“Coming soon via OTA,” that’s what Tesla’s lead engineer for the Cybertruck, Wes Morrill, said on the social media platform X about an update that would improve the rather unimpressive charging curve of the battery-powered pickup.
The software improvements will be most beneficial to Cybertruck owners who have a habit of arriving at Supercharger stations with a very low state of charge.
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New battery tech, new woes
The Cybertruck is Tesla's first consumer EV that features an 800-volt charging architecture. In theory, this should lead to lightning-fast charging sessions, but in reality, testing proved that the roughly 123-kilowatt-hour pack doesn't charge any faster than a Rivian R1T that has a 400-volt battery. That's mainly because Tesla's Supercharger network doesn't have 800V stalls yet, but also because of some software bugs that will "soon" be addressed.
The updates were first announced in April by Tesla’s former SVP of Powertrain and Energy, Drew Baglino, who said that the OTA fixes would increase the average range replenishing rate to up to 154 miles in 15 minutes. However, Baglino didn’t say if the charging curve improvements would apply to the dual-motor all-wheel drive version or the tri-motor Cyberbeast.
On the current software version, a 15-minute top-up at a DC fast charger can add up to 128 miles of range to the Cyberbeast and up to 136 miles of range for the AWD version, so bringing that up to 154 miles would result in an improvement of 13% for the dual-motor and 20% for the Cyberbeast.
Another issue that can be experienced by Cybertruck owners now and that will be fixed with the upcoming OTA update has to do with reduced fast-charging speeds while the battery is at a very low state of charge.
When Cybertruck drivers pull into a Supercharger with close to 0% energy left, the truck sometimes wrongly instructs the stall to lock the amperage to a maximum of 100 amps, leading to longer wait times. For reference, a V3 Supercharger stall has a maximum output of 350A.
What can’t be fixed with a simple OTA update, however, is the disparity between the voltage of the Cybertruck’s battery pack–which is rated at roughly 800V–and the nominal voltage of the majority of Tesla Supercharger stalls, which is 500V. This means that the truck has the potential to charge even faster, but Tesla’s charging infrastructure doesn’t allow it yet.
