No Nuts: Tesla Cybertruck Doors Fail Open at Speed

With so few Cybertruck sold, let alone on the road, it’s amazing to hear all the stories of nuts falling off.

Yesterday two owners discussed how two lugnuts disappeared from a wheel (see below), and why Tesla doesn’t care.

And then a story about a door striker was posted, showing a horrible design failure where the latches simply work loose and fail open (unsafe) at high speed.

I’ve seen recalls for less.

It is hard to describe just how bad this door striker design is, like absolutely everything is wrong with it.

To start, the plate would typically have a backplate. The bolts would pass through three sheets of steel. We don’t see any back plate here, although it’s possible it’s so tiny it rotated away.

So the next point is the back plate would be designed with ridges to fit into the bolt holes and not rotate. Here’s another look.

Similarly there should be a lock washer to prevent the bolt from rotating at all. This fundamental safety concept, which costs basically nothing, clearly was not included in the Tesla design.

Then there’s an expectation for a round bolt through a round hole with millimeters tolerance. This is a giant square hole that looks like it’s suffered a lot of cavitation. It suggests the door fit is so bad that the latch is designed to float. Toxic setup for a tight assembly. Was there even a nut, let alone torque, to begin with?

Six months ago someone else reported the same exact problem.

It’s like the Tesla door engineering team threw basic knowledge out the window; a crucial vehicle safety device was ignorantly, negligently and predictably designed to fall off.

Here’s an inexpensive Nissan striker to compare, and far superior to the Tesla design in every way.

The Tesla owner complains their 1 year old child was in the back seat near the door danger, as if they didn’t predict something Elon Musk called the Cybertruck would be the cause of harm to their family.

Notable is how an “engineer” at Tesla said door failure is simply a “cosmetic” issue and tried to silence the owner’s appropriate suspicion of serious defect.