Watch A Tesla Cybertruck Go Head-To-Head Against A Dodge Ram 2500 In A Trailer Hitch Tongue Weight Torture Test

You may recall seeing a YouTuber named WhistlinDiesel torture a Tesla Cybertruck a few months ago, tearing off the rear section of its cast aluminum “frame” while trying to recover the stuck truck via a strap connected to its trailer hitch. Now another prominent YouTuber, JerryRigEverything — a man who got his start on YouTube fixing Jeep Grand Cherokees, incidentally — has decided to torture a Cybertruck, but instead of just beating the crap out of it like WhistlinDiesel did, JRE is torturing solely the trailer hitch receiver to see how weak it really is. And he’s putting it up against an old Ram 2500.

Straight away, I should note that this test is far from a standardized one. Tongue weight ratings on vehicles are typically relatively low, as Curt — manufacturer of trailer hitches and accessories — writes below:

Tongue weight (TW) is the downward force exerted at a vehicle-trailer coupling point when your trailer is hooked up for towing. The tongue weight should be about 10-15% of the gross trailer weight.

And here are the limits from the Tesla’s owner’s manual:

The Cybertruck is rated to tow 11,000 pounds, so rule-of-thumb tongue weight should be below 2,000 pounds to get a nice, stable, safe tow. The truck’s official max tongue weight, shown above, is actually 10 percent of the max trailer load, or 1,100 pounds. The max load on the rear hitch when being used for cantilevered accessories like bike racks is lower, as shown above.

Still, we all love safety factors, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve overloaded the absolutely shit out of many vehicles. Sometimes you’re towing a nose-heavy vehicle on a U-Haul trailer, and those U-Haul car-haulers sometimes require you to park the nose at the very front of the trailer, yielding a high tongue weight. Plus, you might end up with an impact load due to an uneven roadway or a crash. In any case, you want to make sure that the ultimate tensile strength of that hitch receiver/rear subframe is nowhere near the rated tongue weight.

And indeed, the Cybertruck failed JerryRigEveryThing’s test at just around 10,400 pounds — well above the rated tongue weight.

“That is one improperly loaded trailer away from catastrophic failure,” JerryRigEverything says in the clip. I think that’s the case with pretty much every truck, depending upon how improperly loaded the trailer is.

Whether or not this 10,400 pound failure of the cast aluminum rear section of the Cybertruck is really something to be worried about, I don’t know (I’d have to talk with a bunch of engineers and maybe run some simulations), but someone on Twitter named Bearded Tesla does make a few good points in their thread below:

Let’s talk towing and trailer safety

Unfortunately there are enough people that don’t know enough about towing safety to know what is and is not relevant in this discussion

Lets talk about it – a ???? pic.twitter.com/ebSVVlRns7

— Bearded Tesla (@BeardedTesla) March 11, 2025

Obviously, they’re named “Bearded Tesla,” so keep that in mind. And also, they frequently use the term “lateral” in that thread when it seems like “vertical” or “downward” would work. So read it with some skepticism, but whether or not that cast aluminum rear subframe (held together, in part, by structural adhesive) is an actual problem, I really just know, though we haven’t seen many real-world failures so far.

Still, if this video does anything, it provides entertainment in the form of a comparison between the Cybertruck and a Ram 2500, whose frame appears to hold up quite well in the video, all the way up to 10,700 without failure. Here you can see the hydraulic arm of the Caterpillar machine push straight down on the trailer hitch:

So what’s the takeaway? Well, the Ram seems to have a tougher rear frame section. And I use the term “tougher” intentionally, because that’s really what I think about anytime I see anything cast: Can it absorb energy, especially from cyclical loads? Ductile steel generally can, while cast aluminum can sometimes struggle in this area if not designed properly. Still, cast aluminum has its place, especially when considering strength-to-weight ratio. It can be designed to be quite durable.

Again, I don’t really know what to make of the Cybertruck’s rear casting failing at 10,400 pounds of tongue load in this test, but I do know that Dodge Ram fans now something to brag about other than “HEMI!”

Anyway, this video has been out over a full day now, so you’ve probably already seen it. I’m curious, dear reader, what your thoughts are on it. It certainly looks a bit frightening seeing where the castings broke, but with no significant real-world failures, do we think this is much ado about nothing?