My first time driving the Tesla Cybertruck went haywire. A Ford dealership rescued me.

• Tesla EVs come with an adapter to charge at non-Tesla chargers.

• But that adapter doesn't work with the Cybertruck, Tesla says.

• This design flaw almost stranded me — until a Ford dealership came to the rescue.

When I got behind the wheel of my 3-day rental earlier this month, I knew driving the Tesla Cybertruck would be unlike any other driving experience.

What I didn't expect was for the attention-grabbing truck to also give me a headache when I tried to juice up. After all, it's Tesla's newest product, the company's superchargers are seemingly everywhere, and EV charging is slowly improving across the board.

Boy, was I wrong.

In all of my naivety (despite editing articles every single week about electric cars and their associated infrastructure challenges), I thought the reporting trip would be a breeze. I would pick up the vehicle, test it out, charge it overnight, stop quickly at a Supercharger on the way to return it, and be on my way.

Not so fast.

Here's where my assumptions went astray, thanks to some design oversight from Tesla and a lack of contingency planning on my part:

I picked up a shiny new Cybertruck, one of the first few hundred made, in a Target parking lot in South Austin.

It was my first time using Turo, the peer-to-peer car rental app (more on that in a later story), and the pick-up was seamless.

I was staying at my parent's house in the Texas Hill Country, about an 80-mile drive, so I knew I would be fine on range for the first leg of this journey. I also made sure to research Superchargers — there wasn't one in my parent's town — but there were two within 30 miles, and some new third-party plugs in town I hoped to check out.

Given the truck's advertised 320-plus miles of estimated range, I didn't give charging much more thought.

As I settled in and came to terms with the contraption I was now responsible for operating, I made a mental note of the estimated range remaining: 218 miles

The truck's owner, whom I never actually met face-to-face, had a charging limit set at 80% to protect the battery pack's long-term health.

I also noticed the massive front windshield and sunroof actively soaking up the Texas sun, which would definitely affect the range if I cranked the climate control to cool off. Still, even with the AC blasting and some fun accelerating to investigate the truck's handling, I knew I would be fine mileage-wise.

The truck handled winding Texas backroads with ease, hugging corners and accelerating astonishingly quickly.

My excitement to test out "sport mode" and the truck's speed probably didn't help my range either.

I arrived in the heart of the Hill Country with 111 miles remaining, according to Tesla's onboard computer, plenty for another full day of testing every feature possible. Charging would be no issue, I thought, and I wanted to get the full experience.

Some more testing and photo-taking took my range to about 85 miles when I locked up the truck for the night.

To my surprise, I lost about 20 miles of range overnight. This meant starting the next day with 62 miles in the tank.

I later learned Tesla's sentry mode can eat battery life as it monitors the exterior cameras. That's when some of my anxiety began to set in. "I really hope this one public charger in town works," I thought as I prepared for a day of testing the truck. I headed over to the public charger first thing to check it out.

If it were my own truck, I would likely have a high-voltage outlet at home to charge overnight and start every day with a (mostly) full battery. But because it's a rental and my parents don't have an EV, that wasn't an option.

Unfortunately, the public charger was occupied. Time to get creative.

I opened PlugShare, a crowdsourced app that aggregates all EV chargers onto one map, and headed over to the local HEB.

The best US grocery chain (depending on who you ask) has installed chargers at many of its locations around Texas. The ones here were brand new from Volta. (So new they weren't yet showing on Volta's app or even Google Maps Street View).

HEB didn't respond to questions about how many chargers it has installed so far or of which brands.

This is where the problems started. I (wrongly) assumed Tesla's adapter would work for CCS chargers, just without the DC pins. CCS is an industry standard that predates Tesla. But newer, second-generation CCS chargers have additional DC fast-charging pins that make the plug bulkier on the bottom to increase charging speeds.

Even with the adapter, the bottom part of the plug could not fit past the Cybertruck's plastic fender.

Before you send me hate mail, there’s an important nuance here: Tesla does, in fact, sell a CCS combo adapter for $250. It doesn't work with the Cybertruck.

So I was stuck with a measly "SAE J1772" charging adapter that comes with every Tesla. Silly me.