Tesla's Cybertruck has been widely ridiculed. It looks amateurish with wide panel gaps, rusts easily, and looks like an ergonomic cheese grater. But the most serious defect to date has led to the recall of about 4,000 vehicles.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Association has recalled 3,878 Cybertrucks manufactured between November 13th and April 4th of last year. The problem is with the gas pedal, where the pad can come off and cause the pedal to become wedged in the trim. It's on top of that. This is, needless to say, very bad.
“If the accelerator pedal pad becomes wedged in the interior trim above the pedal, pedal performance and operation may be affected and the risk of a collision may increase,” NHTSA wrote in the recall notice.
The notice confirms an incident that took social media by storm earlier this week. A Cyber truck owner has uploaded a video to TikTok that appears to demonstrate this very problem. “While I was driving, this thing slid up,'' the poster said, demonstrating using an accelerator pad that had come off. “This is how it slides up and this is still hooked to the pedal, keeping the accelerator 100 percent down.”
NHTSA also points out that the saving grace for Cybertruck owners is that the brakes take priority over the accelerator. But the moment a nearly 7,000-pound electric car unexpectedly starts traveling at full speed, not every driver is calm enough to take appropriate corrective action before something seriously goes wrong. .
Tesla built the first Cybertruck in July 2023. But along the way to mass production, Tesla introduced a new element to the assembly line: soap, according to NHTSA. The intention seems to have been to make it easier to place the accelerator pad and pedal next to each other. Unfortunately, it also made it easier to remove the pads. NHTSA's recall notice states that “residual lubricant reduced the pad's ability to hold onto the pedal.”
According to NHTSA, a Cybertruck customer reported the issue on March 31st. Two days later, Tesla engineers used data logs from the affected vehicles to confirm that both the accelerator had been pressed all the way and that the brake pedal had brought the Cybertruck to a stop. On April 3rd, another customer notification was received. Within a week, Tesla received images confirming the nature of the original accident and ran its own tests to recreate it. A voluntary recall was decided on April 12th.
This schedule is in line with previous reports that Tesla had halted Cybertruck deliveries earlier this week. Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to acknowledge the issue in a tweet from X late Wednesday. “There were no injuries or accidents resulting from this,” he wrote. “We're just being very cautious.” Telsa declined to comment.
This incident is yet another heartbreaking incident for the Cybertruck, which is in dire straits, and for Tesla itself. The company's stock price has plummeted this year as competition from China intensifies and plans for cheap electric vehicles were apparently scrapped in favor of a full-scale push into robotaxis.
In December, the company had to recall nearly all of its vehicles to fix a flaw in its self-driving Autopilot software, but resolved the issue with an over-the-air update. Meanwhile, shareholder disputes over Mr. Musk's compensation package and Mr. X's continued woes continue to be a distraction for the company.
According to NHTSA, Tesla will have introduced a new gas pedal component by April 17, and Cybertruck deliveries appear to have resumed. Cybertruck owners will have to take their vehicles to a service center for free repairs as there is no software fix for the soap.