Tesla now offers a tailgate protector for its “bulletproof” Cybertruck, a move that has been soundly mocked online. Yet, dumb as that combination is, the Tesla “Tailgate Shield” is even dumber than you think.
Tailgate pads on trucks are common among cyclists, whether or not the truck’s bed can actually entirely swallow the bicycle in question. They allow the driver to rest their bike’s frame over the tailgate, keeping it upright without turning the bed’s interior into a mess of straps, without scuffing the paint as the front wheel swings around. That the Cybertruck needs a tailgate pad is fine. The pad itself is what’s so dumb.
First off, the pad doesn’t appear to actually properly fit the Cybertruck. Most aftermarket pads you’ll find come in multiple sizes, designed to fit as broad a range of pickups as possible, but Tesla only has one truck to deal with. So why is the protector so much shorter than the tailgate is wide? It’s tough to tell, but it seems that the pad may only be as wide as the floor width of the Cybertruck’s bed — an odd feature to highlight when the fabric could simply be cut at an angle.
The odd sizing would be understandable if Tesla had simply slapped a logo on a preexisting tailgate protector, but this pad’s odd design seems unique. Most tailgate pads have a series of velcro loops along the top, to wrap around a bike’s downtube and secure it to the tailgate, but Tesla instead opts for two strips of what it claims to be MOLLE webbing along the interior of the pad. To my eye, the webbing seems too loose to be true MOLLE, but that’s an aside to the main problem: This is a bad way to mount bikes.
When you’ve got a velcro strip atop your tailgate, there’s nowhere for the bike to go. The system has no flex, the bike’s not going anywhere unless the tailgate pad does. With this webbing-and-strap system that Tesla uses, however, those straps will have give simply due to their length. Your bike will shake around on the tailgate more than if you’d just gone out and bought a pad from Fox.
Which, of course, you can do for less than a third of what Tesla’s charging. This $300 Cybertruck pad is meaningfully worse than the competition, yet meaningfully more expensive — what’s the sales pitch here? It might appeal to the Tesla faithful, those who won’t kit their vehicle out in anything from a third-party brand, but it won’t appeal to many others.