A California company is advertising ‘tactical response’ Tesla Cybertruck upgrades for police cruisers, including shotgun racks and sirens.
I feel there’s a great intersection of cops and those people who still buy into Elon’s bullshit. It couldn’t be any other way.
Right out of Carmageddon
Sweet! Outrunning the cops will be super easy if they start using these pieces of shit!
Particularly given that the design quality houses a whole slew of critically bad design choices.
Like shock absorber brackets and axel mounts that can’t handle simple offroad loads.
I am seriously looking forward to videos of some poor sucker trying to pull a PIT maneuver
In murica… Cops pit themselves.
What?
I’m imagining the cybercop bouncing off the car they meant to pit and flipping/rolling until the cop is skidding on nothing more than a car seat and holding a steering wheel.
Yes, it’s cartoonish.
Cartoons are great and so is that mental image, thank you for that
I agree, and you’re welcome.
Bit of background on police cars. Mechanically, they’re not made to be especially fast, nor necessarily accelerate very quickly, nor handle particularly well. The police package modifications have more to do with endurance. A cop car isn’t going to do 180MPH, but it’s going to be able to do 110 for way longer than a regular production vehicle. A alot of that comes down to extra cooling: engine, transmission, power steering. Cop cars have steel wheels because they bend instead of shattering, and you can still drive on a bent wheel that holds air.
Does the Cybertruck scream “reliable and high endurance”?
Police vehicles also need to be generally multipurpose, to carry weapons, first aid, other gear, and detainees as necessary. This means they need to have enough room in the back seat for a partition, and accessible cargo space so that any particular thing can be quickly accessed. I can’t speak to the back seat of a Cybertruck, but that silly body line at the front of the bed makes a huge part of its cargo space useless. If you want to access stuff that’s up there, you’re going to have to climb in the back and crawl over everything, or unload a bunch of shit that’s in the way, like me looking for the fucking mayonaisse in my refrigerator after my wife has jammed it way too full of other shit. Maybe a Cybertruck could stand in for a State Police car that runs the interstates instead of a Dodge Charger. Maybe.
Ever noticed how lots of police departments label their cars in very low contrast lettering? That’s so they can blend into traffic without being instantly noticeable as a police car. I think it’s obvious what I’m pointing out here.
I also don’t think that a pure electric vehicle would ever be used for actual police work. Having to stick it on a charger for an hour, at least once a day, takes the vehicle and its driver out of service for much longer than just filling up a gas tank. Yeah, you might be able to coordinate the charging with “paperwork time,” but it’s still something worth considering.
tl;dr: The Cybertruck is the worst police vehicle any department could ever choose.
All spot on!
Story: Some idiot company is trying to sell these things.
Lemmy: LOL, cops are idiots!
Who says anyone is purchasing this?!
Ever noticed how lots of police departments label their cars in very low contrast lettering? That’s so they can blend into traffic without being instantly noticeable as a police car. I think it’s obvious what I’m pointing out here.
you mean that automatic siren built into the body paneling isn’t gonna help them blend in?
I’d be more worried if they switched to old white tacomas. switch to persistent car chases. Never speeding, just following along waiting for you to run out of fuel. Oh you going off road? That huge dent on the roof is when it rolled over back in '03. I got 2 jerry cans my partner can pour while still driving.
With the all-wheel drive Cybertruck’s current $79,990 price, it stands to reason the combined taxpayer cost for a vehicle and new UP.FIT features could easily top $90,000. <
I’d be pretty upset if my municipality was set to dump 100k on this trash.
if they’re anything like the ICE cruisers… they’re dropping another shitload in up grades. custom-built gun vaults, as well as other specially-built storage … first aid, extra handcuffs. leg cuffs. Kiddie cuffs. flex-cuffs. evidence collection. Road safety stuffs. Flashlights. speed radar thingies. rolls of printer paper for citation printers. Cameras. spare uniforms. Condoms for the badgebunnies. extra batteries for radios. extra batteries for flashlights. batteries for cameras. extra uniforms. all sorts of bullshit paperwork and forms that only get filled out when they come a cross a karen. Door breaching and lock out tools
needless to say, cops keep a lot of junk in the trunk. So much so the cop’s version of the ford explorer (“Police Interceptor Utility”) actually only has a special suspension to handle the extra weight, and 2 rows of seating instead of 3 to accommodate the entirely-custom storage rack.
oh. you thought they were talking about body armor… naw. They get APC’s for that.
Are you a former cop?
sounds like he either worked in ICE or kitted the vehicles.
I think he meant ICE as in ‘internal combustion engine’ vehicles, because I’m reasonably certain ICE doesn’t do evidence collection or write citations with printers. I think ICE also handles karens quite differently.
There is also the extra radio, sirens, lights, and some have built in radar and plate scanning cameras. I’m pretty sure there are extra batteries and a stronger alternator to keep systems powered and ensure engine starts if auxiliary power is drained.
Different crusiers also have different set ups. Some are normal patrol cars while others have K-9 accomadations, shield and extra defensive gear, pursuit intervention tools like spikes and stop sticks. Cops use such a wide variety of tools that one crusier can’t fit every tool for every situation.
They’ve got a cop motor, a 440 cubic inch plant. They’ve got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. They’re a model made before catalytic converters so they’ll run good on regular gas.
They’re gonna waste that money anyway. At least the cybertruck is dangerous enough that a few cops might die as a result.
And can you really put a price on that?
What else do you expect local governments to spend the opiate settlement money on, rehabilitation?
Don’t forget all those assets they seize.
Imagine thinking they will only buy one.
And you’d have to ask what makes it a good police vehicle. An electric vehicle probably makes Sense, but I’m not sure there’s anything else about it that does. Certainly not the price tag.
Idk. Cops can spend all day in their cruisers and blow through tons of fuel/power during a high speed chase. The EV would also have to power all the electronics on the cruiser including lights, sirens, radios, their laptop thing. Battery capacity might not be able to power the cruiser long enough. Especially if the crusier works a day and a night shift with different officers. Last thing a cop wants is back up cannot arrive because they are charging a battery.
You might have misunderstood, but I was saying the fact that it’s an EV is the only part that makes sense for a police cruiser (assuming they have enough to rotate them out while charging it can schedule that for breaks). Nothing else about the cyber truck makes sense.
“We have an inflated budget and we need to spend every penny of it, even if it’s on dumb bullshit.”
You don’t use it, you lose it!
EDF patrol car from red faction
The rear has no headroom, so that is going to suck even worse to be put in the back of if you are like 6ft.
They will probably give them to the officers that don’t do traffic enforcement because they would be terrible at anything other than presence. Literally every other model Tesla would be better at being a cop car.
does crime in a rain storm or up a sandy incline
The cops:
On a related note how come criminals in Gotham City don’t just do crime during the day time?
They’re criminals, not monsters.
I like that, looks pretty badass
Adding the “troll” tag to your profile is a wonderful thing I learned I could do
How do you do that?
(on boost for Lemmy) go to their “about me”, tap the three dots at the top, tap “add tag”. Now whenever I see this person’s comment, I see [Troll] next to their name. It’s hilarious, since they’re such an active lil fella
Well good for you
I will laugh my ass off when this thing breaks down and catches on fire during their “tactical response” after someone throws a water bottle at it.
I’m going to laugh my ass off when someone figures out how to track them all in real time, and shares it on a publicly accessible website.
I hope they explode
battery fires are not at all common in electric vehicles. this is propaganda
On this planet, we have a concept called ‘humor,’ which involves exaggeration and absurdity for the purpose of getting a laugh. I hope this comes to your own world someday.
repeat falsehoods often enough and people believe them, even if you originally mean them as a well-intentioned and obvious joke
Sorry… are people repeating the falsehood that Cybertrucks catch fire if you throw a water bottle at them?
no but they ARE repeating the falsehood about battery fires being likely or common: https://lemmy.world/comment/10496586
(which is something your joke implied)
Or I implied that the Cybertruck is a badly-constructed piece of shit.
you may have INTENDED to imply only that, but you did imply both unfortunately. I agree with you on the cyber truck part, but I deal with a lot of slightly more rural folks and the big fear RN with electric vehicles is somehow battery fires. which is crazy since they don’t happen anywhere near as often as gas vehicles. so I’m just trying to say we should be careful to avoid that particular cliche (the battery fire part) since it misleads people
The first casualty of those battery fires is probably going to be someone handcuffed and locked in the back seat.
Surely with their budgets and current level of militarisation, US police departments could afford real APCs/light infantry vehicles rather than this mall-ninja tacticool cosplay garbage.
They already do.
This is a pseudo kickback, something to fluff elons ego
Do NOT buy these, there’s no US flag on it. /s
And - check this out:
Of-fucking-course they are.
Shoulda seen this coming…
This could be a huge money save. Might cost the city less if they simply bisect pedestrians in police chases instead of paralysing them from the waist down.
