Well, as long as you set the mass on a frictionless plane in a vacuum, the car can pull pretty much any amount of mass. At some point, it'll all collapse into a black hole and the towing cable will stop working properly, so the capacity is only near infinite.

That’s not true at all though, because there are stopping distance requirements to legally sell the vehicle.

This is worked around if you have one pulling the opposite direction.

So a completely useless claim then ?

"Meaningful and accurate" and "useful" aren't really the same thing when it comes to advertising.

Well, you see, the buyers of pickup trucks in the US are statistically never going to tow anything, doubly so for the “techie” crowd interested in the Tesla truck. So they can make claims that mean absolutely nothing, because the buyers don’t have any context for what the numbers mean anyway, so just go for a bigger number than the competitors.

A common marketing stunt for trucks is to film them towing something really heavy: https://jalopnik.com/watch-an-electric-ford-f-150-prototype-.... Tesla apparently doesn't feel like doing the actual stunt, so they've done the equivalent in writing.

The Model Xes have been used to pull "The Boring Co" waste (on rails), so it seems like Tesla have done this stunt. (One would hope that the CyberTruck can do even more?)

https://www.thedrive.com/news/19529/watch-a-tesla-model-x-pu...

That is actually pretty nuts

Not as nuts as a human pulling a C-17, even if the plane is the lighter of the two: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0xpuub2DBB8

They did similar stunt pulling a very big rocket engine - https://news.yahoo.com/news/awesome-video-shows-cybertruck-t...

It can pull any mass, near infinite, as long as it doesn’t exceed 14k pounds of weight.

Might refer to the fact that EVs have high torque, hence high bollard pull force, which is the maximum force that a vehicle can generate at zero speed.

Give a tiny tug to something enormous and static and you'd technically be towing it. Its speed, however...

My layman interpretation is that you can use the truck to pull on an immovable object and the truck won’t disintegrate. Pulling != towing so the marketing dept is threading a fine line here.

Sounds like either pure BS or "well technically" BS e.g. in the form "it has a gravitational field, which means it will pull on all objects in the universe".

That said, I don't see that quote in the article…

All numbers are nearly equal with some level of precision.

It's marketing nonsense, obviously.

The basis for this claim is that an electric engine can generate torque at an arbitrarily low RPM, so given low enough friction on the load it can move an arbitrarily massive object. That particular given, of course, renders the whole claim BS.

The mass is made of bullshit. Now read the sentence again

Since everyone else gave ridiculous answers, I'll give a real one.

The Cybertruck is electric. Electric engines have theoretically infinite torque at 0 MPH, decreasing with speed. The actual limit is the materials, the friction of the tires, and the point at which the vehicle flips over.

Between a heavy vehicle, good tires and a low center of gravity, it can tow several times its own weight.