The Tesla Cybertruck Engineering Teardown Is Finally Happening
It’s time to find out what makes this thing tick and see how it really compares to other electric trucks.
Tesla Cybertruck deliveries began months ago and there's still a lot we don't know about the electric pickup. That makes sense, seeing as most customers aren't engineering experts willing to tear their $100,000 EV apart. Sandy Munro meets those qualifications, however, and he's picking the Cybertruck to pieces on the Munro Live YouTube channel for everybody to see.
Now, let me start by saying Munro is a long-tenured automotive analyst with his own reverse-engineering company, Munro & Associates. He also admitted to owning Tesla stock and profiting from it big-time in the past. That's not to say these videos will be heavily skewed in Tesla's favor, and he has indeed been critical of them in the past, but I wanted to put that out there.
The Cybertruck that Munro acquired is a Foundation Series model with the tri-motor Cyberbeast powertrain. It cost a little more than $121,000 according to the Monroney, and for that money, you get 845 horsepower and 320 miles of range from a 123-kilowatt-hour battery pack. It's the top dog with the misnomered Full Self Driving suite, and you can tell it's brand-spankin' new because there are no aero discs on the wheels—Tesla paused shipment of those as it tries to find a way to keep them from cutting into the truck's tires.
We're not here for a communal spec sheet reading, though. We're here to learn what's underneath this truck and find out how its engineering and manufacturing techniques compare to its rivals. It's a lifestyle vehicle, more in line with the Rivian R1T and GMC Hummer EV than the Ford F-150 Lightning, no matter what's mentioned in the marketing materials. It's an expensive toy and Munro will hopefully assess it as such.
Expect Munro to get granular with things as he measures tolerances, evaluates body panel integrity, and scrutinizes all the parts the average person would never attempt to see with their own eyes. It'll be valuable to hear from someone with real experience in this field because up to this point, we've mainly just seen people shoot at the thing with .50 cals. Not that those tests are completely useless, but let's be real—they kind of are.
I'm not entirely sure what to expect in terms of positive or negative reviews, but Munro's first impressions seem optimistic. You can watch the series intro video here:
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