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.
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.
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.
I’ve seen teslas with a bike carrier mounted to the hitch… if one were to put two e-bikes on the carrier it would be at capacity or close to it weight wise.
So if I see one parked, I’m hearing I should go hop up and down on the hitch and then run away.