There’s no denying that electric cars can smoke a comparable combustion vehicle thanks to the instantaneous torque of the electric motors. That made the Tesla Model S Plaid and Rimac Nevera darlings of the YouTube drag racing community.
But what about the chunky, angular Cybertruck? Well, as it turns out, the tri-motor Cyberbeast is pretty capable of holding its own in a straight line, as the video embedded at the top of this page, uploaded by DragTimes, shows.
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How fast is too fast?
Modern EVs can be much faster and sometimes much more affordable than, let's say, combustion supercars. But with such big power numbers (think over 600 hp) at the fingertips of people who don't have a racing background, could it turn into a problem?
According to Tesla, the $80,000 dual-motor version can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.1 seconds and reach a top speed of 112 mph. That limited top speed prevented the 6,600-pound pickup from running a quarter mile in under 11 seconds, according to the video uploader.
With the tri-motor Cyberbeast, however, which has 845 hp, can sprint to 60 in just 2.6 seconds and has a top speed of 130 mph, that problem suddenly disappears, albeit for a $20,000 price penalty.
As you can see in the DragTimes video, the differences between the two versions of the electric pickup are obvious. The dual-motor all-wheel drive Cybertruck could accelerate to 60 mph in about four seconds in real-world conditions, whereas the tri-motor slashes that time to under three seconds. When it comes to racing the quarter mile, the dual-motor is a 12-second car, while the Cyberbeast manages to go into the rather exclusive 10-second club as a completely stock vehicle.
Gallery: Tesla Cybertruck Founders Edition
Whatever you think of Tesla’s angular utility EV, that’s an impressive feat, especially for a car that weighs no less than 6,800 lbs. It’s not to everybody’s taste, that’s for sure, but it looks like the Cybertruck is slowly becoming the car it was always supposed to be, thanks in no small part to a series of over-the-air software updates that added more features.
Recently, owners of the four-wheel drive EV got an update that enables them to activate the mechanical front locking differential on the tri-motor Cyberbeast, which transformed it into a much more capable pickup off-road, as Kyle Conner from Out of Spec Reviews recently discovered.
That said, the so-called Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) are still not available for the battery-powered truck, with Tesla’s head honcho Elon Musk saying that the angular EV should get the features when version 12.5 hits the company’s portfolio. That’s already happening for cars like the Model 3 and Model Y, but not the Cybertruck.
