Ford F-150 Lightning Breezes Up Obstacle Where Tesla Cybertruck Struggled

It's not easy towing all those batteries up a slippery surface.

I'm interested to learn what other significant tradeoffs there are between ICE vs electric when off-roading.

I'm with you, both trucks struggled a bit but made it to the top.

Is this kind of driving an important use case though? I would think it would be more impressive to compare how these trucks handle towing trailers.

Hm? Its pretty massive to me.

The Tesla has like no suspension travel. The suspension is barely compressing, and you can see the body bounce over the terrain as the wheels lift or almost lift. If you covered the top of the truck from view, I'd say it looks like a cheap crossover.

And the base F-150 is not really a long travel truck, its just... you know, sprung like a truck. A little side by side UTV could run over this hill without even letting off the gas.

To me it looked like the CT primarily used its rear motors here, and perhaps also didn't have a "crawl" mode (it'd be XDrive in Subaru speak, I guess) as it was kind of all or nothing. Traction control systems can be upgraded; it'll be interesting to see Tesla return serve on this one.

FWIW I reckon 99.9% of these monster trucks will never see conditions like in this video. And that's being generous. Australia has some perverse tax incentives that are making them extremely popular, and they're a scourge on the public roads of Melbourne.

Looks like the Tesla has an open diff with poor brake lock diff control, I think the lighting has an option for a locking rear diff wonder if they were using it, looks like it.

Interesting thing about the Rivian quad motor version is while it has full software control due to a motor per wheel, this can be a downside for crawling like this because it has no way to send torque from one side to the other, so if say only two wheels have traction its torque is cut in half and can actually struggle to move forward as its also a fixed gear ratio.

Contrast this with say a Jeep wrangler that can have a locking transfer case with low range and locking diffs can send a lot of torque to a single wheel through torque multiplication in both the transmission and transfer case and everything locked up. Jeeps also have a decent brake lock diff even if you don't have lockers.