Tesla Cybertruck Teardown Finds Massive Battery Pack Looks Only Half Full

Image: Tesla

You never have to wait long for another story about the odd engineering choices of the Tesla Cybertruck. A new teardown videois going to show that even the angular truck’s massive battery pack seems half finished.

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In a video posted to X previewing an upcoming teardown, Sandy Munro and his engineering firm finally get their hands on a Tesla Cybertruck. The whole teardown hasn’t posted yet, but the clip shows Munro’s team opening the Cybertruck’s battery pack and it’s weirdly empty. As the Byte pointed out, this does raise some questions.

Out of all the EV trucks for sale today, the Cybertruck’s 123 kWh battery pack has the smallest energy capacity. This explains why the truck has come up short in testing compared to Tesla’s own estimates. The Cybertruck only hit 254 miles of range in one independent test. It’s also been reported that the range can plunge to just 200 miles without the beds tonneau cover. Owners have been reporting even less range than that.

The space in the battery pack is a head scratcher though. Tesla allegedly has an expansion coming for the pack that will increase range to 440 miles but that’s supposed to be a bed mounted range extender that takes up a good amount of bed space. Was Tesla trying to keep the already heavy truck’s weight down? Or is this just another instance of Tesla’s obvious cost cutting measures? If only there were some PR person we could ask.

It’s not exactly a design element that the company is worried about Murno exposing. Musk and one of the Cybertruck’s lead engineers tweeted in response to reports of the apparently half-empty pack:

With Tesla’s penchant for not really getting into any sort of engineering details about its cars, we’ll likely just have to wait until Munro’s full teardown video drops for answers.