Of all the videos Tesla released last week to showcase the new Cybertruck’s often unusual strengths, the one we enjoyed the most was the film where it dusted a Porsche 911 at the drag strip. That feat alone would have been worth Tesla boasting about, but the brilliant twist revealed just as the EV was about to cross the quarter-mile finishing line was that the Cybertruck beat the 911 while towing another 911 behind it.
Except it turns out that the race didn’t take place over a quarter mile, but an eighth of mile. Eagle-eyed Redditor u/manitou202 recognized that the footage was filmed at Sacramento Raceway and used aerial images to confirm that the painted stripe running across the strip that Tesla’s video team used as a finishing line corresponds to the eighth-mile mark.
Now there’s nothing wrong with racing over an eighth of a mile. It’s a valid sport in its own right and some drag strips only operate that distance. It’s also quite possible that Tesla opted for the shorter distance both to make the video snappier and to make the whole caper safer by keeping the trap speeds lower. Knowing the true trace distance now doesn’t make the video any less fun to watch, but certain car fans feel that Tesla, and in particular it’s boss, the man who presented the video at the truck’s reveal last week, was purposely trying to mislead them.
Related: Tesla Cybertruck Shocks GMC Hummer EV In Drag Race
If Tesla had simply shown the video and left it at that, things would have been fine. People like u/manitou202 would still have worked out that the race was only an eighth of a mile long, but it’s not like Tesla was claiming otherwise. But the way things really happened it’s easy to see why some people believeTesla was trying to hoodwink us.
First, there’s the text that appears on the screen just after the cars cross the line. It reads: “1/4 mile time <11s, 0-60 mph 2.6s.” Tesla isn’t directly saying the Cybertruck just pulled off those figures, but it’s natural for our brains to bridge that gap and presume it is. The real smoking gun though, is that just after the video ends Musk explicitly says that: “It can tow a Porsche 911 across the quarter mile faster than the Porsche 911 can go by itself.”
Our gut feel is that Musk was just freestyling his presentation and mentioned “quarter mile” by accident because that’s the distance we most closely associate with drag strips. Internet response to the revelation, meanwhile, seems to be a mix of displeasure at Tesla’s attempts to deliberately mislead us, a lack of surprise that it tried to mislead us, and a sense of “who cares? It was just a bit of light entertainment.”
That said, we’d love to see what would happen if the cars continued on until the quarter mile. Although the 911’s rear-engine configuration helps it dig hard off the line, we are only talking about an entry-level 379 hp (385 PS) 911 Carrera. Plus it looks like the Porsche is a manual, which costs it time in a strip run. Having said that, the 911 appeared to be reeling in the Cybertruck when the two crossed the line at the eighth-mile point, so we reckon the Porsche would have easily got to the quarter first. Who’s your money on?
You can check out exactly what Elon Musk said at the Cybertruck presentation about the drag race by clicking on the video below. We’ve reached out to Tesla for a comment and as soon as hell freezes over we’ll let you know what it has to say on the matter.