As it turns out, there’s much more to the Tesla Cybertruck than its otherworldly stainless-steel origami styling. At the test track, I discovered that the Beast’s 834-horsepower tri-motor powertrain can propel it to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds and then carry on to finish the quarter-mile in 11.0-seconds at 119 mph. I later drove it on a 75-mph range test and found that it has a road-trip range of some 250 miles.
But the daily-drive experience is arguably more interesting, and that’s down to the Cybertruck’s steering and suspension. Of these, the steering is the most unconventional, as it’s a steer-by-wire system that will turn from lock to lock in less than a full turn of the handwheel—which is essentially a yoke with an upper crossbar. I found it to be ridiculously intuitive and easy to get used to, even though I’d written it off as a joke before I actually drove the truck.
The suspension is surprising too, because in 500 miles of driving I came away thinking that the Cybertruck is the smoothest-riding vehicle in Tesla’s lineup. How can this be? After all, it has 35-inch LT tires that run at 50 psi? It’s all down to a well-tuned fully independent suspension that consists of standard height-adjustable air suspension and adaptive Bilstein shocks.
This is a truck, however, and it is designed to be taken off-road, so I also ran the Cybertruck up my 20-degree ramp to measure the flexibility of that suspension in a frame-twist situation. How did it do? What does the suspension look like? Check out the video to find out. And apologies in advance for some of the audio. My microphone cable developed an intermittent short and we had to revert to camera audio for some of the shots.
Dan Edmunds was born into the world of automobiles, but not how you might think. His father was a retired racing driver who opened Autoresearch, a race-car-building shop, where Dan cut his teeth as a metal fabricator. Engineering school followed, then SCCA Showroom Stock racing, and that combination landed him suspension development jobs at two different automakers. His writing career began when he was picked up by Edmunds.com (no relation) to build a testing department.