“Is that real?” A woman is standing next to the 2024 Tesla Cybertruck outside a hotel in Venice, California, and she’s 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 seemingly been in the news 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 nanoarmor for the ol’ fusion recombiner back at the gorgon 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, you need only roll down the windows to get an earful of public sentiment. One guy on a bike rides past and yells, singsongy, “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 from the Lamborghini Huracan STO. It has steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire, and its low-voltage architecture is bumped up to 48 volts from the typical 12. The truck’s various sensors and controllers communicate over an internal “etherloop” network that Tesla claims dramatically reduces the amount of wiring needed for communication among the various subsystems in the truck. The power tonneau cover for the bed is lockable and strong enough to stand on. And then there’s that stainless-steel skin, which is dent-resistant and strong enough 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.
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 turns lock to lock. (The Cybertruck’s tiller is rectangular, essentially a yoke with a top bar.) While variable-ratio steering can be accomplished mechanically, it’s more elegant to handle electronically. 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 quieting down because you don’t need to issue small corrections to follow a straight line, and the total range of steering is less than one turn lock to lock. The rear-axle steering plays a role, too, 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 nimble enough already. 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 who’s 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 the 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—the casting can be reconstructed ahead of the demolished parts. As for the body itself, a rogue grocery-store shopping cart will not be a problem. But if you do manage to mangle a panel, just bolt on a new one.
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 scour 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 scrubbings. One thing that Tesla says won’t put a hole in your door: subsonic ammunition. We did not test that claim.
But we did test the metal itself, by heading to C & M Metals, a recycler in Los Angeles. Tesla hasn’t specified the Cybertruck’s alloy formulation, but metal recyclers make it their business to know exactly what they’re paying for. At C & M, co-owner Todd Monroe points his XRF spectrometer at the Tesla’s front end and gets immediate confirmation that this is, metallurgically speaking, good stuff, sort of like a 301 or 303 alloy but not exactly either one. “It’s got a lot of nickel, lot of chromium. This is what you’d call an industrial stainless steel,” Monroe says. Okay, so what’s the bottom line? “I’d give you 50 cents a pound for it,” he says.
This truck, a Cyberbeast Foundation Series model, costs a bit more than that, checking in with a $121,985 retail price. That’s about as much as you can spend on a Cybertruck, and it nets the 834-hp tri-motor configuration—two at the rear, one at the front. Dual-motor versions with 593 horsepower start at $81,985, and next year a rear-drive Cybertruck is promised with a starting price of $62,985. The Foundation Series, a $20,000 upcharge, gets Full Self-Driving capability, and all Beasts have an electronic locking front differential—neither was enabled on this early-build truck though. (Dual-motor trucks get a locking diff at the rear, too, but the Cyberbeast’s dual rear motors take care of that need.) After so many years of anticipation, Tesla apparently decided to just start building trucks and push updates later.
For now, there are some grayed-out options on the dash-dominating touchscreen, which controls nearly every function on the truck. (A few primary controls, like the turn signals and the windshield-wiper button, are on the steering yoke.) The screen works well, given the multifarious tasks assigned to it. Among them is a rearview mirror function, since the deployed tonneau cover completely covers the rear window. Video rearview mirrors usually make us want to barf, but this one doesn’t, perhaps because it can take up about a quarter of the 18.5-inch screen and doesn’t require intense scrutiny. The touchscreen is also your means of selecting the different drive modes and ride heights from the air springs, which can lower the truck for ingress and egress or give it 16.0 inches of ground clearance in off-road Extract mode. There’s still some tuning to be done there too—the truck automatically lowers when you open a door, which Tesla belatedly realized is not the hot ticket if you’re off-roading.
Beast mode is aptly named. Besides that scorching 2.6-second 60-mph time—accompanied by tortured howls off the line from all four Goodyear Wrangler Territory RT all-terrain tires—the Cybertruck cleared the quarter-mile in 11.0 seconds at 119 mph. We saw a top speed of 131 mph, and the truck felt completely stable at Vmax. Tesla claims that the truck generates some rear downforce, a pickup-truck stat as unusual as its 0.34 coefficient of drag. That figure is aided by a flat underbody, which is a big reason the Cybertruck carries no underbody spare tire; an available spare tire mounts in the bed. We’d bet Tesla could have figured out how to stash a spare—there’s an under-bed trunk area near the tailgate, Honda Ridgeline–style—but maybe that was one engineering challenge too many. We get the idea that the powder-coated aluminum tonneau cover alone caused some sleepless nights after it was rolled up and down 10,000 times. With sand in it.
The Cyberbeast’s skidpad figure—0.75 g—is decidedly more trucklike than its straight-line performance, and not all that surprising given the weight and the all-terrain rubber. In fact, maybe it’s surprising that it’s that high. Thanks to its gross vehicle weight rating of 9169 pounds, the Beast is technically a heavy-duty truck, and those don’t typically post superlative skidpad numbers.
Heavy-duty trucks also don’t require EPA range numbers, but Tesla decided to use the same light-duty EPA methodology anyway. We found Tesla’s numbers in line with the performance of other electric trucks, which is to say our 75-mph highway test nets a lower-than-claimed range. Tesla pegs the Beast’s range with the all-terrain tires at 301 miles, while we saw 250 miles in our 75-mph test. That’s better than a Ford Lightning Platinum (230 miles) did in our test but not as good as the quad-motor Rivian R1T (280 miles) and a dual-motor R1T Performance (280 miles) or the Hummer EV Edition 1 Pickup (290 miles). Tesla claims up to 340 miles of range for the 593-hp dual-motor Cybertruck. If you want to use some of that 123.0-kWh battery capacity to run your house, the Cybertruck is the first Tesla that can power-share through its charge port to provide 11.5 kilowatts of backup power, while the four 120-volt and single 240-volt outlets in the truck can provide a maximum of 9.6 kilowatts.
Ultimately, the Cybertruck is a practical machine in an improbable wrapper. It’s the quickest truck we’ve ever tested, yes, but compared to existing electric trucks it mostly represents a difference in degree rather than kind. Its 11,000-pound towing capacity is about what you’d expect. It goes about as far as you’d expect on a charge. The Cybertruck is chock full of clever and original engineering, but most of it is directed toward solving problems Tesla created for itself. Like, the 48-volt electrics allow that huge windshield wiper to be driven by a relatively small motor, but you could also just not have a single huge windshield wiper (which incidentally works better as an aerodynamic aid than it does a wiper; at highway speeds it shifts two degrees downward from vertical to reduce drag by 1 percent). Steer-by-wire is novel, but millions of cars are cruising around just fine with mechanical connection to the steering rack. And dent-resistant body panels are nifty, but Saturns didn’t require a stockpile of Bar Keepers Friend.
The good news is that the learnings from the Cybertruck will inevitably migrate to other Teslas, perhaps ones with a more widespread audience. Because as much as we love weird machines, and as much as Tesla die-hards regard the Cybertruck as the inevitable template for all future pickups, it’s hard to see the Cybertruck becoming a mainstream hit. Even some reservation-holders we met were lukewarm upon seeing it in the gleaming metal. One woman said, “Am I still going to want this in four years, or whenever my reservation comes up? It’s losing its luster for me. I mean, $100,000—I could buy a boat.” In other words, another purchase more discretionary than necessary.
To want a Cybertruck, you have to love the brand of attention that that Cybertruck brings and be willing to live with that even once it becomes a semi-normal sight on American roads. The Cybertruck requires full commitment to not taking anything too seriously as an all-encompassing aesthetic and worldview, on a level that obviates anything going on under the skin—nobody is saying, “I hate the way this looks, but I really love 48-volt electrical systems and steer-by-wire, so I’m gonna buy one.” Not everybody wants to drive a piece of rolling performance art, but those who do will be happy to find that they also got a really good truck.
Specifications
Specifications
2024 Tesla Cybertruck Beast
Vehicle Type: front- and rear-motor, all-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 4-door pickup
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $101,985/$121,985
Options: Foundation Series (20-inch Cyber wheels with 35-inch tires, White décor, off-road light bar, premium accessories, Powershare home backup, Powershare mobile adapter, universal wall connector, Full Self-Driving capability, lifetime premium connectivity), $20,000
POWERTRAIN
Front Motor: permanent-magnet synchronous AC, 276 hp, 320 lb-ft
Rear Motor: induction AC, 284 hp, 544 lb-ft
Combined Power: 834 hp
Combined Torque: 740 lb-ft
Battery Pack: liquid-cooled lithium-ion, 123.0 kWh
Onboard Charger: 11.5 kW
Peak DC Fast-Charge Rate: 250 kW
Transmissions: direct-drive
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: control arms/control arms
Brakes, F/R: 13.8-in vented disc/14.0-in vented disc
Tires: Goodyear Wrangler Territory RT
LT285/65R-20 123/120H M+S TO
DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 143.1 in
Length: 223.7 in
Width: 80.0 in
Height: 68.5–76.6 in
Passenger Volume, F/R: 62/57 ft3
Front Trunk Volume: 7 ft3
Underbed Storage Volume: 3 ft3
Curb Weight: 6901 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 2.6 sec
100 mph: 6.9 sec
1/4-Mile: 11.0 sec @ 119 mph
130 mph: 14.5 sec
Results above omit 1-ft rollout of 0.3 sec.
Rolling Start, 5–60 mph: 2.8 sec
Top Gear, 30–50 mph: 1.5 sec
Top Gear, 50–70 mph: 1.8 sec
Top Speed (gov ltd): 131 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 176 ft
Braking, 100–0 mph: 367 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 0.75 g
C/D FUEL ECONOMY AND CHARGING
75-mph Highway Range: 250 mi
DC Fast-Charge Time, 10–90%: 50 min
C/D TESTING EXPLAINED
Ezra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He’s now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.