The Cybertruck is somehow both over- and under-engineered. It’s heavily armored, with a pneumatic shocks system, and yet that same rugged armor has to be babied, and kept sparkling clean, lest tree sap or bird droppings start rusting the steel. It has one of the most complex assisted driving systems to date, and yet, certain settings will mysteriously and without warning just… quit, requiring a Tesla technician to take a look at the system’s soft- and hardware to identify what went wrong. On the road, its sturdy, torquey, and quick for its size – and it’s difficult to park in an average parking lot. The battery does alright in the cold and heat, but the engine cavity leaks, so Tesla has been advising owners not to run through a regular carwash without putting the car in carwash mode.
By most metrics, this is a strange car.
Pros and Cons
Firstly, in defense of the Cybertruck, there are doubtlessly people who’d still buy this even if (or especially if) Elon Musk was not a deciding factor. There are surely people who saw this car, wanted it, and simply decided not to purchase because of the people who are running the company. It does have many virtues. You want an armored car. You don’t want to upgrade an existing car or purchase a car made for that reason, because most of those cars are not electric. You would also like to broadcast the fact that the car is armored (and even if you don’t, there are so many of these things on the road that you circle around to blending in again). You want a low-riding cabin with supplemental cameras to see the sides and back, with a trunk that has a closing lid built right in. You want a sleek, smooth interior, with every thought and possible adjustment to be made added in one, easy-to-reach place, a large screen in the center of the console. You’d like it to also connect to your phone, and have an account, so you can monitor things like distance travelled and recurring errors in one place. Autopilot, no (or depending who you ask, not yet), but really good cruise control, sure.
This is conceivably a description of a car that works, that has a market, and that would be worth 100,000 to some of the people who bought it.
And then there are the cons.
It’s armored: the body is overly solid and lacks crumple zones. It’s steel, and it’s thick. It’s actually illegal to drive these in many European countries because of this. In the event you need assistance getting out of the car, good luck – the windows won’t break out for you, and in at least one incident the doors auto-locked on explosion, the follow-up of which is that Tesla can unlock your car doors for you remotely. Or for the police. At least one person has died in a Tesla vehicle after the vehicle lost power, because the door lacked an obvious manual release, and at the same time the Cybertruck is a little better than Tesla’s average because you’re plenty likely to accidentally engage the manual open for the front doors when you try to adjust the windows. The back doors are understandably much harder to open because they’re that way on every car, because the back is where young children sit. At some point, buyers were promised this thing would be level 5 autonomous, AKA fully able to make decisions while driving to make it to a location safely, and as of the writing of this article that is not the case. If the screen goes down, you may struggle to drive the vehicle because so many of the vehicle’s cabin utilities rely on it, including the gear shift. There’s a back up gear shift attached to the rear view mirror, which is overhead – the rear view mirror is also mostly obstructed by the sheer length of the vehicle and the angle of the trunk, and then you can’t use the backup camera to help if the screen is dead.
Silver Linings
So it’s not really autonomous – but the monitoring system is clever. There are many, many issues with a car designed around a screen rather than a screen designed around the preexisting car, but the comprehensive and clear language of error messages that would normally just be a single “Check Engine” light on an ordinary car is something other cars might want to consider. However, needing an account to drive is kind of annoying, isn’t it? Needing an engineer alongside a mechanic to debug problems drives the cost of repairs up at the dealership, on top of the already-mostly-custom parts the Cybertruck requires for maintenance. It’s a plenty annoying car, but at least a few of the ideas behind its design are good.
https://www.wired.com/story/this-is-why-teslas-stainless-steel-cybertrucks-may-be-rusting
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-help-cybertruck-explosion-b2673416.html
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/cybertruck/en_us/GUID-903C82F8-8F52-450C-82A8-B9B4B34CD54E.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/business/angela-chao-death/index.html
