Tesla is in a sticky situation. On Thursday, it issued a recall for nearly every single Cybertruck it's manufactured to date because their stainless steel body panels could fly off while driving, providing other motorists on the road a sharp-edged Mario Kart obstacle to dodge during their morning commute.
The Elon Musk owned automaker definitely has a few screws loose, but that's not why these panels are detaching. According to a regulatory filing, the issue is caused by the shoddy glue used to attach the angular pieces of the Cybertruck's exterior, specifically a lengthy portion above the side windows connecting to the vehicle's roof known as the cant rail.
Roll that back — did they say these things are held together by glue?
Yes. Although the use of glue isn't uncommon in the world of automotive construction, you can leave it to Tesla — which is facing its eighth recall for the Cybertruck, a vehicle that's only been on the road for little over a year and was hyped as the culmination of Elon's engineering genius — to find some way to mess up sticking two things together.
In the filing, Tesla says that the adhesive it used was "susceptible to environmental embrittlement," and that the way it will fix the issue is by replacing it with a glue that won't disintegrate after a year on the road.
To experts, it's a baffling blunder.
"Glues are used a lot more than people think in car body construction these days," Dale Harrow, chair and director of the Intelligent Mobility Design Center at the Royal College of Art London, told Wired. "Rather than having a mechanical fixing, weld or a screw or a bolt, it's very effective gluing panels together for a lighter construction. It's become very popular. Jaguar, Lexus, Audi, they'll use glues at some point."
"So I'm very surprised," Harrow said. "It's not as if it's an unknown science. I've not heard [of problems] anywhere else."
But the Cybertruck is different. One reason that you don't hear about other automakers having glue problems is probably that they're wise enough not to use the same metal used in kitchen utensils for the exterior of their vehicles.
"Stainless steel is the big difference," Harrow told Wired, suggesting that the problem seems to arise with how the metal conducts cold better. "I could surmise that something on the production line is not quite bonding at the right temperature or getting the right UV coverage? And that could be due to the stainless steel having a different density from standard steel."
"It's not a small company, and it's not doing things on the cheap," Harrow added. "So I'll be very surprised if there wasn't the knowledge within the company to fix this."
For one reason or another, the glue slipped through the cracks. But the Cybertruck has been plagued with so many issues — from bricking in car washes to bricking while driving, to its big dumb accelerator pedals getting stuck in the down position — that you really shouldn't be surprised at this point.
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