The Tesla Cybertruck was sold to America as the ultimate apocalypse machine, the vehicle you’d want when civilization collapses and you need to haul supplies through a nuclear wasteland. Turns out, it has a harder time with snowflakes. Actual snowflakes.
Owner Joe Fay learned this the hard way while crawling through a snowstorm at a blistering 19 km/h, when his futuristic stainless-steel beast started throwing warnings like confetti. The infotainment screen lit up with a message that could only be described as aggressively obvious: “Multiple cameras blocked or obscured. Clean cameras or wait for visibility to return”. At this point, Fay, to his credit, stated the situation plainly on camera: “Several cameras blocked or obscured? Yeah, the entire windshield is blocked and obscured”.
This is the core problem with Tesla’s camera-only approach to driver assistance. The Cybertruck, like every Tesla, relies almost entirely on a network of external cameras for navigation, environmental awareness, and driver-assist features. No LiDAR, no radar safety net. Just cameras. And cameras, as it turns out, do not enjoy being buried under six inches of wet snow, road salt, and slush.
When the lenses go blind, the whole system stumbles. Fay admitted he was essentially driving on faith, trusting the vehicle’s display screen to show him where the road was, because his own eyes certainly weren’t helping.
Shouldn’t a truck that costs over $60,000 and markets itself as a next-generation vehicle have redundant sensor systems for exactly these conditions? Many commenters pointed to LiDAR as the obvious answer. Elon Musk famously dismissed LiDAR as a “fool’s errand” for autonomous driving.
To be fair, LiDAR isn’t a magic fix either. Research confirms that heavy snowfall can scatter LiDAR signals, contaminate sensors, and reduce range significantly. So no single technology solves the winter driving problem entirely.
What actually keeps you alive on snow? Tires. Unglamorous, low-tech, rubber tires. Experts are unanimous: winter tires matter far more than whether your truck has AWD, a 800V architecture, or a body that looks like it was designed by someone who only ever played Minecraft. The Cybertruck’s all-wheel-drive system and powerful battery pack do contribute to stability, but none of that engineering heroism overrides the laws of physics on an icy road.
