Auto expert Sandy Munro took a Tesla Cybertruck on a mini road trip and had one main complaint — the truck can be difficult to maneuver at times.
Munro, who specializes in automotive manufacturing and worked as a manufacturing engineer at Ford for a decade, said in a recent YouTube video that he took the electric pickup truck, a loaner from CybertruckATX, a “few hundred miles” on a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan. While the auto expert said the car drove “really well,” and he was impressed by the fit and finish of the truck, he ran into a minor mishap trying to back it up.
The truck has a rearview mirror, but it’s virtually useless if the truck’s tonneau cover is down, since the cover entirely obscures the back window when it’s closed. Instead, Tesla has a rearview camera that displays on the truck’s massive infotainment system. But Munro said it was difficult to gauge space based on the camera alone.
“One of the things I’m unhappy about is I don’t know where the back end of this vehicle is,” Munro said. “The camera says I’ve got about a foot, but it actually is more like an inch.”
As a result of the difficulty of backing up the Cybertruck, Munro said he hit a “back wall,” slightly bending the rear edges of the truck and scuffing part of the rear bumper.
The auto expert is far from the first to express frustration with backing up in the Cybertruck. Pharrell Williams appeared to have difficulty maneuvering a Cybertruck earlier this year and several auto experts have made light of the issue as well.
“You can’t see a darn thing out of the back, especially when the cargo bed cover is deployed,” Clint Simone, an automotive journalist for Edmunds, wrote in a review of the truck. “A camera feed constantly runs on the center screen, but I still checked the rearview mirror out of habit every few minutes.”
Similarly, a reviewer from MotorTrend said the rearview camera doesn’t work when the truck’s turn signal is on as the video feed for the rearview camera is replaced by a video from a different blind spot camera.
The Cybertruck has seven cameras, including an in-cabin one that faces the driver. Tesla owners can scan through the various camera feeds using a button on their steering wheel and the rear camera feed automatically populates the infotainment screen when the vehicle is in reverse, according to Tesla’s website. Owners can also choose to have the camera continually running when the tonneau cover is closed, according to the owner’s manual.
“Don’t try to bring up the vehicle control menu, either, if you have the rearview video feed in the top center of the screen, because the menu goes behind it and blocks access to all the most important controls in a very obvious programming oversight,” MotorTrend automotive journalist Scott Evans wrote.
Due to the size of the vehicle, Munro said drivers have to be nearly as careful as they would be with a class eight truck, a type of vehicle also known as a semi-truck that weighs over 33,000 pounds. For comparison, the Cybertruck weighs over 6,600 pounds, according to CarandDriver.
“You have to be cognizant all the time that this is a big truck,” Munro said of the Cybertruck.
The vehicle uses steer-by-wire technology, which tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee previously said could “take some getting used to” for new owners as the wheel never turns more than 180 degrees and the car is much more receptive to small movements on the wheel.
A Tesla spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
