Today I visited a Tesla showroom and delivery center. They had 1 Cybertruck all pretty in the showroom and 5 more on the backlot awaiting delivery. So I was able to review the thing in some depth. And to compare all 6 of of them looking for individual variation in assembly. Conveniently, three were parked right side by side so could eyeball one, then another, then another and back again from umpteen angles.
Here are a series of independent observations not forming an essay.
The CT in the showroom still had the wheel covers on. The outdoor ones did not, although that might have been an overnight anti-theft measure more than something related to the covers’ known issues.
The CTs outside were filthy, as were the other hundred random Tesla models sitting outside with them. It’s been occasionally rainy here in SoCal in the last week or two. Due to the color of the CTs, they show the dirt a lot more than a black, white, or red car does. And they show it differently somehow; we’re used to how a dirty painted car looks, while we’re not really used to how dirty stainless looks. So it appears extra dirty even if it isn’t really.
Overall, the stainless panels fit well together and were straight. I saw none of the odd gapping we’ve seen in pix.
The various black plastic (or whatever) components that surround the tonneau and the roof however were flakier. At the forward end of the tonneau is a black fixed panel about 4" fore-aft and full width of the roof. No two of them had the same gapping on the left and right. One was well-centered, the others were … not. It’s possible that part moves during tonneau extension / retraction which might explain some of what I was seeing. But the slop was ~3/16" ~= 2mm. Which makes a very obvious ~1/4" ~= 5mm gap on one side when the other side is flush with its mating surface.
The interior was very nice and although simple, exuded refined moderno-sleek, rather than “less is cheaper”. The screens (front and rear) were logical and pretty to look at. The rectangular wheel was familiar feeling to me, but I wonder how well it’ll work for lock-to-lock type turns.
The wide flat area forward of the dash up to the base of the windshield is gigantic. It’ll be a great solar heat collector. Which might be welcome on a sunny day in Calgary in Feb, but not so much on a sunny day in July in Texas, Nevada, or Florida. Folks in hot climates will want some sort of heat shield to deploy when parked. Which itself will be ginormous and hard to handle or store in the cockpit. That space will also be a large area that is difficult to keep clean and will soon be dust-encrusted on a lot of CTs. The bottom couple inches of windshield glass will also be very hard to clean.
One of the outdoor CTs had had the windshield wipers run to clear some of the rain spots and dust. The huge wiper is quite impressive, but the amount of the right side of the windshield left untouched would take a lot of getting used to. Bad for the driver and awful for the front seat passenger.
Visibility from the driver’s seat is superb from about 8 o’clock around to 4 o’clock. I couldn’t really evaluate the visibility in the aft third, but probably not much different than more ordinary vehicles. The front is low enough that adult or even tween-sized pedestrians would be immediately visible. A lot of modern pickups can easily have an adult woman walk across close in front of them while being invisible to the driver. That’s dangerous, and not an issue with CT.
The tonneau was open on the showroom model. The bed interior “felt” almost more like a giant car trunk than a truck bed. The feel was “Plenty nice for designer luggage; nobody who cared about their cars would put greasy car parts or bags of mulch in there.” There is a storage compartment under the bed sized about like a small cooler. Nice, but only smallish things could go in there. The bed sides are rather shallow at the rear. With the result that the tonneau won’t close on anything much thicker than ~12" if it extends near to the back of the truck.
Real quickly wandering around them the weirdness wore off and it was mostly just a biggish hatchback. It lost the menacing IFV aspect I thought I saw when I spotted my first one in the wild a few days ago. But the “face” is very low-key / impassive. If a Lexus is trying to imitate a snarling aggressive Darth Vader, this thing is imitating an M1 tank hull. Impassive and implacable. It will do what it wants when it wants and its expression won’t give any warning. Or maybe a policeman in riot gear just standing there doing nothing with face hidden behind a dark shield.
In all I could imagine having one if I decided to go poseur urban assault aggressive with my next move in automotive fashion. And if the darn thing accelerated and handled well compared to the ICE performance cars I’m used to.
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