I was willing to overlook a lot of the shortcomings of these technologies and even some of the more creepy surveillance aspects, because at the time, a lot of these things weren’t politicized and I was purely looking at the potential for the technology. Now, just so you don’t think I’m a hater or a technophobic dilettante, I have owned a couple Teslas. I’ve owned a Model 3 and a Model S, one of the fastest accelerating cars in the world. That thing’s a blast to drive. And I’ve also owned several combustion engine trucks and SUVs over the years.

I’ve even taken the Cybertruck for a test drive. And of course, I’ve been a prepper for around 15 years, so I think I’m qualified to speak about this issue. Now, at first, I was enamored with all the features of the Cybertruck, and I was willing to overlook the look of it all, because to me, it wasn’t about aesthetics. It was totally about functionality. So even though Elon came out and had that embarrassing spectacle where they tried to throw the ball bearing at the window and it smashed, I was willing to overlook all that.

I was purely looking at the technology at the time. But since then, reality has sunk in. And this really isn’t so much about Elon’s politics, it’s just about the feasibility of the Cybertruck as a preparedness vehicle. Now, I’m not an ice engine purist, okay? I think that EVs are ultimately going to be the ideal preparedness vehicles. The problem is, is that a lot of these technologies are double-edged swords. While it enhances your capability, that technology can also be used against you. Now, the benefits for EVs for preparedness are numerous. They’re lower maintenance, there’s no fluid changes, there’s less moving parts, and you’ll seldom ever have to change the brakes on an EV that uses regenerative braking.

They can be a dual-purpose power source if there’s a grid-down situation. Most of these things have massive battery packs that could potentially be used to power your home in a power outage. Even the self-driving component has a lot of Mad Max utility to it. What would be cooler than riding shotgun in your own car while it drives itself in the apocalypse? Even have that enhanced security component because all of the cameras and sensors that are on the car. They have instant torque if you want to make a mad dash in an instant.

Most of them are really quiet, so they’re really stealthy, so you’re not going to hear them coming from miles away. There’s a lot of prepping utility to that, and if you have a large solar array, you essentially have an infinite fuel source. You can’t say that for gasoline or even diesel, all of which are going to go bad within six months to two years, and until the refineries are back up and running, you can pretty much forget about it. And even if you don’t have a solar setup, it’s still cheaper to power an EV than it is to gas up an ice engine.

Now, some of the cons of EVs. One of the big ones for preppers is, what about an EMP? Yeah, there’s dozens of chips and components inside these vehicles that absolutely could be fried by an electromagnetic pulse. That’s probably the same for most vehicles nowadays, and that is a very one-off event that has a very low likelihood of happening, although it could happen. More electronics means that it could potentially be hacked, the circuitry could get fried, and if you do have a problem, it’s usually more expensive to fix. So even though an EV is much lower maintenance than an ice vehicle, if something does go wrong, it usually really goes wrong.

Another con is that there’s a higher upfront investment, so unless you’re getting like a base-level Model 3, you’re probably going to be paying a lot more off the lot for one of these things. The other downside is that most EVs still look like vaginas or the Cybertruck. Either you get the vagina or the polygon, there’s not a lot of choices. You have the Ford F-150 Lightning that a lot of people are complaining about. I think there’s a lot of cool features in there. You get all the Ford F-150 Legacy features on an EV platform, but some people complain about its capabilities.

There’s also the surveillance component. You see, Teslas have cameras all around, and in fact, they have all kinds of sensors inside the vehicle. They even have a camera that points at the driver. I’m quite sure all of your driving data is recorded. They say it’s only recorded in aggregate, but I’m quite certain that if the authorities wanted that information, Tesla would likely be obliged to turn it over, especially if you’re implicated in some sort of crime. Don’t do crime. Nonetheless, that’s still a privacy issue for some people to know that there is a camera pointing right at you, and there is the potential for that information to be accessed.

And last but not least, who wants a car that can be shut off automatically by the government? In fact, who wants a car that can drive you to the police station by itself? I can’t speak for everybody, but that’s not my idea of a good time. One of the cardinal rules of preparedness is blending in, being a gray man. And the more bells and whistles you throw on a vehicle, the more it’s going to stand out. I’ve made a lot of mistakes as a prepper. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would probably just get a standard four by four diesel truck.

At the end of the day, that’s going to do 90% of what you need to do. You could jack it up a few inches, put some rock sliders on there, put a nice roof rack on it, get it all decked out with a tonneau cover. But at the end of the day, how much of that stuff are you really ultimately going to use? Don’t get me wrong. Having things like a winch and a get off me bumper are a great addition to any truck, but it’s not without its set of security drawbacks.

And the problem with the Cybertruck is it just stands out like a sore thumb, especially right now as many people view it as a status symbol. So anybody who has a Cybertruck, you’re going to know that they have money. Now that could definitely change in five years as we see more of these things on the road, but I don’t think we’re going to be at that point for a few more years at least. And it doesn’t appear that the Cybertruck has started a new trend in polygonal shaped vehicles. So the number one reason to avoid the Cybertruck is the look.

The benefits of the Cybertruck are going to outweigh the fact that it stands out like a sore thumb and it’s going to be a beacon for all types of negative people when the crap hits the fan. One of the other major cons is this steer by wire idea. It’s a technology or system that allows steering some or all of the vehicle’s wheels with a steering column that turns the direction of those wheels mechanically. So it’s not a direct connection from the steering wheel to the wheels like it is in 99% of cars.

If this function became inoperable for whatever reason, maybe the government didn’t want you to drive your car anywhere. You could turn that steering wheel all you want and the wheels are not going to respond unless that connection is made. This is where analog technology always is going to win. Until this technology has had decades to build layers and layers of redundancy and ensure reliability in all conditions, this is not something I want to rely on. Also, the weight of the Cybertruck is obscene. This is a 7,000 pound behemoth. 7,000 pounds. And for that reason, no matter what the size battery you put in this thing, you’re not going to get a lot of range.

They tout a 520 kilometer range, but once you start loading this thing up with a lot of stuff and people and maybe you want to pull a trailer, you’re not going very far. It has a respectable payload of 2,500 pounds. It can tow 10,000 pounds, but again, all of that is at the expense of your range. Now it’s important to note that that would be the case with any vehicle. For example, my Toyota Tundra, if I’m pulling a big trailer and I got that thing loaded down, the gas mileage is going to suck.

So this is not something that is exclusive to EVs. Now, before I give you my final assessment of the Cybertruck, I got to give it its praises. It is probably one of the most off the lot bullet proof vehicles that money can buy. And when I say bullet proof, of course, we’re talking about low caliber, low velocity rounds, things like a nine millimeter handgun. It can stop that. And on the basis of that stainless steel exoskeleton that it has, you could likely easily fortify it with more armor to take that up to being able to resist larger, higher caliber rounds.

The shadow resisting glass is a cool feature and does lend itself to some everyday security functions, like even just general run of the mill road rage. What I do like about the body of the truck is because it has a lot of straight edges, it would be fairly easy to modify and customize. You’re not dealing with a lot of curves. And the body of the vehicle itself has sufficient load bearing capacity. So you could modify this thing in all kinds of ways. It also has a cool feature that the Model X and the Model S have.

And that’s a bioweapons defense mode. If there was some sort of biocontaminate outside and you didn’t want that to come into the vehicle, they do have a HEPA filter built in that will filter all that out if you do activate that biodefense mode. Now that’s a cool feature I got to admit. You can’t beat the acceleration and instant torque of an EV and you don’t quite understand it until you experience it. Being able to catapult 7000 pounds of steel 100 kilometers in 2.7 seconds is an unreal experience. Now the Cybertruck does have a 122 kilowatt hour battery pack.

That is massive. Currently on my homestead I only have 50 kilowatt hours of battery. That should tell you that that power within your Cybertruck, especially seeing as you have an 11.5 kilowatt hour output, which is pretty much sufficient for most of your needs. You can run washers, dryers, you can use all of your big energy drain devices and appliances in your home at once off of the Cybertruck’s energy. That is a great dual purpose feature of any EV, especially in the case of the Cybertruck because this one is specifically made for bi-directional charging.

Lastly, the thing that prompted Elon’s tweet was its five star safety rating and Tesla’s are renowned for their high safety ratings. In its testing, the NHTSA reviewed the Cybertruck’s frontal and side crash protection along with its rollover risk. In frontal crash tests, the pickup scored five stars overall with five stars for driver safety and four stars for front passenger safety. So the question is, should you buy a Cybertruck as a prepper? The answer is no, absolutely not. Me and a friend of mine have an ongoing joke where we refer to the Cybertruck as a Trojan horse because that’s what it is.

It’s incredibly enticing, isn’t it? Once they integrate the internet at any time, anywhere, Starlink functionality, you’re going to be able to be off grid with this thing. It’s going to be able to drive you places. It’s going to stop bullets. It can run on solar panels, and it’s literally been built for the dystopian future. So why is it fundamentally a bad idea? 90% of the reason why I wouldn’t want a Cybertruck as an apocalypse vehicle is because of how it looks. If you had all of the functionality that you have in the Cybertruck in a vehicle that didn’t look like a Cybertruck and they just look like a normal everyday run of the mill truck, that would be ideal from a preparedness point of view.

However, you don’t want that steer by wire. You got to get rid of that. You want the ability to jailbreak these things to a certain extent so they’re not permanently grid tied. There’s a drawback to a vehicle that can constantly do updates and improve itself. Now that’s how they’re going to sell it. And this is why it’s a Trojan horse. Because while it’s true that they can constantly upgrade your vehicle with new software and put new games on it and make the full self-driving better and maybe even value add some really cool technology.

That’s a double-edged sword. Because what they can give it, they can also take it away. And that’s a problem for anybody who doesn’t like being controlled. In the future, I do think that there’s going to be a huge market for EVs that don’t have all these cameras in them. That is just an EV skateboard chassis that has all the EV, the ability to charge it with a renewable energy source, the instant torque, the low maintenance, the regenerative braking, all of these things. If you can make that, then that’s going to be an absolute winner for preppers.

And if you can do it in a way that is discrete and low profile, even better. As Sun Tzu says, the greatest victories are the battles that you never have to fight. And while it might be true that Cybertruck is very capable as a vehicle, if it’s only going to attract the attention of marauders that you’re ultimately going to have to fight, then perhaps it’s not the best option. For all those reasons, I’ve changed my opinion about the Cybertruck and now I give it a thumbs down. If you like this topic of bug out vehicles and you would like me to explore it more, let me know in the comment section below.

But what I really want to know is what is your ideal bug out vehicle? Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Canadian Preparo. [tr:trw].

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