Renting a Cybertruck in Los Angeles: What It Is Actually Like

It is the least expensive vehicle in this garage that stops a street, and it is the only one where the renter genuinely does not know what they are getting into. Everything surprising about a Cybertruck happens in the first hour.

Not the acceleration, which you have read about. The door handles, which are not handles. The panels, which are dead flat and reflect the world in ripples anyway. The width, which you will feel the first time you turn into a subterranean garage in Beverly Hills. And the fact that a stranger will speak to you about it before you have finished parking.

Nobody books this to move anything. It goes out for content, for birthdays, for a video where the vehicle is a character, and occasionally for someone who has wanted to drive one since the announcement and has finally found three free days. At $449/day it is the cheapest way to be looked at that we sell, and the Cybertruck rental price page carries the live figure and the rest of the quote.

What follows is what three days with it are actually like, written by the people who hand it over and take it back rather than by somebody who read the spec sheet. Some of it is very good. Some of it is worth knowing before you commit a weekend to it.

The stainless is not paint and does not behave like paint

There is no colour on this vehicle. The body is bare stainless steel with no paint and no clear coat over it, which has four consequences and only one of them is bad.

It shows fingerprints, instantly and everywhere. Every door edge, every panel somebody has leaned on, the whole area around the tailgate. They wipe off with a cloth and no product, so this is a two-minute problem rather than a real one — but if you are shooting stills, wipe the car down before the camera comes out rather than after, because fingerprints are the single most common thing that ruins a frame on this truck.

It photographs as a different colour in every light. Flat midday sun makes it read grey and slightly dull, which is the least flattering thing that can happen to it. Late afternoon turns it into a mirror and it becomes extraordinary. If the shoot has one window, make it the last ninety minutes of daylight.

The panels are flat and the reflections in them are not. This is the detail nobody mentions and the thing everyone notices second: because the steel is thick and unpainted, the reflections ripple slightly across a surface that is geometrically dead straight. It looks like water on a wall. It is also why every photograph of the truck looks slightly unreal, which for content is the entire point.

And it does not scratch the way paint scratches. Small marks burnish rather than chip. That is a genuine advantage on a vehicle that goes out most weekends, and it is why the truck still looks new after a year of being touched by everybody who walks past it.

The width is the thing to plan around

A standard Los Angeles parking stall is eight feet six wide and eighteen feet long. Do the arithmetic and the picture is clear: the truck fits the width with about seven inches on either side if you are perfectly centred, and it overhangs the length. Neither is fatal. Both change how you park.

• Older compact-stall garages are the real problem. Plenty of buildings in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood still run seven-foot-six stalls. The body will go in. The doors will not open. Check before you commit to a restaurant with valet-only subterranean parking.
• The height is the good news. At a shade under six feet it clears every clearance bar in the city, including the 6'0" ones that stop full-size trucks and roof boxes. This is the one dimension where the Cybertruck is easier than the SUVs it gets compared with.
• Park where you can pull through. A supermarket lot, a hotel forecourt, the end of a row. Reversing it is fine — the camera work is genuinely good — but the length means a three-point turn in a residential street becomes five.
• Valets will park it and enjoy doing so. Expect it to end up at the front of the row and expect to be asked about it when you collect it.

Against the other thing people cross-shop it with in this fleet, it is the harder of the two to place by a wide margin — a G-Wagon is nearly three feet shorter and you can see all four of its corners. That comparison has its own article, because the two are booked for the same reason and are nothing alike to live with.

Range, charging, and the day you leave the city

For a day inside Los Angeles this is a non-question. It arrives charged, a full day of the Westside, Malibu and a canyon will not empty it, and you will hand it back without having thought about electricity once. Charging only becomes a subject on a longer booking or a day trip.

When it does, two things are worth knowing. The first is that the number on the label is a ceiling, not a promise: the EPA and the Department of Energy explain how the range and efficiency figures on an electric vehicle label are produced, and the short version is that they come from a standardised test rather than from the 10 at four in the afternoon in August. Heat, hills, speed above about seventy, and the air conditioning all take from it. The second is that a heavy, flat-fronted vehicle pushes a lot of air, so freeway range falls faster than city range, which is the opposite of what people expect from a petrol car.

Practically: Palm Springs and back in a day is comfortable with one stop. Santa Barbara and back is comfortable. San Diego and back in an evening is planning rather than driving. Around town for three days is nothing at all. Tesla's own Cybertruck specifications carry the current figures for the dual-motor truck, which is the one we hold.

Charging itself is uneventful. The Supercharger network across Los Angeles is dense enough that you are rarely more than ten minutes from one, the truck routes you to them itself, and a stop is roughly the length of a coffee. It comes back with about the charge it left with, the same way everything else here comes back with its fuel.

The doors, the frunk and the bed

There are no door handles you pull. You press a pad, the door releases, and you take it from there — and the first three or four times you will stand next to the truck pressing the wrong part of it while somebody watches. It becomes automatic by the second morning. Tell your passengers before they arrive, not after.

Storage is genuinely good and genuinely odd. Six feet of bed under a powered cover that slides back on its own, a front boot where an engine would be, and both of them lock. Bikes, boards, a drone case, an awkward set of light stands: all fine, and the bed is more usable than the bed of most trucks because the cover means you can leave things in it. What it is not is a discreet place to load. You will have an audience.

The steering wheel is a squared-off shape rather than a circle, and it steers far more quickly than a vehicle this size has any right to — the rear wheels turn as well, which shrinks the turning circle dramatically. The first tight U-turn is the moment the truck stops feeling enormous. It is also the moment most people stop worrying about the length.

The attention, honestly

This is the product, so it deserves a straight description rather than a boast.

It is the most photographed vehicle in this fleet, ahead of cars that cost four times as much per day. Phones come out at traffic lights. People cross a car park to look at it. Somebody will ask you what it is like, at a petrol station you are not using, while you are trying to leave. On a shoot this is pure upside: you get a crowd for free and the truck holds a frame on its own.

The part nobody publishes is that the attention is not uniformly warm. This vehicle collects opinions as well as cameras, and a small number of them are delivered out loud. It is not a problem — nothing has ever come of it — but it is a different experience from driving a Rolls-Royce, where the reaction is uniform admiration or uniform indifference. If you want to move through Los Angeles without being spoken to, this is the wrong choice and we will happily point you at a better one.

The flip side is worth stating too: for a birthday, a proposal, a video, or a teenager who has been talking about this truck for two years, nothing else in the fleet lands the same way at any price.

What it costs beyond the day rate

The rate is $449/day and it is the least surprising line on the quote. Four others are worth knowing.

• The deposit is nowhere near the exotic band. It sits several tiers below the flagships, which is what makes everything downstream of it cheap, and it is a refundable authorisation on the primary renter's card rather than a charge. It is released 5–7 business days after the truck is back.
• Under twenty-five, this is the cheapest way in. The young-driver fee has only two tiers and the deposit decides which one applies, so it is $50/day here rather than the $175/day that the top-band cars attract. If you are twenty-three and want something that turns heads, nothing else on this site is close on total cost.
• Cover is mandatory and it is in the quote. Your own policy if it extends to this vehicle's replacement value, ours by the day if it does not. It is priced off the same deposit band, so it is cheaper here than on the exotics.
• A week is not cheaper per day. The Cybertruck carries no weekly or monthly block rate, so seven days is seven daily rates. Some cars in the fleet do fall in price with length; this one does not, and it is better said here than in a quote.

Delivery works the way it does on everything: complimentary to our partner Beverly Hills hotels, nothing to collect it from us on Robertson Boulevard, quoted anywhere else. The airport is priced in two tiers each way and the airport delivery guide goes through which one is worth it. Anything about how a booking can move sits in the terms and conditions.

Before you book three days with it

• Check the garage where it will sleep. Compact stalls are the only real obstacle in this city, and they are common in older buildings.
• Wipe it before the camera, not after. Fingerprints are the number one ruined frame.
• Shoot in the last ninety minutes of light. Midday makes it dull; late afternoon makes it a mirror.
• Tell your passengers about the doors. There is nothing to pull.
• Ask early for a weekend. There is one of it, and in season Saturdays go a fortnight out. Midweek is usually there at short notice.

The Tesla in the fleet → What a Cybertruck costs to rent here →