Tesla Cybertruck, the company's absurdly angular SUV, will probably launch at some point in time. Amazingly, some of the hottest questions surrounding the weird vehicle are ones about its windshield wiper – and we may have gotten some answers in a new video.
The problem with wiping Cybertruck's windshield is that it's absolutely massive. No, really, it's positively gargantuan. The windshield is so big, that someone calculated that the car's singular wiper, as seen on a vehicle prototype, cannot possibly wipe all of it, perhaps even to the point that the car might be in violation of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)'s regulations.
Now, photographer and videographer Brad Sloan has released a 4K video (via Electrek) taken with a drone over Tesla's Gigafactory Texas, at one point showing the Cybertruck's windshield wiper in action.
In the video, starting around the 13:25 mark, we get an amazingly good look at the Cybertruck and its huge windshield from above (switch to 4K quality for the most amount of detail). The wiper is turned on a few times, and we can clearly see that it extends way above the see-through part of the windshield and onto the darkened part on top, which might mean that it does, in fact, clean a large enough part of the windshield, even on the passenger's side.
Notably, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in Dec. 2021 that the windshield wiper seen on a Cybertruck prototype at the time was "not the production wiper."
Tweet may have been deleted (opens in a new tab)
He also said that the wiper was "what troubles (him) the most," noting that there's "no easy solution" for it. He mentioned a "deployable wiper that stows in front trunk" as the "ideal, but complex" solution.
It's hard to say whether the wiper has been significantly improved between now and then, but judging from what we can see in this new video, the wiper works quickly and fairly elegantly, though I still shudder to think about that thing moving fast during heavy rain.
