Tesla Cybertruck owners are willing to put up with a lot in order to own one of these massive trucks. One true believer of the company finally found fault in the truck’s design after the replacement for his first Cybertruck died.
It’s safe to say if you own a Cybertruck, you’re likely at least sipping the Tesla Flavor-Aid, but X user @LamarMK is chugging it. Lamar is a self proclaimed Tesla owner and his X bio lists his Model Y. He added a Cybertruck back in March. Two weeks after taking delivery his Cybertruck failed on the side of the road, throwing all kinds of error messages, as he documents on his YouTube channel.
He made it back home and Tesla service came to pick up the truck to see what’s going on with it. There were other issues he wanted them to look at as well, like the windshield having what he described as a line or “wripple” in it, the driver seat being too close to the center console and the headliner trim sagging. “Stuff happens and we just have to work through it,” Lamar says in the video. Weird attitude to have about a six-figure electric pickup truck breaking after two weeks of ownership, but OK.
By April while the truck was still in service, so Lamar made another video with embarrassing graphics that said “Help Me Elon!” Apparently Tesla service kept giving him dates of when the truck would be out of service, then telling him they would need it a bit longer. He then proceeded to show footage of the Cybertruck in the service center, saying that they “took it completely apart” to find out what was wrong with it.
A couple weeks later he gets the truck back as it’s been “fixed.” Service tells him the issue was a corroded ground wire for the AC resulting in a shutdown of the entire truck’s high voltage system. The rest of the video is him being happy the truck got fixed and saying that there’s going to be “no more issues” after stopping to charge the truck at a Supercharger.
Two minutes into the video however, he asks if anyone knows if the truck is normally loud after being charged; it sounds like it has a gas engine or something. He digs into the service logs and sees there’s an issue with the truck’s active shutters; they seem to be malfunctioning and not opening enough to provide cooling. Mind you, this is the same night he got it back from being in service for over a month. At this point he’s done, saying “Hey, I love the company, I love the truck, it’s my dream truck. But just give me a new truck. Please.”
A few more breaks and service visits and online complaints later and Tesla heard his call. Tesla replaced his Cybertruck at the end of May. Things were going well and he seemed to be happy. Lamar even got this Cybertruck wrapped. Now, nearly two months into having this second Cybertruck, this one has failed. The video shared to X shows that the truck lost power and locked up while it was charging. It’s so dead he can’t even disengage the charging cable from it or get inside it. This happened four hours after he last drove it. He called Tesla service for help but they essentially told him that since it was nearly midnight there was no one to come and help him. He’d have to wait until the morning to get the truck into service.
The next morning a tow truck showed up to haul away the dead truck. In a tweet showing the truck on the flatbed, he said it couldn’t even be jump started. Another tweet shows that once the truck got to the center, it was so dead that even the techs at the service center couldn’t access it; they had to use old school lock out tools to open the truck.
Then comes an update that has to be seen to be believed. In the tweet, Lamar says the techs had to drill into the frunk to get access to the manual release, which caused Lamar to finally pause and take a second look at the engineering of his Wündertruck.
This isn’t just bad engineering, it could be incredibly dangerous if say, a kid were get stuck in the frunk and the Cybertruck lose power. He said the service thinks it’s a problem with the 12-volt battery but since the truck is dead and locked up, they can’t access the 12-volt since it’s in the frunk. None of this matters though because the Cybertruck doesn’t even have a 12-volt battery.
A short time later Musk responded to the tweet, saying that the company will get his truck fixed. Not long after service gained entry into the truck. Lamar was elated of course. Apparently service found the issue was with the truck’s VC left controller which seems to have something to do with the truck security system. Service said that replacing that should fix the issue, which is cool but my god.
The mess that this guy went through with two basically brand new Cybertrucks is nuts. If this were any other car company, none of this would have been acceptable but somehow Tesla owners have convinced themselves that going through something like this is just a part of the ownership experience. If they have a problem, they can just reach out to daddy Musk and he’ll make it all better.