“There are some attributes that work,” David Tracy, a cofounder of the car website The Autopian and a former auto engineer, tells WIRED. “It’s off-road capable and has big 35-inch tires and good ground clearance. It has stainless steel panels that can take some amount of abuse. From a defense standpoint—as in, ‘How safe am I in the vehicle?’—if you were to take a stock Hilux or a stock Cybertruck, the Cybertruck would probably be the better choice in a firefight.”
If technicals are built for speed and maneuverability, then the Cybertruck “offers significant benefits over the Hilux,” Tracy says.
“It is absolutely, absurdly quick,” he says. “In a drag race between the two, the Hilux would be an ant in the Cybertruck’s rearview mirror. If you need speed and agility, and it isn’t necessarily going through rigorous off-roading or being fired upon regularly, then it could actually work fine.”
Despite these potential tactical benefits, defense analysts aren’t convinced the Cybertruck has a place on the modern battlefield. As retired Marine colonel Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, tells WIRED, the armed vehicles flaunted by Kadyrov on Telegram “are totally cool and totally useless.”
“They are cool because they look like something out of a video game and portray Kadyrov as a sort of futuristic warlord,” Cancian tells WIRED in an email. “They are useless because they don’t provide a new capability, except perhaps a bit of stealth.”
Indeed, the Cybertruck is not totally suited for hostile and chaotic environments like the front lines of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. First, the EV’s exoskeleton actually consists of steel panels attached to a standard “unibody” frame that’s more akin to the chassis of a conventional car rather than the “body-on-frame” design of most pickup trucks like the Hilux. This design, according to Motor Trend, makes the former a weaker and less resilient vehicle. Second, while the Cybertruck is certainly off-road capable, it’s still significantly heavier than Hilux, which can make maneuverability and traction on rough terrain a challenge. Third, while its armor portends to offer at least some additional coverage compared to the conventional pickup truck-based technical, the vehicle’s bulletproofing only appears to work with subsonic rounds like the .45 ACP ammo used in Tesla’s tests and not the ubiquitous NATO-standard 5.56 mm round or, say, a shot from a .50 caliber rifle. (Though, to be fair, aftermarket armor packages for the vehicle do exist.)