Can A 1996 Toyota RAV4 Do Better Off-Roading Than A Brand New Tesla Cybertruck?

Entrepreneur Elon Musk has had a lot of ideas over the years, some of them good, some of them bad. The Tesla Cybertruck is so far turning out to be one of the bad ones.

His Tesla Cybertruck idea got off to a very inauspicious start when it was first unveiled back in 2019. During the vehicle’s introduction tot he world, Elon Musk accidentally broke one of the windows on the Cybertruck that he had previously claimed was bulletproof.

Musk then tried to show off the Tesla Cybertruck’s power by pitting it in a tug of war with a Ford F-150. The Cybertruck dominated, but the contest was almost immediately called out for being rigged.

Ford CEO Jim Farley then proceeded to rip Musk’s Cybertruck, saying, “It’s like a cool high-end product parked in front of a hotel. But I don’t make trucks like that. I make trucks for real people who do real work, and that’s a different kind of truck.”

Then, Musk ended up costing Tesla between $16 and $24 billion with his admission that “we dug our own grave with the Cybertruck.”

And then there’s the poorly-reviewed $150 Tesla Cybertruck-inspired beer.

Now, to make the Tesla Cybertruck look even worse someone went and conducted a test to see if, as some people claim, the Cybertruck is as good off-roading as they say.

To test that claim, they put it up against a used $15,000 1997 Toyota RAV4 on the Hollister Hills off-roading course in California.

Guess which vehicle did better?

To be fair, as Henry Cesari of MotorBiscuit put it, “Comparing a 7,000+ pound Cybertruck EV to a lightweight RAV4 off-road was never a fair showdown. Any half-ton truck with a full-size bed and a full-size crew cab is, at best, a compromise off-road. Make it an EV with a 1,000+ pound battery pack and the cards are really stacked against it.”

Then again, as one person commented on X (formerly Twitter), “The software may help. But the suspension is not doing its job and it seem to be suffering form a more intense version of the hummers ailments to much wieght for the compound to pull the car up. Perhaps bigger and softer tires. And again the suspension. Looks like it’s on blocks.”

Then there was this comment…

But tell us how you really feel.