The Tesla Cybertruck, Tesla’s first vehicle to fully utilize its larger 4680-format cell, has been out for about a month now. But with only limited quantities on the road in the public’s hands, there have still been a lot of questions about the vehicle.
Now we’ve got an answer to one of the most important questions: charge rate. It’s not great – but that might not be the whole story.
Peak charging speed, measured in kilowatts or kW, is one of the most important stats on an EV – arguably much more important than range. The higher the charge rate the quicker you can get back on the road during a charging session. Older EVs have DC charge rates around 50kW, which is quite slow compared to today’s standards, where EVs are usually capable of 150kW+, with some models capable of up to 350kW. Tesla’s V3 superchargers can deliver up to 250kW of power, which is plenty fast, though the new V4s are even faster at 350kW.
But another important aspect of charging is charge curve, or how quickly a vehicle “tapers” off of the peak charge rate to a lower one. EVs can’t sustain peak charge rates forever, so will usually only hold on to the peak rate for a certain period of time before lowering to a slower rate. This is why EVs usually state their DC charge time “to 80%,” because charging past 80% at a high rate is generally bad for battery durability.
Until now, this was an open question for the Cybertruck, especially since it is Tesla’s first car to fully utilize the 4680-format cells which have been noted to have somewhat worse charging performance than the previous 2170 format cells.
Video of Cybertruck’s charging curve
But in a video posted by Our Cyber Life, a new youtube channel formed by a couple who took delivery of their Cybertruck two weeks ago, we now know what the Cybertruck’s charge curve looks like. The channel’s videos so far have fully focused on the Cybertruck ownership experience, from a couple who have never owned a Tesla before (but one of them, nevertheless, seems to be a Tesla employee – which explains the early Cybertruck delivery).
The video fully documents a Cybertruck charge at the Tesla supercharger in Mesa, Arizona, a V3 Supercharger capable of 250kW peak power delivery. Most of the video is just a 5x speed timelapse of the screen during the charging session, though Our Cyber Life helpfully included graphs showing charge rate for those who are “not interested in watching paint dry.”
As we can see in the video and accompanying graphs, the Cybertruck seems to have a relatively poor charge curve, at least for this charging session at a busy V3 Supercharger. The car starts at 14% state of charge, after about 20 minutes of preconditioning (an automatic process to raise battery temperature to accept higher charge rates).
It immediately jumps to a peak charge rate of 255kW, but starts to taper quite rapidly, with charge rate gradually decreasing starting at 20% SOC. By 40% SOC the car is down to 150kW, 100kW at 60% SOC, and reaches a plateau of 75-80kW at about 66% SOC, which it holds until around 90% – when the Youtuber’s camera died and the Cybertruck headed out.
All in all, it was a 50 minute charge session from 14-90%, adding 94kWh worth of energy into the Cybertruck’s 123kWh battery. Or, using the standard 80% cutoff, 14-80% took 40 minutes.
Brief comparison with other vehicles
Tesla vehicles do tend to taper rather early, but make up for it with high peak charge rates. It’s usually better to do more frequent, shorter charge sessions to take advantage of higher charge rates at low SOC, rather than to charge all the way up to 90 or 100%. Plus, busy Superchargers will penalize you for sticking around too long while others are waiting for a charge.
This is still a reasonably quick charge rate, especially when compared to the early days of EV charging or compared to AC charge times which run in the hours, not minutes.
But given the Cybertruck’s huge 123kWh battery, we expected quicker charging than this. A larger battery can usually sustain a higher charge rate for longer (this concept is known as “C-rate,” or charge rate divided by total capacity). A Model 3 Long Range has a peak C-rate of 3 and average C-rate of 1.4 when charging from 0-100%, but in this test, the Cybertruck showed a peak C-rate of just over 2 and average of about .9.
Measured in “miles of charge added per minute,” which is an even more important metric for practical driving purposes, the picture gets somewhat worse for the Cybertruck. The Model 3 is rated at 333 miles of range, and from 14-80% can add about 220 miles of range in 31 minutes. By the same metric, from 14-80%, the Cybertruck added 206 miles in 40 minutes – less range in a longer period of time.
All of these are significantly slower than the current charging champions, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and its cousin the Kia EV6, which despite a slightly lower peak charge rate of around 230kW, have an impressively broad charging curve that can sustain speeds of 170-180kW all the way up to 70-80%.
However, we need to caution that this is only one test in one set of circumstances – and the circumstances are less than ideal for the Cybertruck in question.
First, the Cybertruck’s charging system is built with the ability to switch between 800-volt and 400-volt charging. V3 Superchargers are 400V, so it’s possible that the Cybertruck will be able to charge better from an 800V charger – if Tesla gets around to installing them. The V4 Supercharger is supposed to be capable of 800V charging, but so far we’ve only seen 400V installs, showing how Tesla’s charging network isn’t ready for Cybertruck – and that’s true in more ways than one.
Second, it was a busy Supercharger, and on busy Superchargers sometimes Tesla limits charging speed. A Supercharger station won’t necessarily be built with the ability to give maximum 250kW power to every stall at the same time, because you’re rarely going to have every stall full with a car at 0% SOC calling for maximum charge rate. So a 10-stall, 250kW charger might have a total 1-1.5MW capacity, instead of the 2.5MW you’d expect from the nameplate 250kW charge rate. It is possible the Cybertruck was given max charge rate at low SOC, and then the station itself tapered off power delivery in order to prioritize lower-SOC vehicles at the station.
Finally, this is a brand-new vehicle and Tesla may be waiting for more data on battery health while charging, in order to potentially increase charge rates in the future. Tesla is fond of offering over-the-air updates to improve vehicle capabilities, and to allow early owners to act as beta testers. In this case, the owner in question is also a Tesla employee, and Tesla is even more willing to use employees as guinea pigs on new vehicles. So it’s entirely possible that charge rates might increase in a future software update – as happened with Rivian as well.
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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.
Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!
I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!
Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.
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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.
Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!
Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.
The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.
The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!
I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.
That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.
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The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.
This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.
In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”
The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.
One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.
Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.
They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.
Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.
At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.
In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more
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