Tesla’s Cybertruck has been widely derided. Its panel gaps are wide and amateurish, it’s prone to rust, and it looks like an ergonomic cheese grater. Its most serious flaw to date, though, has resulted in a recall of nearly 4,000 vehicles.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Association has recalled 3,878 Cybertrucks, which comprises any that were manufactured between November 13 of last year and April 4. At issue is the accelerator pedal: Its pad can become dislodged, resulting in the pedal becoming trapped in the trim above it. This is, needless to say, quite bad.
“If the pad on the accelerator pedal becomes trapped in the interior trim above the pedal, the performance and operation of the pedal will be affected, which may increase the risk of a collision,” wrote the NHTSA in its recall notice.
The notice confirms an incident that swept social media earlier this week. A Cybertruck owner uploaded a video to TikTok that seems to show this exact issue. “As I’m driving, this slid up,” said the poster, demonstrating with his dislodged accelerator pad. “This sliding up, and the way this was still hooked onto the pedal, it held the accelerator down 100 percent.”
The saving grace for Cybertruck owners, which the NHTSA notes as well, is that the brake overrides the accelerator. That hasn’t always been standard in the automotive industry; in 2010, Toyota recalled millions of vehicles after thousands of complaints of unintended acceleration. At the time, NHTSA proposed a regulation that would mandate that brake override technology. The proposal was eventually withdrawn, but the industry still largely came around, says David Friedman, former NHTSA acting administrator.
“We need to be thankful for a lot of lessons learned from when Toyota’s pedals were sticking,” says Friedman. “This could have been so much worse.”
Even with that brake override available, in the moment when a nearly 7,000-pound electric vehicle unexpectedly starts going full speed, not every driver will necessarily be level-headed enough to take the right corrective action before something goes terribly wrong.
Tesla built its first Cybertruck in July 2023. But somewhere on the road to mass production, the NHTSA says, the company introduced a new element to the assembly line: soap. The intention, it seems, was to make it easier to adjoin the accelerator pad to the pedal. Unfortunately, it made the pad easier to remove, as well. “Residual lubricant reduced the retention of the pad to the pedal,” the NHTSA recall notice says.
A Cybertruck customer reported the issue on March 31, the NHTSA says. Two days later, Tesla engineers used the affected vehicle’s data logs to confirm both that the accelerator was pressed all the way down and that the brake pedal brought the Cybertruck to a stop. On April 3, another customer notice came through. Within a week, Tesla had received images confirming the nature of the first incident, and run its own tests to replicate. On April 12, it instituted a voluntary recall—not that it had a choice.
