2024 Tesla Cybertruck review: first international drive

Having completed the hilarious nomenclature that is the Tesla line-up – Models S, 3, X and Y – Elon Musk has delivered his biggest joke of all: the Model Why? Or, as it’s more commonly known, the Cybertruck.

It’s hard not to be offended by the existence of this wildly otiose and onanistic assault on the senses, a three-tonne pick-up truck/Mars explorer (Musk has declared a desire to die on Mars: “but not on impact”) made of stainless steel and clearly designed by someone whose idea of beauty reflects too many hours staring at a Rubik’s Cube.

What was even harder was driving it and discovering that, in many annoying and unexpected ways, it is something of an engineering triumph. And, as long as you’re not foolish enough to explore the limits of its claimed 630kW and absurd 13,959Nm of torque – allegedly enough to send this giant fridge-freezer on wheels to 100km/h in 2.7 seconds – it’s also surprisingly good to drive.

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What those numbers immediately raise, again – just as the radically pointy and visually unsafe design does – is the question of why?

Yes, in an electric vehicle this big (2.03m wide, 1.8m high and 5.68m long – a standard Australian car space is only 5.4m), you can fit a whopping 123kWh battery, and yes, you’ll need it to get this much metal anywhere near its claimed 547km of range.

But why would you even think about making a truck this big, that fast? I asked some Tesla people at the launch drive in California and their only responses seemed to be slightly embarrassed shrugs and the occasional “umm, because we can”.

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Tesla’s unique approach to such things seems to be based on the mindset of teenage boys, who don’t have the brain capacity to fully comprehend long-term outcomes and act in rash ways that will later come to horrify their adult selves.

In terms of its absurdly potent acceleration, the fact is you’ll only want to try it a couple of times – unless you’re a teenage boy or some other kind of hooligan – before you find yourself hugely overwhelmed, and possibly frightened.

Yes, it is a shocking thrill the first few times you punch the accelerator (hopefully the Cybertruck you’ve bought has one that doesn’t stick to the floor when you do so, a problem that led to thousands of Cybertrucks being recalled recently) and feel all that mass leaping forward in a manner that is redolent of Musk’s favourite film, Spaceballs, and its much-memed Ludicrous Mode.

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The world goes a bit blurry, your lunch quickly stirs in your stomach and smacks into your spine, and before you’ve had time to comprehend what’s happening, you’re compelled to go for the brakes, and go for them hard.

The acceleration might be slightly scary, but it’s the sense that you’re not going to be able to stop all this metal from the crazy speed it has so quickly reached that really rattles your brain.

I tried this surge-panic-squeal-halt approach a few times and can report that the brakes are up to the job, but that there is definitely a sense of weight shifting disturbingly forward as you try and pull up.

One also quickly develops a sense that the Cybertruck might just be a lot more enjoyable to drive if you simply never go past mid-throttle openings. To be honest, the mad Beast Mode (as its most powerful setting is called) acceleration is the sort of thing most people will only use to frighten their friends the first few times they take them out.

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It’s a bit like buying one of those flamethrowers that Musk briefly sold online, through his Boring Company, as a “joke”. Fun at first, but after a while somebody is going to get badly burnt.

And the thing is, the Cybertruck can be surprisingly fun to drive if you don’t delve into its more lunatic side. The key to that is its very clever drive-by-wire steering system, which Tesla hails as a world first, even though Infiniti did roll out something very similar on its Q50 back in 2014 (clearly, Infiniti is not as good at PR, marketing or bold claims).

Based, says Tesla, on the systems used to fly jet fighters, this means there’s no mechanical connection between the steering wheel – which is actually a yoke in the Cybertruck’s case – and the wheels.

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In theory, this sounds a bit scary, and in reality you are warned before you attempt to drive the Cybertruck for the first time that you will find it odd, and that you might try to turn the wheels too far and hit something.

With less than one turn lock-to-lock, and the ability of the rear wheels to turn at sharp opposite angles to the front ones, it does create a weird sensation at carpark speeds (the short lock also makes the yoke practical, because there’s never a point where you need to go hand-over-hand and come up with no wheel to hold onto).

But once you’re used to it, it also delivers an incredible turning circle of just 12.5m, or roughly the same as a Tesla Model S but still slightly more than a Toyota HiLux.

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What this means in the real world – or at least in the simulacrum that is Los Angeles – is that you can actually enter carparks and drive-through restaurants without collecting other cars or slicing down trees with the Cybertruck’s sharp edges.

Even more impressively, once you up the pace and the rear-wheel steering tones itself down, the Cybertruck feels almost sporty to drive, with incredibly sharp turn-in and an effortless change of direction, at least in relative terms. You’re still asking what feels like two small elephants stuck together to toy with gravitational forces.

But the more you drive it – particularly through long, sweeping bends – the more fun the Cybertruck is, and that is not something I expected to be reporting.

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In terms of its off-road abilities, the internet is filled with tales of failure, and we only managed to find a section of beach sand to throw it at.

While the initial impression was that we were about to sink to the centre of the Earth, applying the Cybertruck’s massive torque saw us launch up, out and sideways with effortless ease.

There are a huge number of settings for off-road driving, and the air suspension can raise your Cybertruck by 17-inches for rock hopping.

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Considering how upset some owners have been about the fact that every time you touch the vehicle it leaves big fingerprint marks – yes, just like your fridge – you have to wonder just how much rough stuff they’d be willing to throw one of these at anyway.

And then there’s the issue of just how far from town you’ll get in a Cybertruck, particularly if you’re towing something.

Tesla insists its 547km of range is a real thing, and that you can even get as much as 400km while towing something “reasonable” behind it (supposedly you can tow up to 4990kg, and I’m sure it has the torque to do so, but I don’t believe you’d get much further than the end of your street).

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Tesla’s official efficiency claim is 22.4kWh per 100km, but we actually saw an average of 27kWh per 100km over two days of largely urban driving.

Apparently there are quite a few people in Australia who desperately want a Cybertruck, and the official line from the people we spoke to in the US is that they’re keen to make this happen. But with supposedly two million orders to fulfil in America alone, it seems unlikely that a right-hand-drive version is going to go on sale Down Under any time soon.

Frankly, as much fun as it is to drive, I think our roads might just be safer, and more pleasant to look at, if that remains the case.