Although I can't be sure about the upcoming spec for the Cybertruck we did actually get enough information during the unveil to get a good estimate of the energy consumption required by the car. Once we know the energy consumption of the car we're also able to learn some more details about the solar option for the Cybertruck which Elon Musk tweeted about.
130kWh battery in the Tesla Cybertruck Dual motor
At the presentation, they showed the fuel cost for a conventional truck vs the electricity cost for the Tesla Cybertruck. The cost of fuel was estimated at $130 while the electricity was estimated at $40 as can be seen in the picture below.
By checking the cost of fuel for the average 1/2 ton pickup we should be able to get a pretty good idea of how many miles they estimated for this comparison and by using the cost of electricity we should then be able to get the energy consumption of the car.
Fuel consumption for the Ford F-150 which is the main competitor ranges for the diesel/gasoline version between 25/22 mpg and 22/16 mpg. As the current price of diesel/gasoline in the USA is $3.01/$2.93 for a gallon of fuel this means that the cost per mile should be between 11.7 cents and 18,8 cents. This means that the range used for the comparison fat the unveil should be between 744 and 1195 miles per month. The average annual miles travelled by light trucks is 11712 miles which equal 976 miles/month, as this value is well within the expected range we'll use it for the rest of the estimates.
Given the number of miles travelled we also know that the cost of electricity should be around 4.1 cents/mile.
Since the price of electricity in the states varies between 9.57 and 21.76 cents/kWh the needed energy per mile should be somewhere between 0.428 and 0.188 kWh/mile. The Model X requires about 0.38 kWh/mile so we'll have to assume that they have used the cheapest price of electricity for their calculations as the Cybertruck probably isn't more efficient than a Model X.
This is how we can estimate the battery size to at least 128.5 kWh for the dual motor version given its 300+ miles range.
Solar option covers both the roof and bed
Elon Musks tweeted that there should be a solar option that could generate 15 miles of range per day.
From the images at https://tesla.com/cybertruck we can easily find measure the size of the bed since we know that the total size of the truck and that the length of the bed is 6.5 ft. The cover of the bed should thereby be about 2.7 sqm. If the solar panel is just in the cover it would have to generate 2.4 kWh/sqm each day.
The available solar energy at sea level is about 1000 W/sqm. If we check the solar maps for California we see that they average around 7 hours of sun per day which gives us 7 kWh of available solar energy each day. To reach the required 2.4 kWh/sqm the panel would have to be 34% efficient. That is much higher than anything commercially available, and also higher the most efficient panels introduced by SolarCity in 2015 which had an efficiency of 22%.
It's highly unlikely that the solar option would be that efficient, so we have to instead assume that the rear roof window would also be replaced with solar panels to increase the total area for solar panels to arround 4.8 sqm. This bring the energy requirement down to 1.3 kWh/sqm or 19% which actually is exactly what the current SolarCity panels provides.
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