Comment by petsfed
20 hours ago
Nobody expects an impressive 1/4 mile time from a vehicle towing a trailer. That's not what makes EVs bad at towing.
My towing-capable gas vehicle sees at worst a 30% decrease in range from towing my camping trailer, and my towing-capable diesel vehicle sees closer to a 10% decrease in range.
A while back, I read a comment on here from someone who lived in a trailer full-time as a digital nomad. They were also dedicated to driving an EV. They towed their small trailer with their Model Y. I grant you, the Model Y is not optimized for towing the way that the Cybertruck (ostensibly) is, but they described the process of travelling between Grand Junction, Colorado, and Moab, Utah, a distance just over 110 miles. With the trailer, they had to drive to Cisco, about halfway in between, drop the trailer, drive back to Grand Junction, recharge fully, drive back again, pick up the trailer, and drive the remaining 60 or so miles to Moab, where they could recharge again. Because without the trailer, they could drive the entire 1-way distance 3 times over without recharging. With the trailer, they could not make the whole trip once.
That is pretty bad. Probably a combination of the smaller battery, and a very non-aerodynamic trailer. Of course, an ICE truck could do it without too much trouble, but that's largely because most tow-focused ICE vehicles are wildly inefficient compared to EVs and are discarding lots of unused capacity every time you drive them without towing near maximum load. Not a big deal when diesel is cheap, but now, less so.
If you think about how much excess power your diesel is wasting when you aren't hauling its kinda crazy. When you changed the total weight, and thus total energy required in the system, 50-70%, you only started using 10% more energy.
I remember my family driving long distances in a 1980s VW Diesel, we could barely climb hills but we got 50mpg.