch that demonstration though it looks like the ford f-150 is actually rear-wheel drive only and the reason i say this is because you see only those rear tires spinning as the tesla is pulling along you see the front tires spin backwards which if they were attached to a drivetrain would not work and then you also don't see any 4x4 label on the side of the truck so that all leads me to assume that this is in fact a rear-wheel drive ford f-150 and in this case it makes this demonstration even more pointless because now we only have based on the f-150s weight distribution 60 on the front 40 on the back because we only have 40 percent of the weight on the back and we can only accelerate with the weight on driven wheels we take forty percent of five thousand that's two thousand multiply that by one and our maximum force that the truck is capable of accelerating with is two thousand pounds force and so you know this is a third of what the tesla's capable assuming it weighs 6 000 pounds so it's just a silly demonstration to do because obviously the tesla's going to win this it has three times the weight in this case on top of driven wheels so we're not learning anything here but jason bro the tesla pulled the f-150 uphill okay let's assume tesla wasn't working the angles there because that's kind of what i saw happen and let's assume they weren't trying to be deceitful and they actually did pull a truck uphill great it's a simple thing to analyze just like this we just put it on a little bit of an incline and so in this case we're going to use a 5 degree angle this is steeper 8.75 percent grade this is steeper than the industry standard towing test on the davis dam hill grade and so this is a pretty steep incline i'm confident that it's steeper than what we saw happen in the video so that's what we're going to analyze and for the f-150 we're going to assume no load transfer this makes the math a little bit easier but also gives a slight advantage to the f-150 in this scenario and then we're also going to ignore rolling resistance because it doesn't change the math all that much so once again we need to calculate our forces what's the truck pulling this way what's the tesla pulling this way and then we also are going to have gravity pulling everything back and so for the f-150 that force is 2 000 pounds that's the amount of weight we have resting on those rear tires the driven tires and then we're multiplying that by cosine of five to get our component in this direction uh and so that is going to give us 1900 pound force that the truck is going to be pulling this direction for our tesla cyber truck which is going up this hill we are looking at 6 000 pounds the weight of the vehicle multiplied by cos cosine 5 and that is going to give us 5977 pound force in this direction and so then we also have to account for gravity so all of this is trying to pull the tesla truck down that hill so we've got 11 000 pounds combined five thousand here six thousand here we're multiplying that by sine of five that's going to give us our gravity component in this direction not in the vertical direction and so that will give us a force of 959 pounds and so that is going to be included with this here and so what we're going to do is take 5977 we're going to subtract what the truck is pulling against it and then we're going to subtract what gravity is pulling against it and so that is going to give the tesla an advantage of 3026 pounds so what this number proves is that it was very easy for the tesla to pull the truck uphill simply because it has more weight on the driven wheels so the only thing we learned from this video is that the tesla truck is heavy that is all that we learned tesla's truck is heavy that's it and so this isn't even necessarily a great thing to learn right because cars shouldn't be that heavy uh the more weight they have the more energy it takes to move them around and you know the handling suffers all kinds of things like that and so while i do think that this is a very cool truck and it's impressive and i do like tesla i own one i have a model 3 performance i think it's a fantastic daily driver i think they really missed the mark here on this truck because the styling is just so polarizing that i really have a hard time believing they're going to get traditional truck buyers to convert over to electric so if tesla's stated mission is we're going to you know improve the speed at which sustainable transportation occurs and you know improve that transition over then creating this super polarizing super weird looking truck that doesn't even have access to the side of the bed if you want you know grab something out of it and actually do some work with your truck i think they're really missing the mark here of what their stated goal is now if their stated goal is to just kind of make some cool truck that the tesla fans out there are going to obsess over and talk about that's polarizing and builds hype on the internet they have nailed it that's exactly what they're doing but if they're genuinely trying to transition people over from internal combustion engines to an electric truck at a good price which if their pricing holds what they claim it will be which is not guaranteed then they actually have come in at a really good price on this truck really good range really good performance and then they kind of butcher it all with the styling because it's so polarizing and it's not even that necessarily useful from you know a worker's point of view of having a truck bed because it's only accessible from the rear and it's at this weird slant and so i i'm a bit disappointed by the truck itself because i don't think it's in line with what tesla's stated mission is i think it's cool i just don't think it's doing what tesla says they are attempting to do so i appreciate you all for watching if you want to see some similar videos to this i've got one on a tesla being towed by a ford raptor i also have one on ford's f-150 stunt and why them pulling a million pounds on a train was pretty pointless as well so thank you all for watching if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below\n"