When Tesla actually manages to sell a Cybertruck or two, the vehicles seem to be blowing motors, serving briefly as boats, falling apart, bricking themselves, and getting flipped off. But if you actually try to use your six-figure electric pickup truck as a truck you have more to worry about than a few rude hand gestures as towing will cause the aluminum frame to fatigue and break. The YouTube channel JerryRigEverything prides itself on the testing of industrial design to its absolute limits. Channel host Zack Nelson builds things, supports DIY-ability, and tears apart cell phones, tech equipment, and more for the entertainment of his millions of followers. This week he decided to crunch his own Cybertruck to prove once and for all what kind of weight the Cybertruck’s rear subframe can handle. Is it actually capable of towing 11,000 pounds like Tesla says? To find out, he hooked up a pull scale and added force with the arm of an excavator to measure its breaking point.
Tesla was very proud of its innovative “Gigacast” which is uses to form large sections of a car in a single piece, and decided to create the rear subframe of the Cybertruck from a single large piece of cast aluminum. If you know much about cast aluminum, it is much cheaper than forged or milled billet, but that expense comes with a trade off in quality and longevity. Cast aluminum forms when molten metal is poured into a mold, and is allowed to cool and solidify. There’s no mechanical force exerted on the aluminum to give it more density and strength, and thus it is more prone to cracks and failures. It’s typically fine enough for car subframes, unless you need to put a lot of weight or force into the component, like, say, a few thousand pounds on a trailer hitch.
We already know that the Cybertruck is significantly worse at towing than Tesla’s own Model X SUV, and that towing a Cybertruck on a tow dolly could make it explode, and Tesla’s own engineers admitted that the truck’s 11,000 pound tow rating “isn’t absolute.” But how much weight will the tongue of this ridiculous wedge-shaped truck actually handle? Click the video to find out!
The Snap
“A cast aluminum frame with just 3/16ths wall thickness is just a slap in the face to anyone who bought one of these Cybertrucks,” says Nelson. “Thinly cast aluminum is not enough to hold an 11,000 pound trailer in all conditions, and I’m curious to see how Tesla is going to make this right. The Cybertruck is not a rigid stainless steel exoskeleton supertruck, like it was advertised. It is a soft, supple, porous, Mohs 3 level cast aluminum (truck) with the towing ability of a pop can.”
The Cybertruck’s rear subframe totally shattered with about 10,000 pounds of force on the hitch. Before the Elon fanboys jump in the comments to tell me I’m an idiot because there is a difference between towing capacity and tongue weight, obviously I know this. However, there are certain circumstances in which a significant portion of trailer weight can momentarily become tongue weight, as in road transitions, highway-speed potholes, or the trailer jumping your hitch ball and slamming down on the safety chains. Trucks should absolutely have a pretty serious margin of error built in to their towing capacities to account for improperly loaded trailers, overloaded trailers, road conditions, and potential user error. And that’s to say nothing of long-term viability and accounting for the age fatigue of the metal. For my part, from now on if I see a Cybertruck towing on the highway, I’m giving it a super wide berth for my own safety. This is ridiculous.