It Turns Out The Tesla Cybertruck Is The Safest Pickup
The Tesla Cybertruck may look like a beast, but it coddles its occupants in a crash.
The full-size truck just became the first electric pickup to earn a Top Safety Pick+ rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). IIHS has so far crash-tested the Cybertruck, Rivian R1T and Ford F-150 Lightning.
The Cybertruck received the top Good rating across all of the crash-related evaluations, save for second-tier Average scores for driver torso and rear passenger chest injuries. Its biggest shortfalls were an Average rating for ease of use for the child-seat LATCH system and a Marginal rating for its rear seatbelt reminder system.
While it initially received a poor rating for its headlights due to glare, Tesla has since updated the lights to fix the issue, which was rolled out to all Cybertrucks retroactively through an over-the-air software update. The Top Safety Pick+ rating technically applies to Cybertrucks built after April 2025, which the lead engineer explained in an X post.
Read Also: THE TESLA CYBERTRUCK GETS 79 MPG — HOW DOES THAT COMPARE TO THE OTHER ELECTRIC PICKUPS?
“We made a minor change on the casting for manufacturability in April. Our Internal testing shows no difference in crash result but IIHS only officially tested the latest version,” he wrote.
The Rivian R1T does have a Top Safety Pick rating without the +, while the F-150 Lightning came up short of the Top Safety Pick designation in part due to its Poor rating in the challenging Moderate Overlap Front test.
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As far as internal combustion engine pickups are concerned, the Toyota Tundra is the only one with a Top Safety Pick+ rating, but it had a few more scores below Good than the Cybertruck that one could argue breaks the tie.
The Cybertruck and F-150 Lighting both have 5-Star ratings from NHTSA, which uses a less rigorous test protocol than IIHS. Ford has announced that F-150 Lightning production has been discontinued, however, and has no plans to replace it with a fully electric model.
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