before we go all the way back I want to start by taking us back just a bit before there was any Kendrick or Drake beef there was another beef that lit up the internet and it centered around the Cyber truck thing was the reason that upset me is you didn't come for me as a person which is fine you came for the Integrity of my journalism let me just catch you up to speed back in December of 2023 haggardi alongside two other large media Outlets that is Top Gear and Maris brownley were given exclusive Early
Access to to the Cyber truck for review Hagerty wisely put Jason kamissa at the Helm of the review and he created one of their best performing and probably most entertaining videos so far as great and as fun and honestly pretty informative as that video was called out the whole production for being void of virtually any criticism of the Cyber truck which honestly hasn't aged too well and Matt from the smoking tire was one of those who voiced their opinion despite being friends with Jason and Jason didn't like this so Matt invited him onto his podcast
where honestly Jason kind of put a whoop down on Matt and I guess he wrote a book about it I don't know now as much as Matt has proven to be a person who does kind of mindlessly criticize Tesla and Elon Musk all of this hasn't actually aged that well for that Haggerty video Jason argues with Matt that he's not biased and he's never taken any money from Tesla which of course obviously that's not how this works the point he overlooked is that when a few to select companies or content creators are given exclusive Early
Access to one of the most anticipated vehicles of the past decade and they're taken through the whole BS thing that journalists are taking through and the company they're working for wants to keep getting that kind of early access there is a sort of pressure to make not only an entertaining piece that gets lots of clicks but yeah you can't be completely unbiased in a situation like that you just can't and that's pretty clear now looking back there is no mention in that flashy haggy video of the failed promises surrounding the cybertruck of the glaring safety
concerns and just silly design choices the dishonest way that they pitted the Cyber truck in a race against a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds more and just a lack of critical analysis around the vehicle as a real life vehicle that actual people are going to use and deal with just go rewatch that Haggerty video now every single part of it feels like a giant Tesla in commercial and so there's a reason that Maris browny's much more boring but critical video got five times the views of the Haggerty one aside from the fact that Maris
brownley has such a massive following it is a more helpful and better review I'm sorry it just is despite having spent time with Elon himself Maris is unwilling to put his integrity at all to the side for anyone and that's why people love him and as much as Matt Farah may have had some of the least thought out takes when it comes to cars he's kind of right about the hackery review it hasn't really aged all that well like when Jason bloviates about Elon having this unconstrained rethinking of the pickup truck as we know it
I mean compare that BS with what Doug deiro just said in his review of the Cyber truck as people have talked about towing capacity and hauling capacity and all of this truck stuff about the Cyber truck and frankly I just think these discussions are moot because people are buying this to be cool that's the whole reason nobody cares about Toes or halls and frankly that's also true of its competitors it literally sucks as a pickup yeah the pickup was fine yes it hasn't changed much in the last 75 years because it doesn't really need to
and whatever this is it isn't the future of trucks because it isn't all that good at anything truck related it's not really that durable not necessarily reliable it isn't all that good off Road it's not good at Towing heavy things or just carrying crap and it will give you the worst range anxiety you can imagine and in the Haggerty video immediately after this bit about Elon rethinking the truck they just go and drag race it and spend a bunch of time pretty much just racing it I just I don't get it and there's so much
more in that video you know Jason points out that Tesla's consistently dropping their prices which isn't exactly true but he also fails to point out that this gigantic failed promise of a vehicle that is the Cyber truck now costs double what Elon promised now I don't want to pick on Jason too much I realized that he got a different level of access to the Cyber truck and to the factory and behind the scenes engineering stuff to make his video but to me the video he made is kind of a video Tesla should have made not
an independent car journalist it's not that these early reviewers should have been able to foresee the Myriad of problems surrounding the cybertruck but seriously there's zero criticism of it in that Hagerty video and I say that as a loyal Hagerty fan but this is a vehicle that may go down as one of the worst in Automotive History now why do I bring up this whole you know debacle well I think it's a good example of just how much the narrative has shifted in the past 6 months when it comes to the Cyber Tru now that
actual owners have the thing and are using it consistently and the sort of cloud of hype is clearing the release of the Cyber truck has been nothing short of a disaster and all 4,000 cyber trucks have just been recalled not because they're breaking in every imaginable way which they are or just because they kind of suck in general it's because the accelerator or come on it's the gas pedal it's sticking this is not the kind of vehicle that you want to have a sticky throttle that's not okay so how did we get here with the
cybertruck in my videos I like to look at how vehicles from history were developed and what we can learn from their stories I'm currently working on a video about the history of the Oscar Meer wiener mobile which I think I would rather daily Drive than the the cybertruck and it also might be the only vehicle that would turn more heads the unanswered question for me surrounding the Tesla cybertruck is how it was developed what were the real motivations how did this monstrosity come to exist and how did it take the shape that it did over
the course of its development and does it have any chance of really succeeding as a truck in the long run I think a video like this will be much easier to make in say 25 years when we know more and more of the behind the scenes details get leaked but I'm going to try to make it right now so sit back and relax because we're going way back for this one it's July of 2012 and the long awaited Tesla Model S has just went into production this would be the controversial electric car company's first mass-produced
production vehicle despite not owning Twitter CEO Elon Musk is tweeting and his tweets are performing pretty well in a reply to his own tweet about the goals surrounding the model S shortly after its release he says this would love to make a Tesla super super truck with crazy torque Dynamic air suspension and Corners like it's on Rails that' be sweet now this is all the way back in 2012 which is pretty interesting two years later in an interview with CNN Elon sounded much more traditional about the potential for an electric pickup stating that it would
essentially be like an electric F-150 but that this wasn't really Tesla's focus at the present Tesla's 2016 master plan did mention a consumer pickup truck but little detail was given and we really didn't know where the company was in terms of actually making an electric truck in 2017 at the Tesla semi and Roadster unveil the various elements were teased that would show up on the Cyber truck things like armor glass but then also Elon showed this which was a truck inside a truck now the thing we should note here as much as the idea of
a truck had been brewing over at Tesla for quite a while we can see here that the idea of the Cyber truck and what it would become wasn't really at all here this is pretty much just a silly concept drawing it's very possible that what we think of as the Cyber truck was pretty much at Ground Zero in terms of being a project even in 2017 now we should have learned our lesson at this semi unveil this whole presentation about the semi was so obviously full of BS and outside of Tesla's capability they weren't in
their Lane anymore with the whole semi thing like sure this semi is going to have 0 to 60 in 5 seconds whatever and what is he saying about regenerative braking making it so that you don't need brake pads you can turn the brakes into generators so every time you break that kinetic energy of braking goes right straight back into the battery pack instead of instead of wearing down a brake pad so the brake pads basically last forever the you never need to replace brake pads ever that makes no sense regardless a move towards making trucks
was happening at Tesla around this time Elon was taking suggestions on Twitter and he talked about making a truck that would be slightly bigger than your average truck to accommodate a gamechanging feature as he says which I guess would maybe be the air suspension referenced way back in 2012 and that did end up on the truck or maybe it would need to be bigger to fit the onboard air compressor more on that in a bit fast forward to the end of 2019 Tesla stock is on the up and Elon is once again tweeting in a
reply to his own tweet about buying fortnite and then deleting it Elon answered a question from one of his Fanboys about the Tesla truck renders that were going around ones like this one and this one you know the ones that actually look like trucks fitting Tesla's design language they're honestly pretty cool anyways he said that the Cyber truck doesn't look anything like what I've seen bouncing around the Internet it's closer to an armored personnel carrier from the future okay see Elon just says stuff so I'm not sure people took this seriously because Tesla designs they've
been pretty conventional up to this point like that's kind of the point to make electric cars that function better than internal combustion cars and they look basically the same you know Teslas just have kind of looked like Mazdas pretty much so what was he talking about with this armored personnel carrier from the future around this time Tesla also filed for a patent for the word cyber trk then in November of 2019 the world watched in awe as Tesla held their most iconic and ridiculous ulous unveil so far the Cyber truck and this date wasn't an
accident in the Blade Runner movie the year and month is November of 2019 rewatching the first cyber truck event is strange it feels like such a long time ago we kind of all forgot about this silly concept vehicle for such a long time kind of like the semi and the Roadster I started watching Tesla's live unveils starting with the model 3 this was a different kind of spectacle though when this thing rolled out on stage I thought it was a joke Tesla has made jokes before during their unveils I really thought this was just a
one-off thing that maybe somebody could buy but that the actual production truck would still be a normal truck but nope this was the Cyber truck but why did it look like this now if someone who knew nothing about Tesla watched this event I think the big takeaway would be that this guy and his company are trying to rethink the truck to make a better truck that's kind of the clear message they'd also probably wonder if this was a cult leader but that's another story Elon talks about how trucks have been basically the same for the
past 100 years the same tagline that was fed to early reviewers for the production cyber truck by the way and he then shows some of the iconic trucks through history expecting us to laugh at these dated designs meanwhile he's showing absolutely iconic Workhorse trucks like the advanced designs and the fourth gen CK yeah who needs those actual trucks he then shows that modern trucks are almost almost indistinguishable if you take the logo off just like every kind of other vehicle including Tesla's in elon's presentation he compares the Cyber truck to the most popular pickup in
the United States and of all time the Ford F-150 which is a worthy competitor right it's kind of the gold standard and has been for decades Elon specifically points out the problems with body onframe design this isn't a new criticism few Vehicles besides trucks today are still body on frame his main point though is that the mass of the traditional truck is on top of the vehicle on top of the frame and with the Cyber truck it's moved to the outside in the form of what he calls an exoskeleton now you'd think okay that means
there's more room on the inside of the vehicle or more bed space right well no in this presentation it's all to serve the purpose of having this quote unquote bulletproof and Sledgehammer proof outside shell that I guess will be loadbearing and really the point of all this is that it's tougher that's the point it's tough like really tough bro it won't scratch it won't dent and then of course you know the iconic armor glass moment but again I'm not exactly sure what any of this has to do with trucks and actually making a better truck
the air suspension is one thing that Tesla delivered on which is pretty cool and in theory would make it better for various uses from off-road to not off-road but as we know it's not really that great off-road in any suspension setup oh and it's important to note that GM has had this technology for a while then in the the presentation we get into the truck stuff Elon said that the Cyber truck would have a 3500 lb payload but the production version has a very standard 2500 lb payload by the way the F-150 has a 3,300
lb payload the Cyber truck would have a 62 foot bed length when the production version is 6 feet you know about the same as an F-150 though slightly thinner and this one's crazy Elon says that it'll be able to tow 14,000 lb for reference the standard F-150 from 2009 19 and still today is just over 13,000 lb want to know what the actual production cyber truck towing capacity is 4 lb no it's not 4 lb it's 11,000 lb Elon then shows the Cyber truck annihilating the F-150 in a pulloff but this is clearly a lower
weight lower spec F-150 making it unable to get any traction and Tesla is good at this like having the Cyber truck race a Porsche in a fake quarter mile the range promises were obviously never going to come true in the real world and on paper the production cyber truck has a fraction of the promised 250 300 and 500 plus mile range in all reality you need to get that gigantic extra battery that takes up most of the bed to get over that 300 mile range Mark oh and he said it would float meanwhile it has
some of the worst panel gaps I've ever seen on a production vehicle and he knew that the panel gaps could potentially be a problem which is why he promised some bull crap about the panels having 10 microns of of tolerances which is just ludicrous the only thing that was under promised not surprisingly was the 0 to 60 which of course we've got to have this gigantic tank be one of the fastest vehicles in the world it's so stupid it's 2.6 seconds for the 0 to 60 instead of 2.9 this will all make sense in a
minute the most random claim was that it would come with an onboard air compressor which would be kind of cool but it didn't of course it would be full self-driving which he had promised at like every single unveil and that crap's never going to happen and it would start at $399 with no incentives when in reality if you want a cyber truck the price starts at over 80,000 and you'll never get it delivered like seriously this truck's going to be discontinued fast forward about 4 years and the first cybertruck delivery is happening and we get
another cybertruck live event this time to celebrate the production of the vehicle out of the two cybertruck events the original unveil and the recent delivery I think most with point to the armor glass incident as you know the funniest or most ridiculous moment but for me it's the part where this silly very Tesla esque promo that plays before this second delivery it's the part where it switches from this futuristic crap to this traditional like truck commercial with shots of blue collar workers using the cybertruck as a truck what the heck but that lasts for like
7 seconds before getting back to the you know the yepy crap in the recent delivery event the tagl line is more utility than a truck faster than a sports car and that's the tagline that Elon for some reason he can't get it quite right that has that's more truck than truck and and so what we have here is is something that is a better truck than a truck while also being a better sports car than a sports car what does that mean in terms of the sports car part in my opinion the places where Tesla
did end up succeeding on some level with the cybertruck is unsurprisingly here that's what Tesla is good at now Tesla definition of a sports car has always been a bit off the traditional definition Teslas aren't really sports cars they just aren't they don't put up good lap times right and they certainly don't follow the long tradition of offering you know that kind of raw sports car feel they're not that kind of fun they're more like modern muscle cars you know incredibly fast in a straight line 0 to 60 you know off the line of course
they're going to beat everything right and that's true of the Cyber truck so no it's not faster than a 911 even in a straight line but again my understanding is the Cyber Tru is somewhat revolutionary in terms of a truck with its carish performance things like steer by wire but how is it as a truck let's talk about the design I want to address some of these claims about the cybertruck's Apparently revolutionary frame design it seems like Elon was kind of hesitantly claiming that this would be something like a monoco frame Versa body on frame
but he doesn't come outright and say that that like he doesn't say this is a monoco he does say it's an exoskeleton what are we even looking at with the Cyber truck like how is it put together Top Gear called it an exoskeleton others have said it's essentially a unibody the question is are those steel panels actually loadbearing as Elon seemed to promise the truth is the Cyber truck seems to be just a unibody construction with no floor same as the model Y which is pretty cool for a truck honestly but far from being an
exoskeleton that form is technically possible on vehicles but that would be quite radical for a production vehicle and especially this kind of vehicle Tesla has done some pretty cool stuff when it comes to frame design and integrating the large batteries in with the car's frame and that is true with the Cyber truck but it's not an exoskeleton the panels don't seem to be loadbearing the Cyber truck is pretty much just like a gigantic model Y in terms of its frame design now for the overall styling of the Cyber truck musk has said that there was
is a heavy inspiration from the Lotus espirit submarine car thing from the movie the spy who loved me as well as vehicles in Blade Runner and just the whole Blade Runner aesthetic now there's no mention of the DeLorean for some reason but come on the DeLorean is an obvious inspiration along with just the wedge designs in general this fits into the wedge aesthetic from the 70s and ' 80s and one of the great influences on these Italian wedge designs that the Cyber truck kind of seems to be emulating is giaro which I'm terrible at pronouncing
his name but it's something like that he's the designer of the DeLorean and the Lotus ESP spirit and he commented on the Cyber truck's design saying that when you step outside of the Norms it's almost always seen as a provocation the cybertruck will surely be successful I'm convinced it will find its admirers now I'm not one to disagree with giogo normally I would applaud such a bold departure from the norm in terms of design if you've watched my channel you've heard me whine about how boring modern automotive design is but good Lord if you're going
to break out of the norm at least make something appealing because you're now kind of free to use those old school beautiful design languages if we can apparently now just use like hard Metals again with sharp edges on our cars then make us like a classically styled vehicle not this thing now let's put the cybertruck design in the context of not only trucks but Automotive History in general because I think this is a bit misunderstood this is something I haven't really heard spelled out I believe that the cybertruck is part of a specific design type
from history that is rarely pulled off well at least in the car world and I don't really think is pulled off all that well here I'm talking about retro design I recently made a video about the Retro car boom of the 2000s if you guys want to learn more about this these were cars that were made with old design language in mind made to look old in at least some sense and though the Cyber truck is a unique approach to this trend it is a retro vehicle more specifically retr futuristic anyone who tells you that
this is a purely futuristic concept the way that Tesla wants to present it is crazy it doesn't really look like you're average futuristic concept vehicle it looks much more old school so there's this story that Elon tells about his son coming to him and asking him why the future doesn't look like the future and that's why there's this tagline for the recent delivery event for the Cyber truck the future should look like the future now the obvious response to his son's question is this well son we don't know what the future will look like that's
it we don't know and the future rarely ends up being what we think it will be and when it comes to automotive design the future is based heavily on regulations and Trends and it even relates to political and cultural events artistic Trends we don't know what's coming in the future so we can't really know what automotive design will be it's complicated it's entirely unknown whenever manufacturers have tried to make cars that have designs from the future they're almost never correct think the futuristic American designs from the 50s or the Italian wedge cars from the 70s
and 80s this design looks much more like what manufacturers in say the 80s thought that the future would look like and Blade Runner is a perfect example of this the Cyber truck is a bold retro design that's it it's what the future was supposed to look like when Elon was a kid growing up and in person having seen about six or so cyber trucks it's not really an appealing design even if the whole idea was executed well but it isn't really executed all that well the cybertruck looks cool from about 2 angles otherwise it looks
like a gigantic Hotel ice machine on Wheels the proportions are way off it's a total eyesore and it's funny and crazy when we see one now but it won't be in 6 months it will be the laughing stock of all vehicles worse than the original Hummer or any of the horrible retro vehicles from the early 2000s especially when there's millions of them on the road and if you buy one because you think people will think you're cool it's it's not going to work out too well in terms of trucks though how does it stand up
to the current crop of what's available and I'm not talking about drag racing I don't care about drag racing Jesus for towing it's pretty comparable at least when it's pitted against other electric trucks but God if you're towing in in any form honestly there's no reason why you would choose the Cyber truck or any electric truck over a traditional you know IC truck it doesn't have a spare tire and most importantly other real truck people aren't going to think you're cool which is the reason why you buy a truck these days I remember this was
my big takeaway when I saw the Cyber truck I just thought about truck culture truck people and just how much truck people are going to hate it when you buy a truck you can bond with other truck people not with this thing I think it's important to know that the Cyber truck project isn't a rethinking of the pickup truck for pickup truck related uses this was Tesla seeing where the lucrative truck Market in America was going that is towards the expensive luxury segment and truck owners aren't really using trucks as trucks anymore so sure they'll
pitch it as a pickup in reality it's just another gigantic luxury SUV a luxury vehicle by the way with incredibly poor quality control and so with the Cyber truck Elon found a way to creatively jump into the big super gigantic Deluxe vehicle Market with a truck that wasn't actually that great at truck stuff and would be appealing to wealthy luxury vehicle enthusiasts this whole bulletproof exoskeleton a new alloy stainless steel it's all just smok and mirrors this is just another very Tech heavy very fast Tesla just with a sillier design language anyone who thinks the
whole Tesla project is about saving the planet at this point is insane the cybertruck is just more silly electric vehicle BS that honestly were all becoming immune to the hyper minimalist interior which at this point just feels corporate and awful the stupidly placed controls the overuse of cameras despite having terrible visibility and the gigantic screen where everything is ran that's not to say it doesn't have some radical technology the 48 volt battery thing is pretty cool the idea of steer by wire kind of kind of hurts my soul on a molecular level not because I
think it's necessarily dangerous but because I still believe there's something special about driving a car and maybe the steer by wire is a cool Innovation but is it an innovation to serve the truck as a truck does it actually help make for a better truck or will it just make things like backing up with a trailer just a worse experience but then there's serious safety concerns not only to those unlucky enough to be on the other side of a crash with a cyber truck but even for those in the vehicle there's a reason cars aren't
made of hard stainless steel anymore and you'd think a company like Tesla would understand crumple zones apparently the first major crash involving a cybertruck and a Corolla left the Corolla completely totaled but the person was uninjured while the Cyber truck looks like nothing happened to it and yet the driver had minor injuries when your vehicle is indestructible you take the brunt of the force versus when your car absorbs the energy modern Automotive manufacturing is constrained by specific safety regulations to ensure this that's why all cars and most trucks are blobs void of most fun design
language it's not that manufacturers don't want to make interesting designs they just can't so I'm not really sure how Tesla got around this the Cyber truck is not available in Europe and it never will be because it's an unsafe design but how can it even be sold in the US I honestly could see a class action lawsuit happening when a cyber truck utterly obliterates a car in a way that no other vehicle could just because of its shape in the material it's made of and now with all cyber trucks being recalled and constant problems like
we've never seen before with a Tesla product one has to wonder what the future of this supposedly futuristic vehicle will look like one thing is clear to me at least I believe this is probably the worst truck to ever come out of a major manufacturer and on top of this why would you want to own a truck from a company willing to sue you if you sell it for me the brooding question with the Cyber truck now is how the heck did this thing go to production in this form and this shape how is this
legal from a major manufacturer there was a small bit in Jay Leno's feature of the cybertruck where fron mentions wanting to get rid of the mirrors altogether and just you know have cameras and there's something really Sinister about the way he words this he says and we just couldn't get their regulations changed not we couldn't get it to pass regulations no we couldn't get the regulations changed did Tesla actually get specific regulations changed for the cybertruck because the way he words that it makes it sound like Tesla apparently has the power and leverage to just
get these governing bodies to just change stuff when they want them to now we do know that the major Automotive manufacturers are somewhat in bed with groups like the EPA for example but how in the world did a massively heavy and sharp edged steel-bodied vehicle pass regulations and safety standards I don't really have an answer for that question I do know that trucks here in the US are not really subject to the same safety standards as other passenger vehicles despite the fact that they're almost exclusively used today as just basically passenger vehicles and despite the
fact that every Tesla Model until the cybertruck has broken records for safety standards which is really something we should applaud them for very little has come out about the Cyber trucks crash test ratings which are not official and that's pretty simply because they don't have to it's a truck and the early footage of testing that we've seen of the Cyber truck is somewhat alarming no Jason kamisa just because you cringely say are you kidding me we're talking about Tesla here I don't care about the name Tesla this vehicle is on the road now and it
has not been tested the same way other Teslas have been now if you don't believe me in all of this just look at Tesla's stock and quarterly earnings 2024 has not been good for Tesla the Chinese EV offerings are slowly taking over Tesla's share of the market the stock price and earnings in general are down the Cyber truck has also been a massive black eye for the company's reputation they recently laid off 10% of their entire Global staff including just nixing their supercharger like group I guess the people that sort of manage all of that
if the Cyber truck does end up failing as massively as it seems it could it could go down not only as the worst truck of all time which I know some of you might laugh at but come find me in 50 years and tell me you couldn't see this thing at the top of every worst car ever list is that more likely or is it more likely that it's a huge success and causes no problems for Tesla in terms of large scale manufacturing and ends up Paving the way for the future I highly doubt it
but more than all of that what if the Cyber truck ends up marking the down fall of Tesla as we know it tell me that story would not make sense maybe this move to making ridiculous huge Vehicles is Tesla's way of doing what every other major American automotive manufacturer has done which is move away from normal cars and sedans to gigantic expensive luxury vehicles that are easier to make because they have less safety standards it could be if you're looking to get a truck just go buy an F-150 okay you will be happy you did
I promise I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below and if you enjoy the video make sure to subscribe we'll see you in the next one drive safe
