The Tesla Model X is no slouch. On Thursday, CEO Elon Musk shared a video on his Twitter of a scene from The Boring Company’s workplace, showing the electric car pulling a staggering 250,000 pounds of muck rail cars out of a tunnel at The Boring Company’s work site — desite only offering an official towing capacity of up to 5,000 pounds.
The company’s sports utility vehicle has repeatedly demonstrated its towing capabilities, but Musk’s video is possibly the largest amount demonstrated on video. A January video showed the Model X pulling a truck stuck in the North Carolina snow (a Class 8 tractor-trailer combination weighs around 35,000 pounds), while a video shared by Musk in November showed the car winning a race against an Alfa Romeo 4C Spider while towing another Spider. The Drive notes that the Model X is rated with 7,000 pound-feet of torque, the equivalent of 47 Toyota Camrys from the mid-‘90s.
The Tesla Model X has incredible pulling power.
The feat shows promise for the Tesla Semi electric truck, unveiled in November 2017 with a tentative launch date of 2019. The vehicle will offer up to 500 miles of range, with solar-powered “megachargers” every 400 miles to charge within half an hour. Early demonstrations have convinced customers to order more than 250 for industrial deliveries, including 100 for PepsiCo.
The video also shows The Boring Company is hard at work. The tunnel-digging venture, borne out of Musk’s frustration with Los Angeles traffic back in December 2016, is working on getting four major projects approved. The company released details of its Baltimore-Washington, D.C. route on Thursday, a 35-mile “loop” tunnel that could one day support hyperloop pods with speeds of up to 700 mph.
Tesla Model X offers impressive performance, and Musk could soon bring it to a lower price range. The “Model Y” — analogous to the $35,000 Model 3 that launched last summer as a entry-level version of the Model S — could enter production as soon as March 2020.
Considering how the Model X was not designed for pulling such giant loads, it will be interesting to see whether the Tesla Semi also out-performs its specs when it hits the road.
