- Tesla’s Cybertruck was released a year ago, but there’s still no sign of it coming to Europe.
- Tesla displayed the pickup at the Paris Motor Show this week, and BI had the chance to see it.
- With its brutalist design and sheer size, Cybertruck is unlike anything currently on Europe’s roads.
Tesla’s Cybertruck has been dividing opinion ever since it launched last year — but not in Europe, where the electric truck is still yet to go on sale.
The automaker brought Elon Musk’s postapocalyptic pickup to the Paris Motor Show this week, where I had the chance to see it.
It’s hard to overstate how striking the trapezoid truck is in person. The absence of any curves and fanatical devotion to symmetry makes the Cybertruck seem like it was dropped from another planet.
Amid the numerous cars on display in Paris, the sheer audacity of the pickup’s design made a real impression.
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Big, beefy pickup trucks are already a rarity in Europe, with the continent’s narrow streets and dense urban environments more suited to smaller models. The Cybertruck’s brutalist style and sheer size make it unlike any vehicle I’ve ever seen.
In some ways, that’s the point, and the reason the Cybertruck has become such a status symbol in the US. The pickup’s divisive design seems deliberately calculated to shock and provoke.
Not for me
Eventually, however, the shock wore off and was replaced by a strange sense of futility.
I do appreciate Tesla’s attempt to do something a bit different — but I’m not that enthusiastic about driving around a car that looks like a giant boxcutter.
The sheer size of the Cybertruck is also an issue. As someone who spent much of the past few years whizzing around narrow British country lanes in a 12-foot-long Toyota Yaris, the idea of trying to back something as bulky as the nearly 19-foot Cybertruck into a parking space doesn’t appeal too much.
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Neither do the Cybertruck’s famously sharp edges, which have already seen some owners report injuries in the US.
The Cybertruck’s propensity for fingerprint smudges was also apparent. The vehicle in Paris had already picked up small blemishes around the edge of one door.
The Cybertruck drew a huge crowd in Paris, but the reaction from attendees wasn’t all positive.
Two attendees told BI the pickup was “too big” for the European market, with one joking that the truck was larger than his house.
No sign of a European debut
Despite being available for over a year, Tesla has not yet indicated whether it plans to sell the Cybertruck in Europe, one of its most important markets.
Experts previously told BI that the Cybertruck, which weighs 8,860 to 9,200 pounds or around 4.43 to 4.5 tons when factoring in passengers, fluids, and cargo — is likely too heavy to be driven in Europe with a standard driver’s license.
You need a separate license to drive anything heavier than 3.5 tons — including passengers and cargo — in the European Union. In the US, the threshold is much higher, which means you don’t need a special license to drive the Cybertruck.
A few Cybertrucks have reached the continent using sneaky tactics to get around regulations, but even those have faced stern opposition.
Campaign groups called for Cybertrucks to be removed from European roads earlier this month after one was successfully registered in the Czech Republic.
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Elon Musk previously floated the idea of producing a smaller version of the Cybertruck for European markets.
But even if Tesla did manage to get approval to sell the pickup in Europe, it’s unclear whether there would be demand for it.
Pedro Pacheco, vice president of research at Gartner, previously told BI that the tiny market for pickup trucks in Europe meant it may not be worth Tesla’s trouble to sell the Cybertruck across the Atlantic.
“For a vehicle in the category of the Cybertruck, there’s not a huge market in Europe, because pickup trucks generally are not very common,” he said.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
