Plus, no propshaft or exhaust to get hung up on things, and you can get the CoG lower, improving handling. Plus, a level of traction control that simply isn't possible with ICE. I'm excited.
https://www.carthrottle.com/post/how-do-electric-vehicles-pr...
(This incidentally is part of why Tesla started with the Roadster - the flat torque curve of an electric motor can give some great acceleration numbers, which is pretty nifty when you're building a status-symbol sports car.)
When my beloved '00 Ram 1500 died about 5 years ago I decided to hold out for an electric truck that I assumed would be coming to market. Looks like I may finally get my chance shortly. I honestly don't know if the cumulative environmental footprint is better, but I do know an electric motor will be superior.
That's just a law of converting massive amounts of kinetic energy into potential energy as the weight goes up hill.
If you look at the torque curve of a modern pickup truck engine, it's either completely flat or it's actually decreasing as you go from low to high RPMs. E.g. the GM Duramax 6.6 maxes out at 1200 Nm at 1600 RPM, then decreases to 900 as you go higher in revs. For comparison, the Model X P100D puts out 660 Nm at peak.
Wrt. Tesla's acceleration numbers - it's always been possible to obtain those. In fact, sub 2-second 0-60 times were achieved with road legal Ford RS200 in the mid 1980s. Sports car manufacturers have instead been competing on track times on famous circuits like the Nurburgring Nordschliefe. Tesla hadn't a snowballs chance in a hatching machine to compete on that, so they went and optimized for a spec where there was no real competition, and that fit their technology well.
As for traction control, there is no system in the world that is superior to just locking all three diffs. This is what you find in serious off-road machines, and many decent pickups. No sensors, no intelligence, no response times, just simple mechanical engineering that will always automatically distribute torque to where it is needed. Instead of being reactive, acting when slip has been detected, it is proactive and gives you torque where there is grip.
Assume you're stuck in mud somehow, a perfect case for diff lockers. If you lock the rotational rate of all your wheels together you are either:
a.) limiting the torque you're applying to the amount the tire with the least amount of traction available can bear before slipping out, or
b.) letting 'em rip and hoping you don't dig yourself down into a hole.
The beauty of having fine control over the power going to each motor is that you can put down the max torque that particular wheel can manage regardless of what the other tires are doing. And you can do so with a granularity that is unmatched by any ICE TC system (which IIRC use the brakes to control torque?)
Where Tesla just put down a 7:13
> torque curve
What's the Duramax's torque at 0 RPM?
For comparison, a front-wheel-drive stock Renault Megane RS does 7:40. Mercedes did 7:25 in a stock 4-door coupe last year, the AMG GT 63S. The stock supercars are down below the 7:00 mark mostly.
In the non-stock category, the record is 5:19 by one of Porsche's modified LMP1 cars.
If you look up how a stall speed converter works, you'll see that an automatic transmission delivers torque at a non-zero engine RPM even if the wheels are at zero RPM. The lowest you will go on the Duramax is around 1000 RPM, where you get 600 Nm torque.