The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department recently received a donation of 10 Tesla Cybertrucks from a tech billionaire, fully wrapped, decaled with “TACTICAL VEHICLE” stickers, and kitted out for barricaded-shooter situations. The trucks carry ladders, hand-held ballistic shields, and all the aesthetic signals for serious, high-risk police work.
At the unveiling, Sheriff Kevin McMahill touted the vehicles’ safety. According to the Associated Press, McMahill said the Cybertrucks will keep officers safer “because they are bulletproof, while Metro’s other squad cars are not.”
Only, according to the company responsible for upfitting the Cybertrucks, the doors on these modified Cybertrucks are factory stock. And as we’ve seen demonstrated by countless Youtube videos and at least one real-world Cybertruck riddled with bullet holes, Cybertruck doors don’t come from the factory with effective bullet-proofing.
Uh oh! That’s not good… the Sheriff seems to be expecting that his officers have a level of protection in these Cybertrucks that they demonstrably do not have.
Let’s dig into it!
According to the UP FIT Founder, the Las Vegas PD Cybertruck Doors Are Factory Stock
In theory, there’s nothing stopping a police Cybertruck from being genuinely bulletproof. It can be done. You can reinforce panels, replace glass with multi-layer ballistic glass, and upfit the vehicle properly. The finished vehicle would be heavy as hell, but safe as houses.
That’s not what happened here.
The founder of UP FIT, the company that modified the Las Vegas police Cybertrucks, posted a hype video on Twitter showing off the work. In that video, he explicitly says:
“The vehicle does not need added ballistic doors because the doors already have ballistic protection from the factory on the doors, a unique attribute of the Cybertruck.”
In other words, no upgraded bullet-proofing on these police Cybertrucks.
You can watch the whole video here. Sorry to say, it’s a Twitter link.
Cybertrucks Are Not Bulletproof. Watch This Guy Shoot Holes in One to Prove It.
The level of bullet-proofing on a factory-stock Cybertruck isn’t something we need to guess at. This has been tested. On video. Repeatedly.
YouTubers have absolutely shredded the idea that Cybertrucks are bulletproof straight from the factory. Door panels, glass, front, rear, they’ve shot Cybertrucks just about every way you can shoot a Cybertruck, other than through the battery pack.
Here’s JerryRigEverything putting holes straight through a Cybertruck door with various common rifles and handguns (and a few wacky ones!):
AR-15 style rifles punch through the doors. All but the lightest handguns punch through. Standard rifle ammo punches through. Plus, the glass is an absolute joke from a ballistic standpoint.
If you shoot the truck from the front or rear, or through the absolutely enormous glass surfaces, penetration is trivial.
The stock Cybertruck is demonstrably not a bulletproof vehicle.
You Don’t Even Need YouTubers. This Rental Cybertruck Got Shot Up in the Wild.
If you’d prefer real-world evidence, here you go.
This is a rental Cybertruck that was actually shot up in the wild, abandoned with multiple bullet holes through the doors and a clean penetration through the glass at head height for the driver.
Two flat tires, a door-jamb penetration, and a trim panel flying off are just icing on the cake. I count 3 clean bullet-holes through the glass that already decided the verdict. This would be a terrible tactical vehicle in an actual gunfight.
And if this Cybertruck was bullet-proof, how does it have 4 bullet-holes in it after what looks like a really spirited day of driving?
The Bullet-Proof Confusion Started With Elon
If the Las Vegas Sheriff and even the UP FIT founder thinks that Cybertrucks can stop bullets by default, there’s a reason for that.
Elon Musk said the truck was bulletproof.
Here he is telling Joe Rogan as much:
The operative quote, delivered as typical word-salad served by the world’s richest man:
“You have a tank from the future… Okay? That’s bullet-proof.”
Now, you wouldn’t expect a physical feature like bullet-proofing to change through over-the-air updates. So imagine my surprise when Elon later added a huge caveat to the vehicle’s supposed battle-worthiness.
Here’s Elon later tweeting that the Cybertruck is actually very easy to shoot through, so be ready to duck:
Which is a long-winded way of saying… The Cybertruck is not bulletproof.
If you have to duck, you don’t have a bulletproof vehicle. That’s why not a lot of tanks look like drop-top convertibles.
A Dangerous Misunderstanding
And yet, the Las Vegas Sheriff appears to believe, and publicly stated, that these “tactical” Cybertrucks with totally stock doors are bulletproof in a way his normal patrol cars are not. Presumably, the 400 Las Vegas police officers trained on the use of these new vehicles expect that to be true, and will count on that fact in the field.
Like having a “bullet-proof” vest that only works if you duck out of the bullets’ way, that seems like a dangerous misunderstanding to me.
