There are many reasons to hate the Cybertruck. Looks, shoddy workmanship, flat out performance lies, Man-child business owner, etc…
But my biggest gripe, and this is the unpopular bit, is that in my opinion, it’s not actually a truck at all.
The Cybertruck is a uni-body construction, often called a “car chassis”. It shares that with the Honda Ridgeline, Hyundai Santa Cruz, and a few others. Trucks that are meant to do actual work use a body-on-frame construction because it has more ability to flex and twist when you put a heavy load in the bed or towing something heavy.
To put it simply, if you put a heavy enough load in the back of a uni-body truck, you’re going to lose some traction on the front wheels as the weight will tilt the entire body backwards, whereas real trucks made for work are developed with the bed mounted separately to avoid that issue.
I know that yes, Santa Cruz, Cybertruck, Ridgeline, etc… are still technically classified as a truck. But in my (unpopular) opinion, anything uni-body shouldn’t be classified as one.
Not to mention it’s an entirely aluminum frame that has been shown to shatter instead of bend when overstressed, which is the opposite of what you want when you’re towing a trailer down the road at 65mph
You’ll also break the frame if you hop on the hitch. It has a vertical load rating of 160 pounds and the frame is aluminum. No bending, just breaking. It’s poorly conceived, executed, and implemented from top to bottom.
It has a vertical load rating of 160 pounds
Did literally nobody ever use the tow hitch to jump into the bed or something during development? How does this even happen?
This seems like a guarantee of failure for ANY actual use of the hitch. How is that even legal?
It can PULL more. It just can’t handle much for vertical load. This is true of all Teslas. They are all aluminum frames. This is specifically for things like a cargo or bike rack. The leverage becomes greater every mm away from the hitch the weight is. There’s some question of what a stress test would show. But the problem is there’s no standard distance for those type of racks from the hitch.
Imagine a 10 foot steel bar in the hitch, and you hopped up and down on the end of it. If you weigh 200 pounds, you’re applying roughly 2,000 pounds of effective vertical weight on the hitch. If you do it again only two feet from the hitch, it’s 400 pounds effective vertical weight. What is the actual upper limit of effective vertical weight for a tesla hitch? Likely much more than 160 pounds. But that’s what is put in the manual because they don’t want to warranty the hitch because of the composition of the frame.
The real issue is that the hitch is attached to the frame, and the frame is aluminum. So it’s not the case where you might bend the frame and could then have it bent back to good working order. If you put too much weight on a Tesla hitch, the frame itself will simply fracture.
I don’t think this is all that unpopular of an opinion. It was one of the biggest complaints I saw when the design was first shown. There’s actually a number of trucks I’ve seen out there that aren’t trucks in my opinion, as they can’t just backup and get loaded with whatever to haul off. I use my SUV more as a truck by just dropping the seats than some of these designer minibed raised chassis monstrosities could.
The term “vestigial bed” is the most accurate thing I’ve seen. Tf is the point of a 4 foot bed on a pickup?
I used to have a Ford Explorer Sport Trac, that had a 4.5’ bed and it was a great size for me about 90% of the time. Now I have a monstrous 6.5’ bed, and it’s too big 90% of the time. (The used truck market is extraordinarily bad and I took what I could get.)
Don’t get me wrong, there are still thousands of reasons to find the Cybertruck horrid, but the bed size, I personally would say, isn’t one of them.
I have a short bed Tacoma (5’1” I think) and for almost everything I need it to do it does it. But if I want to sleep in the bed I have to drop the tailgate or sleep catawampus.
Wait? Is the cybertruck a shitty electric camino?
Edit: deleted second electric
In fact, it can’t even tow, because the hitch can just rip off. It’s a useless pile of scrap metal.
