YouTuber Spends $300,000 Torturing a Tesla Cybertruck vs Ford F-150

YouTuber WhistlinDiesel has finished his three-part Cybertruck durability series, and the verdict went to the Ford F-150 he ran alongside it. Over the course of the series, the Cybertruck made six or seven trips to Tesla service. The F-150 needed a driveshaft and nothing else.

Cody Detwiler, who runs the channel, says the whole series cost him north of $300,000 to film. Both trucks got identical treatment throughout, with the F-150 there as a control.

The Moab, Utah segment is where things fell apart fastest. Detwiler says he spent roughly $40,000 flying his team and the trucks out for the shoot, and the Cybertruck lasted about a mile on the trail before the towing module tore off underneath and disabled the vehicle. The team spent more than an hour searching the ground for the part so they could reattach it and keep filming. They never found it.

The reason surfaced later, during editing. Someone who had driven past them while they were searching had already picked the module up and listed it on eBay for $1,000, apparently thinking it was valuable. Detwiler says the part was destroyed and worthless, and that losing it killed the segment he had flown everyone out to shoot.

He also reports the frame snapped during testing, and both trucks eventually got sidelined by wiring failures, which he found funny given how differently they are built.

The Cybertruck did score one clear win. Detwiler had paid extra for self-driving on his Cyber Beast and had never been able to use it, since it kept telling him a software update was required. When he finally got to test FSD on a loaner, the Cybertruck drove itself to a steakhouse, handled the turns, and parked itself with nobody touching the wheel. He gave Tesla a point for it, noting the F-150 cannot do anything close.

The end of the video had the Cybertruck remote controlled and crashing into the side of the F-150 on a private drag strip, making for some insane footage. The F-150 was totally destroyed, as was the Cybertruck.

His overall read on the truck was mixed rather than dismissive. He rated the Cybertruck’s body construction well ahead of the F-150’s, called it dramatically faster, and said it was far more comfortable to sit in, describing the Ford’s suspension as primitive and the cabin as miserable. His main criticism was that it does not behave like a truck.

“I think it’s more of a car. That’s just the best way to describe it. It feels like a beefy Model 3,” Detwiler said.

He singled out the hitch as the most serious issue he found and said he hopes Tesla addresses it. He also noted that no automaker has ever contacted him about any of his videos, Tesla included, which he assumes is deliberate on their part.

Both trucks were shredded at the end, with the material pressed into roughly 500 Cybertruck cubes and 100 F-150 cubes for sale on his site. While digging through the wreckage, the team found small artwork etched into the circuit boards, including a lobster and a cat, the kind of Easter egg engineers add knowing nobody will ever see it.

That being said, imagine being a fly on the wall at the Tesla service center after seeing the destroyed Cybertruck over 5 times.