First off, the looks.
Now there are a lot of different designs for vehicles, and not all appeal to me. The Cybertruck is definitely something that does not really appeal to me. From my viewpoint the design of a vehicle should follow it's function, and the Cybertruck in my mind allows the design to dictate the function of the truck.
The way that the sides of the truck angle down towards the tailgate eliminates using any of the truck bed campers that I'm familiar with, and depending on how fat those come up I might start to worry about them interfering with using a 5th wheel on the thing.
The other big thing that I think would be a issue for me are the sight lines and visibility when driving the truck. Having those wings going down the side of the vehicle can't be great for visibility when trying to back the thing up. And yes, I'm sure they have cameras covering all that space but I prefer not to have to be reliant on a camera to be able to see where I'm going when maneuvering a truck.
The biggest complaint that I have however is that the thing just looks cheap.
I didn't really want to draw a conclusion until I saw one in real life since it's hard to tell from a photograph what something really looks like when you are standing in front of it. Recently however I had a chance to get a look at a couple of these things on a recent trip and having had a chance to see one in person I have to say that they don't look at impressive in real life as they do in the photos.
IT's probably not helped by the body panels looking like most of them are glued on. It's probably due to the way that the thing is all sharp edges and thin lines, but to me it makes it looks like most of the body panels are just glued on to the front and sides of the thing.
Secondly, function.
I'm sure that everybody has seen photos of people wiht Cybertrucks doing "truck stuff" that ammounts to tossing a couple of bags of dirt into the back with a case of water from Costco. That's not truck stuff, that's just vehicle stuff that you can do with anything with a trunk.
And while there are lots of videos with people taking Cybertrucks off road and having them get stuck and breaking down there are as many videos of that happening with normal trucks so a lot of that was stuff that I was willing to just write off as people playing with a new toy and not really understanding how to use a 4x4 off road.
Then a guy on youtube who goes under the handle of Whislingdiesel got his hands on one.
Normally I don't really watch his stuff, but the few videos that I've seen had him taking trucks and just absolutely beating the living hell out of them. When I saw that he got hands on one of these trucks I figured that it would be interesting to see how long the thing survived. And what was interesting is that the took both a Ford F150 and the Cybertuck and did the same thing with each one to see how they hold up.
Now obviously a EV Truck will just murder a conventional one in straight line accelleration and torque, but what kind of shocked the living hell out of me was what happened when they tried to pull the F150 off of a situation where it got stuck and they wind up ripping the entire bumper off of the back of the Cybertruck.
And it's not just that the bolts that hold the tow hitch on sheared off and broke, this looks like it tore the end off of the frame that the truck and I don't see how you can fix that without replacing the entire body of the truck.
Now, I'm pretty sure that pulling something with a truck is pretty basic "truck stuff", I use my truck to tow trailers, and to pull sumps and such out of the ground all without any problem.
There's a lot of stuff done in that video that would normally never happen, but hooking up one truck to another to pull it out of a place where it's gotten stuck is not something that I would have thought would result in the entire bumper and it's casting getting torn off the back of the truck.
The air-ride problems, the tonneau cover, even the doors coming apart when slammed, those are all things that I can't see happening during the normal course of using a vehicle, but the problems with the bumper - that's something that would be a concern. They point it out in the video - what happens if you have a trailer with a heavy load on it and that happens to hit a pothole while you are towing it?
I have other concerns with the steering being drive by wire and so much being tied into that central screen, but that's common on all of the Tesla vehicles.
Personally what I want is just a EV powertrain in the same type of truck that I have now. I don't need a huge screen to control the functions on my vehicle. The controls work, the layout works, hell I don't even need the thing to look any different. Just give me a electric version and I'm going to be pretty happy with that.
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