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
At least you’ll never have to deal with frame realignment after a crash
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?
Elon.
There’s no way that barrel chested mfer is 160 pounds
This seems like guaranteed failure if it goes over nearly any rough road or rapid inckune/decline with a load trailer.
Of course the odds that anyone attaches a trailer is pretty low.
My Volvo has a hitch weight rating of 500 lbs
Yeah. Almost every car has a higher vertical weight limit.
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.
So if I see one parked, I’m hearing I should go hop up and down on the hitch and then run away.
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.
catawampus
I was going to confirm that yes, 5’1" is a typical shortbox. But I first have to say wow…I haven’t heard that word in a very long time. I love it.
In fact, it can’t even tow, because the hitch can just rip off. It’s a useless pile of scrap metal.
I…I’m not sure this is unpopular, so much as it is nit-picky. It would be like saying your favorite nut can’t be honey roasted peanuts simply because the peanut isn’t a nut at all. It’s a legume. Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be arrested for attempted murder if you force fed someone peanuts who had a known nut allergy.
“Your honor I knew he had a nut allergy not a legume allergy.” I’d love to see someone try that in court.
This is absolutely a design decision. They won’t tow, they won’t go off the asphalt, they will mostly climb sidewalks and the only heavy loads they will ever carry will be the ones in their owners’ bellies after family dinner at Olive Garden.
They are oversized crossovers with open trunk and that’s plenty more than their owners need.
Reminds me of an old Miller Hugh Life commercial I loved. Showed an old guy watering his lawn by hand with nothing but a hose while looking at his neighbor’s new SUV (when they were getting popular). The voiceover says: “The only ‘off-road action’ this $60,000 monstrosity will ever see is if its owner accidentally backs over a flowerbed. A real man knows a station wagon when he sees one!”
The cyber truck is a Ute.
Wait? Is the cybertruck a shitty electric camino?
Edit: deleted second electric
This is insulting to the El Camino
EV Camino
In a previous post, somebody called it a name that will forever live in my head:
WankPanzer.
We should start to distinguish the two different styles of trucks by bringing back the term “pickup”.
These smalls trucks can be “pickups” and the truck trucks can be trucks.
After reading your comment I realized I didn’t really know the difference between a ‘pickup’ and a ‘truck’. I found this pretty informative:
While I am onboard with this, it is funny that the article keeps changing terminology and uses ‘pickups’ and ‘puckup trucks’ interchangeably.
Back in my home country, we exclusively called them pickups. “Truck” was used for anything from box trucks to 18-wheelers. But the passenger vehicles with beds were called pickups, regardless if it was a Maverick or an F150. Took a while for me to adapt to calling them trucks in the US.
Yes please.
Just to add… if the Cybertruck, Ridgeline, etc… are trucks, then so is the El Camino…technically. And that is certainly not true.
The El Camino is a coupe utility vehicle, which is like a truck in the same way a three door hatchback is like a atation wagon. Kind of an midpoint between two other more distinct classes of vehicles.
Unibody trucks are still trucks if they can do general truck stuff like haul cargo in a bed and are generally shaped like a truck. They are definilty lighter duty though, which is fine and I wish coupe utility would make a comeback.
The cybertruck is just terrible at being a truck.
I would absolutely argue (and that’s kind of my point) that the Cybertruck…and ESPECIALLY the Santa Cruz is closer to a coupe utility vehicle rather than a truck.
If you can do truck things with it, it’s a truck. You can certainly do more truck things with a Ridgeline than a cybertruck and have it survive.
I think of them like planets.
The Ford Maverick looks like the larger trucks in style but is unibody, so it is Pluto. Looks like a planet, considered by many to be one, but technically a “dwarf planet”
The Santa Cruz is Ceres. Round, definitely planet like, but harder to call a planet.
The Cybertruck is Arrokoth. Few would mistake it for a planet. Weird looking, misproportioned, and way out there…
Car classification seems to change all the time. As a non-car person I can’t keep up.
For me this is a truck:
But all the other classifications also change all the time. In 20 years a Cybertruck lookalike is probably a limousine or a compact car.
That’s a European lorry, American trucks don’t have a flat nose.
(I am somewhat kidding)
That’s clearly a Japanese truck.
I never understood how the “X” was an SUV.
the x is for crossover, i think
Whistlin Diesel broke his truck waaaayy sooner than expected because of the uni-body.
