Elon Musk was quick to address concerns about panel gaps on the Tesla Cybertruck after the tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee said an alignment issue on his door was the “worst I’ve ever seen in a production vehicle.”
In a review of the electric pickup, Brownlee pointed out the gaps when assessing the truck’s exterior.
“I think there’s going to be something wrong with this door because it literally looks like it’s open. That’s pretty bad. I’ve never seen a gap quite that bad,” Brownlee said after he closed the driver’s side door and the door still appeared to hang about half an inch open.
“It’s probably one of those things where I’ll have to bring it in to Tesla. They’ll tighten some things up, and it’ll look fine, but that’s the stuff you will probably have to deal with if you get a low VIN Cybertruck,” he added.
In a response to a screen grab of the door gap from Brownlee’s review, Musk said he’d seen the issue in about 15 of the trucks.
“Not a ‘door fit’ issue,” Musk wrote on X. “About 15 Cybertrucks in service had an issue where the door striker loosened in the field, due to insufficient torque after door fit.”
Musk said it “takes 5 mins to fix in service and has been addressed in production.”
Not a “door fit” issue.
About 15 Cybertrucks in service had an issue where the door striker loosened in the field, due to insufficient torque after door fit.
This is takes 5 mins to fix in service and has been addressed in production.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 20, 2024
Miles Somerville, a producer on Brownlee’s show, told Business Insider he came up with a “temporary fix” — gaffers tape. Somerville said he applied the tape to the door striker, the metal clip that the door latches onto, in order to get it flush with the vehicle.
“I think a door striker should be relatively simple to not screw up upon delivery,” Somerville said in an emailed comment.
A spokesperson for Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even before Tesla began deliveries in November, Tesla fans had pointed out prototypes of the truck with poor panel alignment. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that as a result of the truck’s stainless-steel body being made out of metal that came in large coils, it was prone to curving and attempting to resume its previous shape, even when it had been flattened.
Musk also commented on the issue ahead of the truck’s release. CNBC obtained a companywide email sent by the Tesla CEO in August in which he said the truck’s design required extreme accuracy in measurements and “any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.”
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