The Cybertruck’s hood will also need to flex and be free of protrusions to get a good pedestrian safety score from NCAP.
“The [Cybertruck’s] the big wiper and the bulge would be a danger zone,” predicted Avery.
According to transport NGOs, the modified Cybertruck was registered in the Czech Republic in July. The system for individual vehicle approval of the Czech Republic was used for its registration. The Czech Transport Ministry said all vehicles in the N1 category in which the truck is registered have weight ratios calculated from formulas in the 2018 EU regulation. But the vehicle data he provided shows that the Cybertruck doesn’t fit the formula when carrying four passengers.
To be legally driven in Europe, a Cybertruck customer will need to have a Category C license. This is a truck license and is intended for driving vehicles that have a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) of more than 3.5 metric tons or 7716 lbs.
Norton Slovak, co-founder of Cybertruck.cz, the company that owns the imported Tesla truck, told The Guardian that he was aware of the discrepancy between the vehicle’s weight and the regulation, but that “the calculations may not fully reflect how these are applied regulations or interpreted by the Czech authorities.’
The Czech Ministry of Transport does not see the discrepancy as a problem, as the registration is an “individual approval of a vehicle of the national scope only on the territory of the Czech Republic” and not an EU-wide type approval.
However, the truck, which the owners are hiring for advertising campaigns, has already been driven to other EU member states, including Slovakia, where in an Instagram post you can see the company testing the Cybertruck’s “Wade Mode” in a lake near Bratislava. Things don’t go as planned and the all-terrain EV gets stuck in the water, requiring bystanders to help push it out and place planks under the wheels.
Tesla, Norton Slovak and the Ministry of Transport of the Czech Republic were approached for this piece, but none responded.
In their open letter, the transport NGOs claim that if the European Commission does not act, the importation of this single Cybertruck with rubber rims could lead to a “massive importation of Cybertrucks into Europe”, which they say would prove dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and those drivers who do not travel in such armored motor vehicles. Euro NCAP seems to agree with this conclusion.
