Tesla delivered its first Cybertrucks — somewhere between ten and twelve of them — on 30 November 2023, four years after Elon Musk unveiled the angular stainless-steel pickup and cracked its “unbreakable” window on stage. Six weeks later an early owner has published the first defect report, and it is about what anyone who has watched Tesla launch a new model would expect.
What the owner found
The owner, posting under the name Nan, had driven about 80 kilometres when the problems showed. The exterior panels beside the truck bed do not line up — panel gaps, the recurring complaint about Tesla’s build quality, made more visible by a body of flat, unpainted steel where every misalignment catches the light. The right turn-signal control also misbehaves. Nan was careful to add that the steering and acceleration are excellent; the complaints are about assembly, not engineering.
What the truck is
The Cybertruck’s body is stainless steel, which Tesla says does not scratch or dent and never needs paint. The bed is six feet long and four wide; payload is about 2,500 pounds and towing capacity 11,000 pounds. Three versions are priced at $60,990, $79,990 and $99,990, and more than two million people have paid deposits — a queue that, at Tesla’s current build rate, will take years to clear. The first road accident came quickly too: on 28 December a Cybertruck collided with a Toyota Corolla on Skyline Boulevard in Palo Alto. The Corolla was damaged; the truck, in a detail that will become part of its marketing, was not.
Why early defects were likely
Every new Tesla has shipped with fit-and-finish problems in its first months — the Model 3 and Model Y famously so — and the Cybertruck is a harder manufacturing problem than either: flat stainless panels cannot be pressed into forgiving curves, they show every millimetre of error, and the factory line is new. Tesla’s pattern is to fix such issues over the first year of production and to repair early cars under warranty. Anyone with a reservation number in the six figures has, in effect, opted to wait for that.
The view from here
No Cybertruck will be registered in Bangladesh for a long time — it is left-hand-drive only, 2.2 metres wide, and the import duty on a $100,000 vehicle would roughly double the price. But its problems are instructive for the electric cars that are arriving here, from BYD, MG and others: build quality, not battery chemistry, is what an owner lives with every day, and it is the thing to inspect before signing.
Source: Daily Mail, via Prothom Alo.
