Much has been made of the Tesla Cybertruck’s ability (or lack thereof) to do “truck stuff,” with a great deal of social media attention being paid to any whiff of failure. At the center of the controversy is Tesla’s choice to essentially bolt a hitch receiver to its cast aluminum body. Aluminum is strong, sure, but is it as strong as the steel ladder frame found under conventional half-ton pickups? Well, apparently YouTuber JerryRigEverything decided to put the issue to rest with his very own stress test, and even brought along a conventional HD Ram 2500 pickup to use as a “control” for the experiment.
Considering how much these modern trucks can tow, Jerry needed something hefty for this stress test. How does a 50,000-pound excavator grab you? To make sure that the Cybertruck’s nose stays on the ground while the hitch is loaded, they strap it to a handy wheel-loader. By lining the truck up on a concrete loading dock and leveraging down on the hitch with the excavator’s digging arm, he was able to precisely control and monitor the load on the hitch over the course of the test using a simple crane scale (accurate to within 5 pounds, Jerry says). He suggests that the best-case scenario for Tesla would be a failure well north of the 15,000-pound mark—approximately 35% more than its 11,000-pound factory tow rating and more than 13 times its rated tongue weight.
As the load on the hitch crosses the 6,000-pound threshold, Jerry notes that he can hear sounds coming from the Cybertruck, as the hitch starts to visibly deform. Just after it crosses 7,500 pounds, the truck’s alarm system is triggered. At 8,000 pounds, Jerry comments that the truck has started “Creaking like a millennial going down stairs.” Right in my 40-year-old feels, Jerry. Thanks.
At that point, they move the excavator closer to improve its leverage, and start cranking up the load yet again. At 8,000 pounds, it has already performed better than Jerry expected. But not long after they resume, it fails outright at 10,400 pounds. From there, it’s on to the failure “analysis.” The loading area makes it easy to access the rear end of the truck after the test, allowing them to view the carnage up close. An entire aluminum section appears to have been ripped completely from the Cybertruck’s body, tearing apart some structural adhesive in the process. Jerry says the failure appears very similar to what happened to WhistlinDiesel’s Cybertruck, which had sustained impact damage prior to its catastrophic incident. As a bonus, the Cybertruck refused to start after its bumper was not-so-surgically removed, protesting the result with 28 on-screen error messages.
Though the frame failed short of the Cybertruck’s tow rating, it was at a load nearly 9.5 times its rated tongue weight, which is a more accurate measure of how the load was being applied in this stress test. But as Jerry notes later in the video, horizontal towing loads have a funny way of becoming vertical tongue loads under certain conditions, and the effects compound if your trailer isn’t properly loaded, making this test result more applicable to the real world than one might imagine. Still, the Cybertruck’s 1,100-pound tongue weight rating is about right for the half-ton class. So other trucks would likely perform about the same, right?
Well, that brings us to the part many of you have probably been eagerly awaiting: the control test, as performed by a Dodge Ram 2500 HD. It’s a 20-year-old truck with a steel hitch receiver bolted to a steel frame. This junker doesn’t even have an engine in it, and the chassis was previously involved in an accident. Sounds like the deck is stacked against it, right? Well, we won’t completely spoil the ending, but suffice it to say, the Ram’s capability exceeded that of Jerry’s available test equipment.