When Tesla showed the Cybertruck beating a Porsche 911 down a drag strip while towing another Porsche 911, everyone who knew anything about cars was a bit, well, skeptical. As more information came out and YouTubers did deep dives on whether or not the results shown by Tesla were actually possible, it turned out that it probably wasn’t. Now though, we’ve got even more proof that Tesla’s video (while a brilliant piece of marketing) was indeed a bit (read: completely) fugazi.
The folks over at MotorTrend decided to put CEO Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims to the test by recreating the drag race. They got two of the slowest Porsche 911s you could buy – 911 Carrera Ts, a borrowed an 845 horsepower Cybertruck Cyberbeast from the Out of Spec Reviews YouTube channel and even got the exact same Futura Club Sport aluminum trailer used in Tesla’s stunt. What they found out is well, the Cybertruck towing a 911 T just isn’t as fast down a dragstrip as a regular 911 T with a manual transmission. In fact, it’s not even particularly close.
Here’s what MotorTrend found after six quarter-mile drag races:
In the first heat, the Porsche ran 12.5 seconds at 115.6 mph, while the Tesla followed in 12.7 seconds at 105.2 mph. Over the next few runs, as the Porsche driver honed his launch, the 911 trimmed 0.3 second off the time. The Cybertruck only posted one quicker run, which amounted to a trivial 0.02-second improvement. If we cherry-pick the quickest Cybertruck run and the slowest 911 run—the best possible scenario for Tesla—the Beast still crosses the finish line 0.229 second behind the Porsche. (All results from our drag race have 1-foot rollout removed per drag-racing convention, but in the spirit of running an honest head-to-head race, we have not applied any weather correction.) The chart below shows the quarter-mile times for all six runs, and if that’s not proof enough for you, check the photo gallery for the receipts—the official timeslips from Famoso Dragstrip.
A few weeks after Musk made the original quarter-mile claim, [Jason] Fenske posted a video on his Engineering Explained YouTube channel revealing Tesla had only shown an eighth-mile race. Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill responded by confirming that Tesla never actually ran the quarter-mile race, but he still backed up the original assertion. “The fastest 1/8mi CT hit while towing on the day was 7.808s at 88 mph and the trailer tires were only rated to 80 mph so we opted to call it a day before someone got hurt,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Our simulations showed the full 1/4 mi race would be close but with the same net result, so no need to risk it.”
[Cybertruck lead engineer Sam] Morrill also claimed Tesla’s video didn’t show the Cybertruck’s quickest run. We’re not sure if that’s true, but we can say confidently that Tesla didn’t show the Porsche 911 Carrera T’s quickest possible run. In four out of six MotorTrend drag races, the Porsche 911 Carrera T beat the Cybertruck to the eighth-mile mark. Pitting the best runs against each other, the Porsche 911 Carrera T crosses the eighth mile in 7.9 seconds at 91.4 mph. The Cybertruck does it in 8.1 seconds at 86.7 mph.
OK, to be fair to the Cybertruck, it apparently was faster off the line. That makes sense. Launching an EV is very easy, and launching a manual transmission sports car – even on the best surface – is pretty hard. However, the Cybertruck only holds its advantage for seven feet. After that, the 911 Carrera T takes off and doesn’t look back.
MotorTrend and Fenske even went through the trouble of meticulously weighing both the drivers (and their helmets), all three cars and the trailer in order to make sure the results were as fair as possible. They also fitted the cars with VBox data loggers, and those showed the 911 T was faster than the Cybertruck no matter how you sliced the data. Now, of course, an unaided Cybertruck will kick the absolute shit out of a base 911 T, but that wasn’t Elon’s claim, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?