2024 Tesla Cybertruck Beast Tested: Space Truckin'

From the May/June issue of Car and Driver.

Is that real? A woman standing next to the 2024 Tesla Cybertruck outside a hotel in Venice, California, is pretty certain she's looking at an escaped movie prop. "Like, is there a car underneath that?" she asks. We inform her that yes, it is real, but if any vehicle will cause you to question objective reality, it's this one. To those of us who are into cars, it seems like the Cybertruck has been around forever—it was announced in November 2019 and has been in the news seemingly every day since. But for a sizable segment of the population, this may as well be an alien lander or an escaped military project. It looks like it drove out of the Home Depot Andromeda in the year 3000 carrying a pallet of nano armor for the ol' fusion recombiner back at the Demogorgon Ranch. When the door opens, you half expect to see the driver's seat occupied by a hologram. The Cybertruck is the craziest production car of the century, and second place isn't even close.

Whether you exclaim "I can't believe they built that!" with a sense of wonder or disdain depends almost entirely on an aesthetic judgment. Either you dig the Cybertruck's 32-bit polygon form factor and naked stainless-steel skin or you don't, and there really is no in between. Driving it around Los Angeles, we need only roll down the windows to get an earful of public sentiment. One guy on a bike rides past and yells, sing-songy, "Cybertruck... lame!" Another says, "I don't know why that gets so much hate. It looks cool." And yet another calls out, "Is that made of wood?" We told you: A significant percentage of the population can't accept that a real car company actually built this to sell to the general public. We're still grappling with that ourselves.

Consider that this tri-motor Beast model—or Cyberbeast, if you will—is a 6901-pound electric pickup truck that can tow 11,000 pounds and also hits 60 mph in 2.6 seconds, which matches the time we recorded with the Lamborghini Huracán STO. It has steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire, and its low-voltage architecture gets bumped up to 48 volts from the typical 12. The truck's numerous sensors and controllers communicate over an internal "etherloop" network, which Tesla claims dramatically reduces the amount of wiring needed for communication among the various subsystems in the vehicle. The power tonneau cover for the bed is lockable and strong enough to stand on. And then there's that dent-resistant stainless-steel skin, which is so robust that the doors have no internal side- impact beams because they don't need them. The Cybertruck represents a thorough rethinking of how to build a car—much of it self-imposed, but progress can come in strange forms.

Now Steer This

The Cybertruck's steer-by-wire system lacks a connection between the wheels and the steering wheel, or the cutely named "squircle." While this will surely trigger the foil-hat community, Cybertrucks are safe. Triple redundancy and a diversity of information ensure any fault in the system will not result in a 737 Max situation where the car will not do the driver's bidding.

The front steering rack has two 48-volt motors. Each of those motors reports to two different circuits and is tied to two different controllers. Three feedback sensors (one for each motor and a third for the squircle's motor) report to different controllers. Should one motor fail, there is still enough torque in reserve to steer through a parking lot (where steering forces are greatest).

If one sensor disagrees with the other two, it's ignored. But if the split jury persists, you will get a warning to pull over and call for a tow, because something isn't working properly. You will also get a message to pull over if a controller goes down. If a request to stop safely goes ignored too long, it will eventually brick the truck. —K.C. COLWELL

For instance, that steer-by-wire system is essentially a byproduct of Tesla's determination that yokes are cooler than steering wheels, which means you absolutely need a variable steering ratio to avoid multiple hand-over-hand turns. (The Cybertruck's tiller is rectangular, essentially a yoke with a top bar.) While variable-ratio steering can be accomplished mechanically, no mechanism can deliver this truck's level of variability while maintaining 0.9 turn lock to lock. And so the uninitiated inevitably pull away in the Cybertruck tracing a spaghetti path because it's easy to apply too much steering input. Your brain quickly adapts to the new normal, your hands quiet down because you don't need to issue small corrections to follow a straight line. The rear-axle steering also plays a role, enhancing agility to the point that the Beast's dual rear motors don't do any torque vectoring across the axle because the truck is already nimble enough. At one intersection, we had to wait for the Ford F-250 ahead of us to execute a two-point U-turn that the Tesla dispatched in a single arc.

If you're worried about steer-by-wire with no mechanical backup, the backup is basically more steer-by-wire. There are two steering motors, each of which uses a separate controller and power supply, with various sensors on each to sniff out any issues. If one of the motors fails, the truck will go into a limp mode with a five-minute countdown to pull over. The "loop" part of the etherloop points to more redundancy since the truck can lose any component on its network and reroute communication to keep all other systems online. Even the electronically controlled dampers were designed with the what-if of failure in mind. If the dampers lose power, they default to firm valving, so a driver towing or hauling a heavy load won't be stuck with a wallowing truck.

Tesla's thinking on worst-case scenarios and their aftermath extended to crashes too. Thanks to the Cybertruck's snub nose, there isn't as much crush space as you'd enjoy with a traditional long-hood pickup. For the first time, Tesla incorporated collapsible crush tubes into the single, giant front casting that dissipates energy by essentially exploding into tiny pieces. But a crash doesn't mean the entire casting has to be replaced—it can be reconstructed ahead of the intact parts. As for the stainless-steel body itself, it's ready to take on the worst that rogue shopping carts can dish out in the Ralphs parking lot.

Air Bender

Weirdly, the Tesla Cybertruck has more aero than you might imagine. The front end was always going to be a challenge, but Tesla changed the prototype's flat nose to a subtly curved front panel that helps air bend around the forward flanks. Carefully shaped front flares create a small, deliberate vortex that encourages the flow to bend smoothly around the corners. The prominent wiper acts like a fence that directs air over the top instead of allowing it to swirl down onto the driver's window, cutting down on wind noise. Underneath, the belly is much smoother than any ladder-framed truck could ever hope to be.

The most surprising aspect may well be how naturally well suited the angular-looking aft end is. The rearmost flanks taper gently like some kind of teardrop, which is the most inherently aerodynamic shape. The abrupt truncation at the tailgate is actually quite good aerodynamically, with the air flowing over and off the body smoothly, thereby reducing drag more than a rounded tail might achieve.

The roll-top tonneau is essential to all of this, of course, so we conducted 75-mph steady-state tests with it closed and open, as well as with both it and the tailgate open to create an exit for the air "trapped" in the bed. We also wondered about the effect of the wheel caps, so we repeated our tonneau-closed runs with those off as well. The 10-percent hit to consumption the open tailgate generates is less surprising than the barely 2-percent loss without the wheel covers. But Tesla warned us that the covers are largely aesthetic. —DAN EDMUNDS

About those panels: Tesla formulated its stainless-steel alloy to prioritize hardness and corrosion resistance. Much has already been made of Cybertrucks wearing grimy orange rust stains, which result when iron particles in the air alight on the truck and begin oxidizing. You can wipe them off (we used an ammonia-free glass cleaner), but the Cybertruck definitely makes you acutely aware of how much airborne iron is apparently floating around out there. You can also give it a good scouring with Bar Keepers Friend, after which the metal will "repassivate," forming its own protective haze. Since this consumes maybe a few microns of metal thickness, you could theoretically clean a hole in your truck, but with 1.8-mm-thick door panels, that would take a lot of scrubbing. One thing that Tesla says won't put a hole in your door: subsonic ammunition. We did not test that claim, as our accountants strongly discourage the shooting up of six-figure trucks.