2024 Tesla Cybertruck review: First drive of the garish, childish, outlandish truck that Elon built
It’s long been hard to separate the brand and the man, Tesla and Elon Musk, and yet until now, until the garish, childish, outlandish Cybertruck, the company had not managed to produce one single vehicle that entirely embodies its creator, its megalomaniacal motive force, in one giant, shiny turd of a package.
But boy, Tesla, and Musk, have nailed it this time.
The Cybertruck looks like a bad joke, something the humourless weirdo wunderkind is a specialist at. It fascinates and horrifies, simultaneously, just as the batshit genius does, and in the end, once you’ve driven it and somehow survived it, it’s almost impossible not to be impressed by this collection of seemingly insane ideas, despite yourself. Despite reason, and logic.
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Because as much as I hugely looked forward to hating it – I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to not enjoying something more, just looking at photos made me cackle with spite – I have to admit to forming a grudging respect, and even an almost painful admiration, for the spectacularly silly Cybertruck.
But let me enjoy myself, first, by pointing out its many failings. The Cybertruck is made out of stainless steel, which means it has no nice curves or swooping subtlety, only edges you could cut yourself on and a roof line that looks inexplicably stupid.
It is also too big not to laugh at (5.68m long, 2.03m wide and 1.8m high), with proportions that bring to mind a camel doing a headstand, and when you’re inside it the dash looks like a billiard table, the A-pillars are as fat as two pythons that have just eaten an average American man each, and the steering yoke just looks dumb.
There is a rear-vision mirror, but it’s rendered pointless if you roll the tonneau cover out over the vast rear tray (six feet long). Rather than replacing it with a digital one, the Cybertruck sends the vision from its rear camera to a little screen super-imposed over the big digital touchscreen that is the central safety issue, sorry control centre, of any Tesla.
It’s awful, impossible to get used to, too small, in the wrong place, and when you put your indicator on (via buttons, of course, not a stalk, because they would look silly coming out of a yoke) it is replaced by vision from the blind-spot cameras anyway.
Then there was the recent recall of every Cybertruck built so far, as reported in The Guardian:
“Cybertruck owners reported that their vehicles were at risk of getting stuck driving at full speed due to a loose accelerator pedal. Video showed the pedal itself falling off and the piece beneath wedging itself into the car’s interior, which would force the vehicle into maximum acceleration. One driver was able to save himself from a crash by holding down the brake pedal.”
Mmm, safety.
Shall I go on, or move on? No, let’s move on.
2024 Tesla Cybertruck price and equipment
Ah, what price this gargantuan wank-atron? Well, in the US, if you’re willing to wait – and apparently there are as many as two million pre-orders – you can have one for between US$81,895 and US$101,985.
That gets you a lot of technology and theoretical ability. The Cybertruck has one induction motor on the front axle, another permanent magnet motor at the rear and a vast 123kWh battery. Its claimed power and torque figures are 630kW, which seems a lot until you read the next number, and 13,959Nm.
Is such a thing even possible?
Well, while you’re considering it, ponder the fact that this 3.3 tonne beast can allegedly accelerate from a standing start to 100km/h in 2.7 seconds, or maybe 2.8, either number is bonkers.
All that torque is alleged to give the Cybertruck a towing capacity of 4990kg. And yes, that did make me wonder, if you towed a smaller Tesla behind you, so you didn’t have to embarrass yourself when you got near a town, or an African elephant (Tesla helpfully points out on its website that it can tow an average one, I know not why you would do that), how would it affect range?
Tesla claims its overall range between charges is an impressive-sounding 547km, and an employee told me confidently that you would still get 400km if you towed something “reasonable” behind it. I don’t buy it, personally, but then I didn’t buy how fast it was until I drove it, either.
Claimed efficiency is 22.4kWh per 100km, but we actually saw 27kWh, and we didn’t get as many chances to really thrash it as I would have liked.
Buyers also get a very loud stereo system with 15 speakers, including two dedicated subwoofers and distributed amplifiers, various settings for going off-road, including a Baja Mode for fast sand dune blasting, air suspension that can raise the cabin by up to 17 inches for serious rock hopping, a built in bottle opener in the rear tray, right near two storage areas with drainage holes so you can carry beer and ice to your tailgate party, at which you will be hugely popular; a Sleep mode, where the car will keep the cabin at a constant temperature in case you want to sleep in it after you’ve drunk all the beer, and various hilarious Easter eggs, the best of which is that you can smash the windows in the virtual graphic Cybertruck on your screen and hear Elon Musk reacting to the disastrous display of how tough the windows are, or aren’t, at the pick-up truck’s launch.
Tesla also claims this glass makes the cabin “as quiet as outer space”. This is simply not true. Although I’ve not actually been in outer space.
2024 Tesla Cybertruck: What we think
Aside from making a car with no curves, nor visual beauty, or any subtlety whatsoever, the greatest technical achievement of the Cybertruck is not its outrageous, frankly unbelievable torque, nor even its acceleration. It is the world-first adaptation of drive-by-wire steering technology.
Previously seen only in jet fighters, this ingenious system is what makes it possible to get the Cybertruck into and out of suburban car parks without destroying every other vehicle within 10 feet. It blesses the vehicle with a turning circle smaller to a Tesla Model S, and less than one full turn lock to lock.
To say that it makes the Cybertruck’s steering feel unusually direct is an understatement. They actually warn you before you drive it for the first time that it’s going to feel weird, that you’re going to want to turn the wheel far more than you need to and you need to recalibrate your brain, briefly.
Watching someone reverse it, with the rear wheels turning noticeably in the opposite direction of the front ones at parking speeds, is trippy enough. Doing it yourself is beyond strange at first, but quickly becomes second nature, and then just hugely impressive. At higher speeds, the rear-steer effect is more subtle, but the turn-in is incredibly sharp and overall it’s just stupidly easy to drive this thing, which is not what you think is going to happen when you first climb up and in.
Visibility is not great, but there’s a lot of glass, so it’s not completely awful either, other than the rear-view issue.
And then there’s the get up and go, which is just wild. I don’t believe the silly torque figure, but it’s definitely possible that this thing has more instant torque, more mid-range thrust, than just about anything I’ve driven. You might think response would be dulled by three tonnes of metal and battery, but it’s genuinely quite violent in the way it accelerates.
What’s hard to get used to is believing that all that mass is actually going to stop again when you want it to, but the regen/brake combination works… well enough.
We did take our Cybertruck very briefly off road into some sand and the initial feeling was that it was just going to sink under its weight, but again, there’s just so much grunt on tap that it just powered its way out of trouble, then sideways, then forward again. It was amusingly capable, at least in a short test.
After two days together, I must admit I didn’t want to stop driving the Cybertruck, indeed I very much wanted to leave LA and drive it to Vegas. It felt like it would belong there. Or maybe on Mars.
2024 Tesla Cybertruck: Verdict
Come for the chuckles at its stupid styling, stay for the technological tour de force that lies beneath. It’s possible that Tesla’s Cybertruck will never actually go on sale in Australia, but that would actually be a shame. It’s so much more impressive than I thought it would be that I’m almost not annoyed about it being better than it looks. Almost.
SCORE: 4/5.
2024 Tesla Cybertruck specifications:
Price: TBA – but lots
Basics: EV, four doors, full-size dual cab ute
Range: 547km
Battery capacity: 123kWh
Battery warranty: Eight years/240,000km
Energy consumption: 22.4kWh per 100km
Motors: 1 front-mounted induction motor and 1 rear-mounted permanent magnet motor, 630kW/13,959Nm
AC Charging: 11.5kW
DC Charging: 250kW
0-100km/h: 2.7 secs
