Yes. Everyone else in the automobile world calls that a unibody.
Exoskeleton in this case is just a marketing term for unibody.
—Peter
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Does anyone expect the final product to be identical to the prototype?
The Captain
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Sort of, per Musk the body would be the frame, as opposed to the body and the frame being the same component. At least, that’s what he made it sound like:
Yeah. Part of this is the fundamental design change, we moved the mass to the outside. We created an exoskeleton.
So normally the way that a truck is designed, you have a body on frame, you have a bed on frame and the body and the bed don’t do anything useful. They’re carried like cargo, like a sack of potatoes. It was the way that aircraft used to be designed, when they had biplanes, basically. The key to creating an effective monoplane was a stressed skin design. You move the stress to the outside skin. Allows you to do things that you can’t do with a body on frame.
That is a unibody. Been used in cars (and light trucks) since before Musk was born.
This seems to be de rigueur for Musk. He seems to have to learn by doing rather than by reading about what others have done. But just because he learns something by doing does not make it a new breakthrough. In some sense, he does a lot of reinventing of wheels. That’s not always a bad thing, but it can slow down various parts of the design process.
Unibodies are handy things. They give you strength with lightness. But there are limits to unibody strength. That’s why the Tesla Semi has a more traditional frame for pulling the trailer.
–Peter
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