Well, it’s finally happened. The Tesla Cybertruck has gone on sale, officially launched at a customer handover event hosted by Elon Musk in Texas. Has a new vehicle ever polarised so much, or been as highly anticipated, as the Cybertruck? Say what you want about it. Love it. Hate it. Attack it with metal balls. Laugh at its giant windscreen wipers and its questionable panel alignment. Marvel at its Back To The Future Part II design. But whatever you think or say, you can’t ignore it. So, here are the things you really need to know about Tesla’s most polarising car. Jump to the bottom to see the Cybertruck’s pricing and technical details
It was 11 years in the making… and four years late
Tesla is, of course, more than one man. But it stands unique as a car company with a billionaire impresario, in Elon Musk, who acts as the brand’s town crier - usually via the social media platform he owns, X. It was 11 years ago that Musk began publicly navel-gazing about the idea of building a Tesla pickup truck, finally saying in 2018 that it would be ready the following year. This week, four years late, it arrived.
The hype train was unstoppable
The 2011 ‘announcement’ began the sort of hype that made no sense in the context of a company that back then was only producing the Tesla Roadster – a hollowed-out Lotus Elise with an electric motor in it, basically. Yet, via a series of Musk-y public musings, teaser pictures and, eventually, a disastrous unveiling in 2019 (we’ll come to that), the Cybertruck quickly became the most famous non-existent car in the world.
The 2019 launch event was a disaster…
So yes, the infamous 2019 launch event. On November 21st, a packed crowd in the Tesla Design Studio in California watched as Elon Musk wheeled out a Cybertruck, to the sort of collective fervor usually reserved for a new iPhone, or a man walking on water. “We have a car here that experts said was impossible,” said Musk at the event. “It’s the most unique thing on the road, and finally the future will look like the future.” Musk later tasked Cybertruck designer Franz von Holzhausen with demonstrating the car’s bulletproof glass by lobbing metal balls at the windows. He did. Two of them. Each broke a window. “Maybe that was a little too hard,” said Musk through nervous laughter.
…but the subsequent publicity couldn’t have gone much better
Despite the launch event – or more likely, because of it – the Cybertruck quickly became the most contentious car on the planet. Very few new cars are truly idiosyncratic these days, but whatever you make of it, the Cybertruck is splitting the community into two camps. It’s almost impossible to be ambivalent about it. Every new picture, every video clip, every nugget of information about the Cybertruck has created opinion one way or the other. As such it’s developed near-mythical status.
Cyber Smash Oops
Tesla hasn’t quite delivered on what Elon Musk promised
Back in 2019, Elon Musk promised that the Cybertruck would offer “500 or more” miles of range on a single charge, and be priced at around $40,000. None of the versions announced on the company’s website this week have accomplished that. Full specs are below, but the closest any Cybertruck gets to 500 miles is 30 miles shy, and that’s when a detachable ‘range extender’ battery is plonked into the loading bay. Which takes up a significant amount of space, of course. The cheapest Rear-Wheel Drive version will be $61,000 when it turns up in 2025 too, with today's AWD model costing $80,000 - twice what Musk was aiming for.
Its stainless steel body panels are dent-proof and corrosion resistant
The styling of the Cybertruck is partly a practicality feature, we’re told. The stainless steel “exoskeleton” is unpainted and the panels designed to resist dents, scratches and bird poo. But if they do get damaged, they’re “simple and quick” to repair because there are no folds or unusual shape-moulding to deal with. And if you don’t like silver, Tesla will wrap them for the low, low cost of just $6500.
It has confusing doors
You might have noticed a distinct lack of door handles on the side of the production Cybertruck. That’s because the doors open by pressing a barely visible button on the bottom of the window pillars. Don’t worry though, the doors will open automatically when the driver approaches with the key – a feature introduced with the Tesla Model X
It has a comically large windscreen wiper… and Elon doesn’t like it
The Cybertruck’s windscreen is so massive that the wiper is longer than…well, the wait for a Cybertruck. The 2019 Cybertuck (which was technically a concept car at that stage) didn’t have a windscreen wiper, but that was quite literally never going to wash for production. On X, Musk said that “the wiper is what troubles me most… [a] deployable wiper that stows in the front trunk would be ideal, but complex.” That would have driven the cost up, though, so Tesla settled on what appears to be three wiper blades in a row.
It's faced numerous questions about build quality and usability
The two main criticisms of the Cybertruck during its gestation were a perceived lack of both quality and practicality. Posts about badly misaligned panels have been circulating on X for months, as well as one user’s image of a bicycle not fitting into the flatbed, with the front wheel hanging over the tailgate. On practicality, though, Tesla is banking on this being a ‘lifestyle’ product – a left-field luxury car, even - rather than the sort of thing a tradesman would use to pick up bags of cement from Selco Builders Warehouse. And on quality, there’s a good chance that the panels in question were on an early prototype car, and will already have been fixed for production.
More than one million people have put a deposit down for one
The negativity doesn’t seem to have made much difference, because even before this week’s launch event, Tesla had reportedly taken more than one million deposits for a Cybertruck. Sure, they’re just $100-dollar deposits and won’t all transfer to sales, by any means, but it demonstrates the appetite for this 'poorly built and impractical' pick-up truck.
The Cyberbeast has more torque than NINETEEN Lamborghini Aventadors… allegedly
The triple-motor Cybertruck, called "Cyberbeast" in true Tesla fashion, is where things go a bit off-the-wall. Tesla isn’t historically very good when it comes to publishing all the data that most manufacturers do. It tends to talk only in motor counts, battery ranges and 0-60mph times. Still, multiple sources are claiming that the Cyberbeast has 10,296lb.ft of torque. In metric money, that’s 13,960 newton metres, which seems like the sort of number that could uproot the core of the Earth. A Lamborghini Aventador has 720 newton metres. The Cyberbeast will do 0-60mph in 2.6 seconds, which is mad quick, especially for a three-tonne truck, but that torque figure can’t possibly be true, right?
Still, it can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911… while towing a Porsche 911
At the launch event, Tesla showed a video of a Cyberbeast drag racing a Porsche 911, and winning. Nothing too unusual about that. Except that it was towing a Porsche 911 while doing so. However much torque it actually has, as a publicity stunt you have to tip your hat to Tesla for that one.
The Cybertruck is massive risk for Tesla
“We dug our own grave with the Cybertruck,” said Musk in November about the difficulty the company has had in bringing the thing to market, adding that it would take around 18 months for the company to hit its production target of 250,000 trucks per year. If the initial customers respond negatively to the car, it could be that most of those 1,000,000+ pre-orders will be cancelled and the car will be seen as a failure. Ford, Hummer and Chevrolet are just a few of the “legacy” manufacturers launching electric pick-up trucks soon, so the market is going to be tough. Time will tell.
