Tesla Fixed my Cybertruck with GLUE - (but I'm not mad about it...)

I've been told that the special Tesla glue that's currently holding these two circular pieces of aluminum together is strong enough to hold not just one Cybertruck in the air, but two Cybertrucks in the air from a crane. Today obviously I only have one Cybertruck, but I still think it's worth a shot to see if this glue can actually hold the entire truck. Especially now since this blue glue, or structural adhesive, is what Tesla used to repair and reattach my bumper and tow hitch back to the aluminum frame of the Cybertruck. And they say it's just as strong now as it was before. So I got a feeling that this glue is a little different than Elmer's. I'm getting ahead of myself though. The last time you saw my Cybertruck it was in a freak excavator fight accident and I thought it was completely totaled since we ripped the rear casting completely in half. But it turns out that Tesla has constructed the Cybertruck with repairability in mind and it turned out a lot cheaper than I anticipated. The repair process is called giga cast sectioning and today we're lucky enough to see how it's done. I asked Tesla if I could watch my own truck getting fixed and surprisingly they said yes. The giga cast sectioning procedure allows us to replace just part of the rear casting instead of, you know, the whole thing. The Cybertruck is made up of three different pieces. We have an aluminum casting in the front. We have a center section here made up of ultra high strength steel. You can see that it's magnetic. And on the backside we have another casting in the rear. And obviously the rear casting is what we're going to be focusing on today. I'll get to how we repair this casting which as you can see is broken right here, but first I kind of want to show off what's inside the truck. So this is the rear drive motor. And if you remember my Cybertruck was immobilized after the damage had occurred. It turns out that there's a series of wires running through the system called a high voltage interlock loop. And if any of the wires in that wiring harness are broken or disrupted, it shuts the whole thing down for safety, which makes a whole lot of sense. It's not that any of the components themselves were damaged, it was just the low voltage harness that lost continuity, meaning that one of the wires was broken. When I say low voltage, I mean mid voltage because the Cybertruck uses a 48 volt system. But you can see here some of the wires that got stripped or ripped completely out of the wiring harness. And this is what was keeping the whole truck immobilized because the canned communication system is how all the computers and modules talk to each other. Since it's taken apart and all opened up, let's look inside really quick. So this right here is the compressor for the rear air reservoir which handles the air suspension since there's air shocks on all four tires. Here's the tonneau cover where the tonneau cover gets rolled up underneath. And anything orange is the high voltage system. So the back side of the NACS charging port is right here, and all the electricity goes through to that middle section of the Cybertruck where the battery is located. You might be like, hey Jerry, if it's an aluminum rear casting, how come it's not silver? Tesla adds this olive e-coat paint over the aluminum as an extra level of protection against oxidation. Since there are both steel and aluminum components in the Cybertruck, the electric coat helps prevent galvanic corrosion where two different metals come in contact with each other. The rear casting is made up in a few different parts. The main portion down here is this large lower section. This is a separate aluminum casting up here and it's held together with some spot welds and structural adhesive which we'll get into in a second. But you can see a little bit of that structural adhesive oozing out right here, and the divots from where the robot spot welded the pieces together. If the Cybertruck has a rear end collision, there are some pretty nifty lines in the casting where we can just cut it off and replace the back end without having to remove the rear drive motor or the battery. And there's another line right here in the center where if there's a side impact on either side, we can just replace half of the casting still without needing to remove all of the major components inside, which helps save time and money. The cut line for the center casting is right here next to the compressor which sits on some rubber bushings. These are the different sectioning pieces so we can cut the rear end right there, we can chop it in half right here, or replace just like the fender wheel wells, or obviously the whole piece. The Cybertruck is more repairable than I anticipated which is what's going to help us keep that repair cost low. But I'm talking too much. Let's slice off the rest of this casting and get it put back together. The rear casting includes some reference lines that are molded into the casting itself, and while that guideline is important, it's more of a suggestion. Tesla is designed to end about 3 millimeters worth of tolerance so we have some wiggle room when we go to reattach the replacement pieces. So obviously the more exact we can make the cut the better. So after the main cut is done and the piece drops off, we have a small portable belt sander with an 80 grit sandpaper disc that cleans up the rest of the cut. This is the rail section that's built specifically for these rear casting repairs. And if we cut it correctly it should just click into place like a little Lego. Nice. This is the world's biggest vice grip. The interesting part of all these repairs is that nothing we're doing here is secret. Everything is actually publicly available and detailed out on Tesla's website, which is something I've given them credit for in the past. The repair guides that Tesla has are probably the best in the industry. It's the same tutorials or guides that I used to patch the bullet hole in the rear passenger door. If you remember that, the 50 cal tore through one of the wiring harnesses. And since the pen diagrams are available for free online, I was able to get it fixed pretty quick. Procedures change over time. Obviously the ones they have online are the most up to date. The holes we're drilling right now is for a 6.5 millimeter structural flange rivet. The rivets though aren't going to be doing the heavy lifting. The heavy lifting comes from the two part structural adhesive. The structural adhesive we're using is called Fuser 2098. It's crash durable structural adhesive, and at first I was skeptical, as I imagine many people are. But we do have that crane ready to visibly show us how strong this glue is here in a few minutes. Now that we have the holes marked for the rivets, we can start adding the adhesive to the cast aluminum frame, and the replacement pieces which will bring my Cybertruck back to one piece again. The long nozzle makes sure that both parts of the adhesive gets mixed equally as they're squeezed from the tube. And there are some pretty strict instructions for how this adhesive gets applied. First we coat the entire area once with a layer of the adhesive and brush it out evenly over both surfaces. Then we can add a second thicker layer on top of the glue we just spread out so there's plenty of glue to squish out of the edges. It smells about exactly like you imagined it would. With a tensile strength of 3,190 pounds per square inch, the structural adhesive can be stronger in some cases than welding, especially since glue can cover more surface area than spot welds or rivets. And it's not just Tesla using this stuff. GM, Chrysler, Honda, and Acura are all listed on the bottle. The rivets are basically just there to make sure the pieces don't move while the two-part epoxy is curing. We have about 90 minutes or so to apply the glue before it starts drying, which means we do have to move pretty quick, but it should get to a full drivable strength within 24 hours. And interestingly, there are also microscopic non-compressible glass beads inside the glue to make sure we can't squeeze out too much of the adhesive. The invisible glass beads prevent over clamping and make the process a little more foolproof. Tesla's goal here is to return my Cybertruck to manufacturer specifications. And since we are using about 20 times more of that structural adhesive than it would take to hang the Cybertruck from a crane, the numbers do check out on paper. But we'll see if it translates to real life when the crane rolls up. It's really nice of them to match the color of the glue to the wrap of the Cybertruck. It's that extra attention to detail. After we finished gluing and riveting the frame rail sections, we did let the structural adhesive cure for 24 hours before coming back and installing the steel receiver hitch. The trailer hitch bolts directly to the rear casting and also connects directly to the bumper energy absorbers. These creatively designed pieces of aluminum are actually pretty fascinating. Going back to the aluminum conversation we were having earlier, obviously we're at a Tesla collision center right now. Tesla knows that vehicles are bound to get in accidents here and there. For a small fender bender, we don't immediately have to start chopping apart the rear casting. There's a piece right here near the rear bumper where the aluminum is designed with ripples in it to absorb the impact. It's an energy absorber that's part of the rear crumple zone and is bolted onto the rear casting which makes replacing far easier. So if you only get a love tap from another vehicle, it's super simple to replace this one piece. And then obviously if it's a much more intense fender bender, we can always section the rear casting and replace this portion here because it's designed, again, with ripples in mind to not transfer the energy to the rest of the vehicle. It's designed to stop any damage before we get to this point. You know, it's like one of those lizards where it kind of loses its tail and grows back later. The parts that are most likely to be damaged are super easy to swap out. And interestingly enough, now that we've repaired my Cybertruck, if on the off chance I were to get in an accident on the way home and someone rear ended me, this is still repairable and we can just resection it at the exact same place since most likely the energy will not be transferred since it's aluminum to the rest of the frame or the rest of the casting. The Easter egg right here with the Cybertruck and the Cyberhammer stamped onto the backside, it's all coming together again. Because we're dealing with the tolerances of many different pieces of castings and metal panels, we're temporarily setting the tailgate into place and making sure everything lines up before we drill holes through the tailgate tower, lining it up perfectly with the lower frame rail section that we just replaced. The last piece to get installed and structurally adhered to the Cybertruck frame is the tailgate tower. This sits right on top of the new sectioned piece we installed earlier. The tailgate tower's job is to line up the rear stainless steel side panels with the tailgate of the Cybertruck, so it's location is pretty important. When I snapped the Cybertruck casting during my tongue weight durability test, I assumed that the whole truck was completely totaled, or that it would cost more than the truck was worth to repair since the casting basically is the whole truck. But thanks to this sectioning procedure, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my poor decision making didn't total out the truck. And the final repair cost came out to $13,994. And it took Tesla less than a week to do the actual repair and get me back on the road. Now obviously no two accidents are the same, and my truck had no external damage. So unless you're specifically ripping your hitch off with an excavator, your repair cost will probably be different. If you remember during my original tongue weight durability test, we also spotted the structural adhesive holding the upper and lower aluminum castings together. And I just want to clarify, while finding the failure limit of the Cybertruck's tongue weight was extremely fun, it did fail at 10 times its static tongue weight load rating. So as long as you load and balance your trailer correctly, the Cybertruck will always be able to tow its rated capacity just fine. But keep in mind that no earthly metal or vehicle is invincible, and now we do know where it breaks. Science can just be a little expensive sometimes. Did the repair end up costing more or less than you thought? Let me know down in the comments. All that being said, the repair isn't worth a single penny if the structural adhesive can't do its job. Which brings us to my test. To be honest, putting glue on a 2.5 inch diameter tube does not intuitively seem like it would be strong enough to hoist a 7,000 pound Cybertruck off the ground. But apparently on paper, this much glue is capable of holding nearly 15,000 pounds. Two Cybertrucks, both at the same time. So if someone wants to let me borrow their truck, we can always stack two of them on top of each other. But until then, we'll start with just mine. Take a look at how much steel there is on this crane and how thick these shackles are compared to this super tiny layer of glue. We did follow the same adhesive instructions and applied the glue in the same way the Tesla Techs did during my repair. And of course, we let the structural adhesive cure for 24 hours before connecting it to the crane. And now there's only one thing left to do. If the 2.5 inches of glue fails, my Cybertruck will probably break in all kinds of fun new places. There we go. We have the tires on the metal blocks. We have the spreader so the straps don't hit the truck. And then the itty bitty bit of glue way up there in the top. Safety first. I think we're ready. Send it! 5,000. Backing up. 6,000. Oh it's coming off the ground! That is so impressive! And there you have it. Two and a half inch diameter structural adhesive carrying the entire weight of the Cybertruck off the ground. Look how tiny that is up there. A few things Tesla and I can both agree on is the structural adhesive is ridiculously strong, the free repair guys are absolutely epic, and of course it is excruciatingly important to always load your trailer correctly. I'm super glad to have my Cybertruck back. Say whatever you want about the truck, I know I do, but the strength of the glue is not something to worry about. And judging by the amount of adhesive they put on that rear casting, I bet it is just as strong now as it was originally. Thanks a ton for watching, and I'll see you around. Alright, bring it down!