Tesla Cybertruck has her merits, like it or not

When I recently drove Tesla Cybertruck, the owner said he bought it because his children thought it was cool. The children knew their friends would think too. But when they went to school, all the other students drew their cell phones. Cybertruck was literally too cool for that place. The children told the father that if he took them in the pickup again, they would go down before. This is the perfect parable for this car.

This is an old Tesla promise. The CEO of the US company, Elon Musk, said in 2013 that he wanted to make a pickup to compete with the Ford F-150, and estimated that he was about five years away. Six years later, in 2019, Cybertruck was presented.

People were not just impressed with their appearance – basically a giant, sharp and stainless steel box – but with the presentation itself. Musk has conducted a demonstration of the armored windows, which are not yet available on production models, where Tesla designer Franz Von Holzhausen has played a metal ball. The window broke, so Von Holzhausen threw a ball into another window. She also broke.

Cybertruck delivery of production began in late 2023 more than four years after the premiere. The first units are part of the “Foundation Series”, which is a $ 20,000 package that offers buyers early delivery and some extra features. The unit I directed was one of the Foundation series.

Cybertruck currently has three versions. The basic version has a single engine and rear -wheel drive, which costs from $ 61,000, but is scheduled only to 2025. Tesla estimates that it will have 400 km of autonomy and an acceleration from 0 to 96 km/h of 6.5 seconds.

After that, comes the pickup with double engine and full -wheel drive – which I drove. It costs from $ 80,000. Tesla estimates a 600 -hp 544 km autonomy of 4 to 96 km/h of 4.1 seconds and a towing capacity of 5,000 kg.

Lastly, there is Cyberbeast. It starts at $ 100,000 (R $ 540,000) and Tesla estimates 512 km of range, 845 hp, a payload of 1,130 kg, a trailer of 5,000 kg and a time of 0 to 96 km/h of 2.6 seconds. That’s right: a pickup truck of almost 3,200 kg that can reach 100 km/h in less than 3 seconds. This is impressive or scary, depending on who you ask.

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Cybertruck is extreme, as well as people’s feelings about it, or love or hate it. It is the future or a marker of social regression. It looks like a spaceship or a poorly built refrigerator.

The appearance of the pickup is its most controversial feature. Seeing her personally impressed me a lot. The pickup has a different look, and I can respect it – especially at a time when all Americans direct the same crossover or similar SUV. But I couldn’t set aside concerns about security or feeling that to buy a Cybertruck you must deeply want to be seen. And being seen has a price.

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Everyone looks at a Cybertruck and therefore everyone looks at their driver. You don’t know if they are looking with approval, aversion or penalty. You know that if you make a single error – a sign of delayed steering change, a last -minute track change, a wrong estimate of the size or, Elon free, something worse – you will be this Cybertruck driver. You know everyone is rolling their eyes, thinking about how you should have bought a Toyota Corolla, but your ego didn’t allow it.

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The exterior of the pickup truck is also a grease magnet with its stainless steel. If you touch it, you will leave a mark. To enter, you need to press a button on the door to open it and then grasp it inside so that your fingerprints do not appear outside. To clean the fat, it is necessary to use a stainless steel refrigerator cleaner. It is silly.

The good news is that Cybertruck drives better than it seems. While everyone is gaping with the steel panels sharp enough to cut a chest, the interior looks like you are sitting in a homemade cinema. It is surprisingly serene.

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The windshield is huge, the instrument panel is minimalist and the seats are luxurious. There is an internal light on the summit that matches the light bar on the front and there is a small party trick on the infettranement screen that reproduces the audio of windows breaking at Cybertruck’s debut. There were times when, when driving Cybertruck, I forgot that it was in the car that most caught the eye on the road. These moments were fun.

In “Chill” mode, the acceleration is controlled and Cybertruck slides to speed. There is a “standard” mode that provides a total acceleration of turning the stomach (0 to 96 km/h in 4.1 seconds). There is a little wind noise on the highway when it reaches the top speed, but the noise of the road is minimal.

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Cybertruck’s direction jumps a lot, but it is not hard, and its shape hindered my space perception at first. Its dimensions are hard to understand as I drive – I had to look over my shoulder several times when changing track or slowing down parking maneuvers to make sure it was in the right vacancy.

The mechanics of driving the truck was an arduous task in traffic and traffic lights due to its size and the sensation of the pedal. The accelerator was heavy under my foot, which does not go well with regenerative braking.

Regeneration automatically reduces speed when you take your foot off the throttle, transferring the kinetic energy back to the battery to carry it, and I usually love it. This causes stopping traffic lights to look productive and once stopped you can support both feet on the floor instead of being on the brake. But the weight of the pedal and the slowdown of regeneration make Cybertruck slow, as if it was hard to move and stay in motion.

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The best part of Cybertruck is its maneuvering ability in relation to its size. It has two features that make it infinitely more agile: four -wheel steering and mechanical -binding direction. The four -wheel steering means that all four wheels are stirring, and I team it has swivel wheels in a suitcase. When your wheels turn, you move better.

The by Wire direction is Cybertruck’s best feature, to the point that, whenever I’m in another pickup, missing. In most vehicles, steering wheel answers are mechanically connected to the actual wheels through an axis. Sometimes, especially when parking or curved in tight spaces, you need to spin the steering wheel a lot to point where you need to go.

When the driver gives a steering wheel command in a Steer-by-Wire setup, there is no mechanical connection with the road. Instead, the computer has sensors to measure the position of the steering, the speed of the wheel and a number of other factors, instructing a engine to drive the wheels. This allows the steering relationship to vary constantly, eliminating the need to rotate the steering wheel to maneuver at low speeds.

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Pass from a direction by wire to a normal direction in a large electric vehicle looks like an arduous task. Cybertruck does not facilitate the maneuver of a large vehicle, but makes it easier than most. This is a great advantage.

Cybertruck is not totally excellent or totally bad, like the people on both sides of the debate will say. When you ignore the appearance, context and some of the problematic resources, it is actually a decent vehicle. But, like the owner’s children, the attention I received when driving seemed excessive. There was always pressure not to be an idiot in a giant cheese grater. Even driving the car well, I still wondered what everyone around me thought. If you can tolerate – or even wish – the spotlight, maybe Cybertruck is for you.

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Source: Motor1.com