The 600-hp Cybertruck is no slouch, zipping to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds, but it can’t keep up with the 834-hp truck’s 2.6-second run.
Welcome to Car and Driver‘s Testing Hub, where we zoom in on the test numbers. We’ve been pushing vehicles to their limits since 1956 to provide objective data to bolster our subjective impressions (you can see how we test here).
The Tesla Cybertruck turns heads with its bare-metal, geometric bodywork. It also blows away drivers—and unwitting passengers—with the ability to rocket from zero to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds despite its hulking size. Still, not all Cybertrucks are created equal. Car and Driver initially tested the Cybertruck Beast, which packs a trio of electric motors that zap 834 horsepower to all four wheels. With this setup, the Beast clocked the aforementioned 60-mph time—making it the quickest truck we’ve ever tested.
We’ve now tested the 600-hp dual-motor all-wheel-drive Cybertruck to see how much slower it is than its record-setting sibling. While the dual-motor Cybertruck is still a speedster even by sports car standards, our testing reveals that one less motor and 234 fewer horses leave it a full step behind the beastlier variant.
Quick zero-to-60-mph times make great headlines and both Cybetrucks will catch people’s attention. The dual-motor Cybertruck took 3.9 seconds to hit the mile-per-minute mark, meaning it’s 1.3 seconds slower than the tri-motor variant’s 2.6-second run. The gap widens the faster the Cybertruck goes. With twin motors, it hit 100 mph in 9.6 seconds, whereas with three motors it only needed a nice 6.9 seconds to hit a hundo.
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Greg Pajo|Car and Driver
While the Cybertruck Beast can reach a top speed of 131 mph, the dual-motor variant is limited to 113 mph. At the drag strip, the lesser Cybertruck completed the quarter-mile in 12.4 seconds at 111 mph. That’s 1.4 seconds and 8 mph behind the Beast’s performance of 11.0 seconds at 119 mph.
Along with the traditional acceleration metrics, we administer a 5-to-60-mph test that emulates what it feels like when mashing the go pedal in the real world. The Beast has a 1.1-second advantage versus the dual-motor truck, with the former completing the run in 2.8 seconds and the latter needing 3.9 ticks. The dual-motor version also lags behind its more powerful counterpart in our passing tests. The 834-hp Beast ripped from 30 to 50 mph in 1.5 seconds versus 2.5 for the 600-hp Cybertruck. The 50-to-70-mph passing maneuver took 1.8 seconds in the tri-motor model, compared with 3.6 for the dual-motor truck.
Removing a motor from the Cybertruck Beast shaves off 263 pounds, with the dual-motor version tipping our scales at 6638 pounds. Despite the weight loss, the dual-motor model returned the same 0.75 g of maximum cornering grip on our skidpad. Both trucks rode on the same Goodyear Wrangler Territory RT tires. Surprisingly, the lighter dual-motor truck also needed extra room to come to a complete halt during our emergency braking test. The dual-motor Cybertruck stopped from 70 mph in 187 feet; the Cybertruck Beast needed 176 feet.
Sure, Tesla’s dual-motor Cybertruck doesn’t have the same eye-popping straight-line performance as the tri-motor Beast, but for a three-ton pickup truck that looks like a stainless-steel appliance from Mars, its acceleration times are undeniably impressive.
