Thanks to its pressed stainless steel body panels, extremely stiff construction and those sharp angles, you don't want to be on the receiving end of a Tesla Cybertruck. Crashing into one in traffic can have catastrophic consequences since the Cybertruck’s body is like armor with little to no flex, and it will result in extreme damage to the other vehicle and hardly any damage to the Tesla’s thick steel panels.
Now, a new dash-cam video shows what happens when a late-1990s Toyota Camry has a run-in with one, and spoiler alert: it's not a great outcome for the Camry.
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The Tesla Cybertruck is really tough
No other road-legal vehicle is as tough as a Tesla Cybertruck, with its pressed stainless steel body and over 6,600-pound weight. Crashing it into another vehicle will not really harm it but may prove catastrophic for the other vehicle.
But it also highlights what the Cybertruck's design means in a crash scenario. This is the main reason it’s not legal to register one of these vehicles in Europe, where you can legally buy and drive a Ford F-150 Lightning, for instance. All vehicles must have crumple zones and pass strict pedestrian safety tests.
If you’ve seen that video of the Cybertruck crash test, you know how bad it is at dissipating the energy of an impact when hitting a solid object. Its front gets damaged, but not much else flexes, and you can see the ripple from the impact resonating throughout its entire shell and the crash test dummies being severely jolted in their seats.
Crashing into a solid object that stops it in its tracks would be very bad for occupants inside the truck since the deceleration would be much more pronounced than in a vehicle with crumple zones, whose job is specifically to bring a vehicle to a stop more gradually. The over-three-ton Cybertruck is the closest thing to driving a street-legal tank on the road, and it will do a lot of damage to whatever it crashes into.
Wham Baam Teslacam shared this footage of an accident that happened in Fresno, California, last month. The video shows this older Camry colliding head-on with a moving Cybertruck. You would expect both vehicles to suffer significant damage in a frontal crash like this, but since one of the vehicles was a Cybertruck, most of the damage was inflicted on the other car. Thankfully, no one was injured.
The Cybertruck didn’t appear to have sustained any body damage. Its plastic bumper appears pretty badly scuffed, and the corner piece popped off in the accident, but looking solely at the extent of the damage, you wouldn’t know how significant the crash actually was. This is an eye-opening video that shows how tough the Cybertruck's body is.
