A year ago people were wondering out loud if Tesla would design a Cybertruck to run electrical current to the body.
Would it be possible to electrify the exterior of the cybertruck if there was a possibility of physical harm to the passengers in the truck?
If you squint your eyes hard enough you might read this grammar as someone asking if they can electrocute emergency responders who try to rescue passengers from a crashed Cybertruck.
Nevermind that, however, because an actual owner boasted that when his vehicle became improperly electrified, the Cybertruck automatically went into “hibernation”.
If current is detected anywhere it’s not supposed to be (e.g., your battery has a loose wire and is discharging onto the doors, posing an electrocution risk), the high-voltage system hibernates to avoid injury. And that’s exactly what my truck did. […] Before anyone gets the wrong idea — what’s happening with my truck is not necessarily something that went wrong…. There are too many variables to identify exactly what happened on my truck and where, but we know one thing: it’s working as designed.
Leave it to a Tesla owner to say that a brand new vehicle completely unusable and an electrocution hazard is “working as designed”.
This goes beyond the emperor has no clothes into the emperor likes being humiliated, with electroshocks.
Now cue the latest update to this design feature debate: an Idaho farmer, famous for his Cybertruck purchase in an attention-grabbing scheme, is now happy to be reporting that 120V flows through the vehicle body (even the wheel lug nuts) after he plugs in a charging cable.
While it might appear that Smith set out to debunk critiques, he just wanted to grow his TikTok account. “It was something unique that people hadn’t seen and something that I felt would get good engagement, and it did,” Smith said.
Yeah, getting electrocuted by touching a car is very, very unique to Tesla. No hibernating in this case. And the owner seems to enjoy demonstrating the unnecessary dangers a little too much, like he’s sticking a fork in live outlet to get a laugh.
Finally someone found something positive about the Cybertruck.
But seriously, this attention-seeking potato farmer released a follow-up video where he assures the audience his problem is real… but only with the charging cable, not the Cybertruck. It’s hard to believe his distinction at face value given there’s an obvious emphasis in his first video of the truck electrifying its body simply by being plugged in. The purpose of real safety designs, such as common and inexpensive ground fault interrupters, is to prevent the risk of electrocution regardless of the condition of a cable.