Is the Cybertruck Really That Bad?

The Car Chick (00:00)
Welcome back to The Straight Shift, the podcast where I tell it like it is. No fluff, no just the straight truth about cars. Cybertrucks have been controversial since the model debuted back in 2022, although deliveries to customers didn’t start until late 23. But they have been in the news a lot more lately, both for being vandalized and for not floating. One was pulled from the beautiful Ventura Harbor recently, just north of Los Angeles.

Apparently the owner was trying to put his jet ski in the water when the Cybertruck rolled backwards and went for a swim itself. Despite Elon Musk claiming that you can use the truck as a boat, this one promptly sank. Thankfully the owner was able to get out first and no one was injured. But no, you cannot use it as a boat. Unless you count a submarine as a boat. Does a submarine count as a boat? Hmm, I don’t actually know that. I’ll have to look that up.

With less than flattering news coverage of the Cybertruck recently, I’ve had several listeners and clients reach out and ask, is the Cybertruck really that bad of a vehicle, or is it just the haters blowing it out of proportion due to the increased unpopularity of Elon Musk? So putting current events aside, is the Cybertruck really that bad? Yes, yes it is.

Buckle up folks because today I’m gonna break down five reasons why the Cybertruck isn’t just bad, it’s epically terrible. So let’s get into it.

Before we get too far into this, I do want to issue a colorful language warning. There may be little bit of cussing in this podcast. I normally try to keep it clean, but I’m just not going to hold back today, so forgive me.

Alright, let’s start with the obvious, the design of the Cybertruck. Now, I get that beauty is subjective, and I normally like things that are different, futuristic, edgy, even a tad bit ugly. I like funky light fixtures, and anyone who has ever seen my shoe collection knows that I have unusual taste. I even tend to like angular vehicles. But there’s avant-garde, and then there’s…

looks like it was designed by a nine-year-old using Microsoft Paint on a Windows 95 machine. The Cybertruck is just a giant stainless steel wedge. It looks like a dumpster and a DeLorean had a one-night stand and then woke up the next morning and said, shit, we should not have done that. Tesla may call it futuristic and okay, I’ll buy that, but it’s not Star Trek futuristic where everything is sleek and fluid. It’s more like Jawa sand

crawler from Star Wars futuristic. Don’t get me wrong, I love both Star Trek and Star Wars. But the Cybertruck makes the Pontiac Aztec look like a design masterpiece. And it’s not just the exterior. Once you actually wedge yourself inside, because they’re not the easiest things to get into, you will be greeted by a minimalist slab of nothing. Now, I like a clean interior design in cars.

I don’t want something that looks like the cockpit of an airplane, but the Cybertruck is stark, as in, boring as fuck. You get some decently comfortable seats. I will give them credit for that. You get these octagonal shaped cup holders, which I still have not figured out the purpose of that. And you get this huge 18 and a half inch touchscreen, but that’s it. The rest of it is just so bland and so plain.

Oh, but the steering wheel is a yoke-style steering wheel, like you’re driving an F1 car instead of an actual vehicle. The yoke-style steering wheel is necessary in an F1 car because you have very limited space in that cockpit, and it makes it easier for the driver to get in and out. Entry and exit of any race car is absolutely crucial because if it does catch on fire, you literally have 20 seconds to get out. And even with the steering wheel detaching,

anything you can do to give yourself that time to get out of the vehicle is a good thing. It also works in an F1 car because those vehicles are designed to have extremely quick steering. The driver does not need to rotate that wheel much at all to get that car to rotate. That’s why it’s an F1 car. But in a regular car truck, it’s just not practical. Have you ever tried doing a three point turn with a yoke steering I have.

It’s like arm wrestling yourself. I don’t recommend it. the rear visibility in the Cybertruck is totally non-existent. That funky bed cover blocks your view, so you have to rely entirely on the cameras in the car. That’s kind of cool up until the point where they get covered in mud or road salt or just your average dirt and you can no longer see out of them. But you know, it’s fine. It’s fine. You don’t need to see to drive.

Now not going to call the Cybertruck a terrible vehicle just because of the design aesthetic to each their own, say, but let’s talk about how this vehicle is put together.

Stainless steel for the body. Really? Okay, sure, stainless steel is very strong, it’s durable, it’s resistant to corrosion, and it’s supposedly resistant to denting and scratching. Tell that to my kitchen appliances. Do you know why car makers don’t use stainless steel for body panels? Because it’s heavy as fuck, it’s hard to shape, and yeah, every little scratch and ding you get shows up like a zit on prom night.

And while it is resistant to some casual dents like from the occasional light door ding in the parking lot, do you know what happens when you get an actual ding or actual damage to it, like in an accident or maybe backing into your mailbox? You can’t just pop out a dent or do some body work, little bondo, little sanding and repaint it. Nope, you’re replacing the whole panel. hopefully the Tesla shop will get lined up decently,

because Teslas are notorious for poorly aligned body panels. Remember, this is a technology company that is still learning how to make cars. And clearly they still have a lot to learn. Just this week, Tesla has stopped deliveries of the Cybertruck to the very small number of people who are actually still ordering these things due to complaints from the owners of those metal body panels falling off. Apparently the glue that holds the stainless steel exterior in place

is failing. This is not a new issue for Tesla. They have been aware of the problem for well over a year, but have failed to address it. let me put on my shocked face. Many owners have been escalating this report to the NHTSA, but it actually took a viral YouTube video of the entire front bumper of a Cybertruck dangling loosely and dangerously from the body and flapping in the wind as the owner drove down the highway.

That’s what it took to get Tesla to acknowledge this potentially dangerous issue. We’ll have to wait and see if they actually do something about it. This is me not holding my breath. But hey, at least those flailing body panels are rust proof, right? Not exactly. While stainless steel is corrosion resistant, it is not corrosion proof. Cybertrucks have not been catastrophically rusting out in the rain like you may have heard on social media.

The orange discoloration that you may have seen in viral videos and photos is actually surface oxidation, which is what happens to your brakes when the car’s been out in the rain. The difference is when it’s your brakes, if you just drive the car and use your brakes, that surface oxidation comes off with use of the brakes.

Normal cars, they will get corrosion also due to exposure to materials like salt from the roads or sea air. That’s just the nature of metal. But the difference is normal cars have layers of paint and clear coat to help protect the body panels. Cybertrucks have no coating at all. It’s just bare stainless steel, which is why it’s difficult to get that surface oxidation off. And they’re just in general a bitch to keep clean.

You can’t take them through a car wash. You can’t ceramic coat them to protect them or make them easier to clean. So dirt, bug guts, tree sap, even fingerprints are very difficult to remove. They are a detailer’s worst nightmare.

Could Tesla have at least made them with that fingerprint resistant stainless steel like my refrigerator? Apparently not. Maybe this is why people wrap them a lot, that and to make them more unique, but I’m pretty sure that the wraps also help protect the body panels. But hey, at least they’re bulletproof, right? Again, not so much. The 1.8 millimeter thick stainless steel is supposedly strong enough to withstand impacts from a nine millimeter handgun.

So course, YouTube immediately rushed to test that claim, because that’s what YouTubers do. Gotta love them. And while the doors of the test truck in question did survive a few rounds from a 9mm and some from a .22 caliber rifle, pretty much anything stronger than that went straight through with no problems. And then there’s the bulletproof glass. Remember that iconic unveiling where Elon confidently said that the windows were bulletproof?

And then promptly shattered them with a steel ball. Twice. So neither stainless steel nor the Cybertruck’s glass windows are rated for ballistic purposes. It’s pure gimmickry. So don’t drive one of these things through a sketchy neighborhood on a Saturday night thinking that you’re going to be safe. But let’s get real. Do you really need bulletproof windows in a truck? Well, actually, maybe nowadays in a Cybertruck you do.

But let’s look at the other practicality and functionality of the vehicle. you would think that if you’re call something a truck, it should be, you know, useful. It should do truck things. Is that not why we buy trucks? To haul stuff, tow stuff? Well, the Cybertruck’s bed is shaped like a giant trapezoid, so the dimensions are different in different parts of the bed. It is not a nice rectangle.

And that makes it difficult to haul things like furniture, sheets of plywood or drywall, or any other large rectangular object. The tie downs in the bed are located in very low and weird corner places that make it a little more difficult to safely secure down anything you were trying to haul. And the high sides of the bed and the lack of step sides make it even more challenging to load and secure anything safely.

You’re definitely going to need a partner in crime to help you do this. A couple of years ago, I was at Lowe’s loading up on DIY supplies for one of my projects. I think it was when I was shiplapping the inside of my coat closet because, you know, for some reason I decided that was an important thing to do. But I’m in the contractor loading area at Lowe’s and I come out with about

35 to 40 lengths, 8 foot long lengths of plywood that I’ve had them cut on their big saw down to about 6 inches wide. So not very wide, but 8 feet long and about 35 to 40 of them. And meanwhile, there’s these real contractors, real pros there, and they are loading up their real trucks with tons of stuff for their projects. And then there’s the one guy with the Cybertruck, and he is sitting there trying to figure out

how to load just a handful of two by fours into his truck. He’s trying it with the tonneau cover, without the tonneau cover. Can’t figure out how to secure them in a way that they’re not gonna go flying out while he’s driving. And meanwhile, all the real contractors are sitting there chuckling as they’re loading their real trucks. And then here I come with all my plywood and my Mini Cooper. And they definitely all stop and stare and start laughing.

Until I open up the hatch and start loading the lengths of plywood into my Mini. Because the distance from the passenger floorboard to the far back corner of my hatch, guess what? It’s exactly eight feet. And with the plywood being slightly flexible to go over the roll cage bar in there, yeah, I can get 35 lengths of eight foot long plywood into my Mini Cooper. So I close the hatch, put my cart away, and I drive off and

the Cybertruck guy and all the pros are just standing there with their jaws on the pavement. It was hilarious. And I don’t know if the Cybertruck guy ever got the two by four secured in his truck or not, but the Mini Cooper was more practical at Lowes than the Cybertruck. But speaking of that tonneau cover, it’s a power cover and it’s a cool idea. And I do think it looks awesome, but it does reduce your actual cargo space. And while it’s supposed to support 300 pounds of force on top of it,

there are several YouTube videos that prove otherwise. But let’s talk about towing. That’s the other thing we tend to do with trucks. And Tesla says that the Cybertruck can tow 11,000 pounds. And it can, just not for very long. A dual motor Cybertruck has a stated range of about 320 miles on a charge, at least when the battery’s new. When towing a really heavy load?

Yeah, that range drops faster than Tesla stock has in the last few weeks. One YouTuber whose channel is called Flying Wheels, it’s a really cool channel. He towed his boat with his Cybertruck to a location just about 120, 130 miles away from his house. And he had to stop twice to refill the electrons. Have you ever tried to charge an EV with a trailer attached?

The charging cables at the public Tesla superchargers are so short. So even when you’re not trailing something, you have to pull your EV all the way up to the charging station just to get it to reach. I mean, it’s shorter than the pump at the gas pump. So if you’re trailing something, you either have to hope you can pull up sideways and then promptly block all of the other chargers and piss off anybody else who wants to charge their electric car.

Or you have to go somewhere else in the parking lot, unload whatever it is you have on your trailer, and then drive over to the charging station, spend 30 to 40 minutes charging the car, because that is how long it takes to charge a Cybertruck, even on a supercharger. And then you’ve got to go back and re hook it up to whatever it is you are towing. So for this poor guy, what was normally a 2 hour trip to the lake with his family to put their boat in the water turned into a 4

hour trip. And speaking of charging issues, a lot of Cybertruck owners have reported slow charging, especially in cold temperatures. Now that doesn’t surprise us because we’ve talked about how batteries do not like to charge in cold weather. That’s true on all EVs. But the Cybertrucks, even on a level two charger at their homes in warm weather, are not charging the way they’re supposed to. been leaving them plugged in overnight and they may only have a 50 % or less charge in the mornings.

The complaint also extends to the power door for the charging port. It likes to get stuck about halfway open, halfway closed, so it won’t do either. And enough owners have complained that you cannot Google without coming up with hundreds and hundreds of incidents of this happening to Cybertruck owners. So it’s just basically a giant metal box that you cannot use for proper truck things.

It’s almost as if Tesla looked at actual pickup trucks and said, hey, let’s do the opposite of all of that.

let’s turn to safety because of course we have to look at safety. The Cybertruck was dubbed a death machine after a couple of fatal crashes shortly after the truck hit the roads in late 2023. And that was before the vehicle was third party tested for crash test safety. Modern cars are designed with what’s called

crumple zones, they absorb the impact in a crash to keep the occupant safe. The body panels literally crumple up, they bend, they fold, they may go flying off, and that’s all to dissipate the energy so it doesn’t translate directly into the cabin and crush the driver and the passengers. It’s physics. The Cybertruck stainless steel body does not have crumple zones.

Instead, it relies on a stiff exoskeleton to redirect the energy in an impact. And early on, safety experts were very skeptical of that. They were concerned that the rigid panels would actually transfer all of that energy directly into the cabin and cause severe injury or death to anyone inside. when the National Traffic Highway Safety Association did their independent testing of the Cybertruck,

they did give it five star rating for everything except the front passenger collision test. That only got four stars. But it’s still a good rating and that’s good news for anyone inside the Cybertruck in an accident. Everyone else involved? Not so much. In a collision between a normal vehicle with traditional crumple zones and a very rigid Cybertruck? Yeah, the Cybertruck is definitely gonna win.

And pedestrians? They’re toast. You hit somebody with a Cybertruck and they are going to go flying like a ragdoll. The Institute for Highway Safety has stated that any vehicles with a tall or front end, they’re obviously going to be more deadly in a collision with a pedestrian or a bicycle compared with vehicles that are shorter and have more sloped hoods. That is not surprising. Again, that’s just physics. But the Cybertruck’s really stiff stainless steel exoskeleton

makes it even more deadly to anyone or anything that it hits. And that’s probably one of the reasons that it’s on average 45 % more to insure than other trucks on the market. And that very blunt front end, it causes snow to build up and completely cover the headlights. So if you’re driving a Cybertruck while it’s snowing, especially really snowing, you’re going to have to plan to pull over

regularly get out of the truck and wipe the snow off the headlights. Oh, so safe and convenient. then there’s the whole catching on fire thing. But you know, I’m not even going to go into that. Let’s just say it gives a new definition to the term dumpster fire.

Finally, let’s look at the cost. Remember in 2022 when Elon promised that the Cybertruck would start at $39,900? Yeah, what happened to that?

The cheapest one starts at $80,000, and that’s before you add on the extended range battery, self-driving mode, any of those extra bells and whistles. Maybe that’s why sales have failed to top 39,000 units in the last year, despite a sales goal and manufacturing capacity of 125,000 units. Meanwhile, the Ford Lightning and the Rivian R1T are similarly priced,

but better built and hey, can actually function as trucks. But you know, go ahead, spend more money to drive a stainless steel pyramid on wheels. That’s your choice. I don’t care. And at least it qualifies for the $7,500 federal tax credit while those are still around. But hint, so does the Ford Lightning.

So there you have it folks. The Cybertruck is overhyped, impractical, overpriced, and just plain ugly.

And while I can look past the impracticality, the steep price tag, and even its resemblance to a dumpster, it just doesn’t do what Tesla promised it would do. And that is my biggest problem with it. When a business doesn’t deliver on its promises to its customers, especially on such an expensive product, I get a little upset. It’s just an integrity thing. As a business owner, I believe that you should under-promise

and over deliver if you want to have a good customer experience and build brand loyalty. But the bottom line is the Cybertruck is not an actual truck. It is a gimmicky toy. If that’s what you want it for and you can afford it, go for it because it does have some really cool gimmicks. The lights can do all sorts of funky things like put on a light show. So if you wanted to say, hold a pop-up rave in a parking lot, that’s the perfect vehicle to do it in.

It can double as a movie screen. You can project images, even movies, onto the body panels. Especially that flat rear bumper makes a nice movie screen. You can even have a romantic setting in it. The big screen inside can be set to campfire and some other mood images and sounds and combine that with some sexy music and hey, you got a nice romantic setting there.

Not that you’re probably gonna get a lot of romance accomplished inside that truck. It’s just not that roomy, but maybe that’s a good use for the oddly shaped bed or maybe on top of that tonneau cover that can supposedly hold 300 pounds. So that’s not really sure how I would want to test that. But anyway, if you want an actual electric truck, would looking at the Ford Lightning or the Rivian. None of them are perfect. They’re all going to have reduced ranges when you’re towing.

That again is just physics, but they are much better vehicles. And if you just want a conversation piece, may I suggest to use DeLorean. They are available on the secondary market. They’re about the same price, mind you, but they’re a lot less likely to get vandalized. But if you are looking to dump your Tesla and get into something different, be sure to check out my online car buying course, The No BS Guide to Buying a Car – Your Inside Track to Getting the Best Deal.

You can find that on my website, TheCarChick.com or directly at CarBuyingCourse.com. All right, folks, that is it for today’s episode of The Straight Shift. Don’t forget to subscribe and let me know what you think about the Cybertruck. Do you hate it? Do you love it? Do you dare defend it? If you own one, do you regret that purchase or are you still loving it despite the issues that they have? Until next time, folks drive safely and

maybe stay away from stainless steel dumpsters on wheels. I’m outta here.