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Tesla Model X Breaks Electric Towing Record By Pulling Boeing 787 (inverse.com)
A Tesla Model X has set the world record for heaviest tow by electric production passenger vehicle when it pulled a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner at the Melbourne Airport in Australia. The video can be viewed on YouTube. Inverse reports: As probably expected, the plane far exceeds the Model X's recommended tow limit of around 5,000 pounds. In fact, the weight of the unloaded 787 with a minimal amount of fuel came closer to around 300,000 pounds. The airline pulled the Dreamliner around 1,000 feet down the tarmac. The stunt was part of a wider campaign around Qantas' new work with Tesla, which involves offering high-powered chargers at its Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide facilities as well as offsetting miles for Tesla drivers that are also frequent flyer members.
The towing limit on most cars is because cars accelerate and brake going up and down hills, and have to cope with lateral acceleration forces on the trailer in turns.
In this case, the Tesla is pulling a lot of weight on a dead-flat surface at low speed. All it has to overcome is the inertia of the airliner's mass when accelerating to the 2 mph it seems to be doing in the video, and then overcome the friction of the plane's tires and wheel bearings once up to speed. Electric cars would be especially good at this, as they have no clutch and the highest torque at low rpm.
If you're not convinced any vehicle can tow heavy masses on flat ground with limited frictional forces, check out this video. Or this one...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You would stand a better chance than you think.
There are generally three things about towing capacity weight:
-Ability to *accelerate* at acceptable road speed. Note that in this case, they only accelerated it to slow walk speed.
-Ability to *stop* the mass behind you, which is all about brakes and nothing to do with the engine/motor (here the 787 is responsible for stopping itself.
-Tongue weight. This is generally specified separately, but there is some assumption about a trailer's tongue weight. Again, this is not about the motor/engine. Of course here there's negligble tonge weight.
This isn't an *anti* tesla view. The truck industry has *long* done stunts like this to 'prove' how much better than their ratings they are. This is the same sort of stunt as people pulling a train with their teeth, a very difficult thing to be sure, but more plausible than one would intuitively think.
Of course, I wouldn't call it an 'anti-ad', but it's also not 'only the model-x can pull this sort of weight' in reality.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
and I wouldn't stand a chance if I attempted to pull sixty times my vehicle's curb weight.
USAF, we used to push or pull F-16 or F-15, by hand. 4 guys, 30,000 lbs of aircraft. Not far, and zero grade. But it was done.
You do the math.
The truck industry has *long* done stunts like this to 'prove' how much better than their ratings they are.
Towing enormous loads from a dead stop (on a level surface) is much easier with an electric motor drive vehicle than with one powered by a combustion engine.
An electric motor (absent some pathology in the power supply to it) produces maximum torque at stall. This is ideal for gradually accelerating enormous weights on low-friction level surfaces. (Also great for sprint races, and getting started from a dead stop in general.)
An internal combustion engine has no torque at its output shaft if it's not running. You need some mechanism for driving the stopped wheels from the must-keep-turning engine.
Clutches are a friction brake (with a SMALL length of of spring, so you can recycle most of the energy initially lost to pushing torque through a shaft-speed difference IF you get moving right away.) Try to tow an enormous weight from dead-stop and most of the energy goes to heat the clutch - which quickly fries unless you only engage it in pulses.
Transmissions with torque converters are better. But get moving quickly (in a very low gear, because much of that energy is still turning into heat in the transmission fluid.
Electric motors make heat, too. But only in proportion to the (square of) the torque they produce. So it's the same heat they'd make if they were accelerating the car with the same torque, which they're able to dump quite nicely. Also: They aren't stuck absorbing a LARGE amount of heat because of the minimum speed of the engine shaft. Their controller can apply enough current to get the torque, but this results in much lower voltage (and thus much less total energy) when they're not turning (no back-EMF from the moving motor also acting like a generator to oppose the incoming current). So max torque and only enough HP/watts to produce it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way