Jager
Well-known member
- First Name
- Jeff
- Joined
- May 25, 2020
- Threads
- 24
- Messages
- 337
- Reaction score
- 1,089
- Location
- Virginia
- Vehicles
- 2024 Cybertruck AWD, 2022 Model 3 LR AWD
- Thread starter
- #1
The ascent begins slowly, like the lazy stretching of one’s arms. Just a little tickle of the senses. A prologue of what’s to come.
It’s not that there aren’t curves. It’s just that you glide through one and then you have a little distance, a few moments, before the next one arrives. It’s all very gentle.
Back in the day, it’s where you’d be putting heat in the tires.
Today, on this early January morning – and with the mountain now here - I reach forward to the display and pause the music, then bring up the Dynamics page.
“Sport.”
You listen – not just with your ears, but with all you’ve got – and you feel the truck change. Everything tightens.
FSD made its turn for me two months ago. The 2,000-mile trip to Missouri in the HW3 Model 3. Even that now-seems-ancient v12.6.4 stunned me with its broad competence.
Then, back home with the Cybertruck, v14, despite a cacophony of little niggles, continued that journey.
Mostly.
The one place it fails spectacularly is on a good road at speed. Somehow, despite what they call their most aggressive driver profile, I’m thinking the internal codename used by Tesla for the software stack isn’t Verstappen.
Which is okay. God made roads like this for drivers.
And so it’s not surprising that I feel this sudden, blooming impatience. There’s a decreasing radius corner just up from the bottom that has held my attention. The scene of many crashes back in the day, I have been curious how FSD would handle it.
Sigh.
There’s a blue RAV4 crawling along at the speed limit just in front of us and FSD seems perfectly happy to trundle along behind it. We haven’t even really begun and I’m already shaking my head.
Around the horseshoe turn at the bottom, the first one that turns back in on itself, announcing the point where things get serious. Then the lift for a couple hundred feet. Then the sudden, sharp decreasing radius cooker.
Midway through that corner I can’t take it anymore. A quick stab of the brake to disengage FSD and my hands return to the yoke for the first time in 30 minutes.
It’s always a miracle, that feeling. The vehicle, back in your hands, alive.
I swing into the left lane – there are two lanes on the ascent; one lane heading down – and pressure the throttle. In seconds the blue RAV4 is gone, lost forever in the tapestry of turns quickly multiplying between us.
The mountain is four miles up, four miles down. Its curves are written in blood, its long, checkered history the same-same stories of riders and drivers who pushed too far. Drivers who misgauged their own skill. Riders who tried to impress one pal too many.
I’ve ridden it a thousand times, two wheels and four. It was where I once came to scrub in new tires. It was the last place my wife ever rode with me on a motorcycle, the footpeg upon which her foot rested sealing the deal when it scurred along the pavement. It was the place, a lifetime ago, where two troopers tag-teamed me with their blue lights. Eighty in a fifty-five and the saddlebag defense failing epically that afternoon, the local county circuit court soon having another reckless driving case to try.
It's been a long time.
For sure my Cybertruck has been given its legs. It’s been on this very mountain, in fact. And it’s absolutely been driven hard. I’m not sure it holds many surprises for me anymore.
But it’s never been driven with the same hard intent that I used to bring here, to this mountain, every week. It hasn’t been driven with prejudice. That’s what today is about.
It was the YouTube video, sitting on the couch yesterday, that prompted everything. The 911 driver down in North Carolina who had to drive two and a half hours to get to the really good roads. The kind of roads needed to let his Carrera do the things its engineers had imagined.
The Cybertruck needs a good road too.
After the RAV4, the next few turns are… not my best. They’re not bad. They’re not ugly. They’re not sideways, by any measure.
But a good turn, taken well, isn’t something you see. It’s something you feel. And to feel that, you first have to feel the road.
My eyes search for the old clues, willing long-forgotten synapses to fire. Speed slowly starts to build, a long, uncoiling thread spooling out behind me.
My right knee rests gently against the edge of the center console. My right foot lies slanted across the throttle pedal, the toe of my boot fixed softly against the riser in the center of the floor. The throttle needs subtlety and that’s what those two references give me.
Faster now into the next turn, spun, smooth, accelerating into the exit. My heartbeat rises in kind.
This is the place most people get hurt. It feels so good, so effortless. It’s a seductress smiling at you. But this is a technical road with a cornucopia of problems to solve. The next curve tightens more than the last and if you don’t somehow square that circle you’re done.
Easing out of the throttle the tiniest amount, I can feel the truck’s sudden restraint, measured and perfect, like it’s been lassoed by an angel. And then a moment later I’m back into the throttle and the angel smiles and lets go her thread.
As glorious as it all is, it doesn’t last. You know you’re in a different place when regenerative braking is no longer enough. When one-pedal driving won’t get it done. When the hydraulic brakes have to join the party.
But that’s okay.
The challenge with the Cybertruck isn’t its length or its weight or its sheer mass. It isn’t the massive front windshield. It isn’t the A-pillar.
The challenge with the Cybertruck is its width. Broad of beam, on a narrow road the Cybertruck soon consumes nearly its entire share of pavement. At speed, around a blind corner, that brings considerations that matter.
On a racetrack you’ve got berms and tiger stripes and runoff. There’s none of that here.
But I do have two lanes heading up the mountain. Hard into the right-hand lane, my eyes find the bottom of that much-maligned A-pillar, the spot in your vision where the bulbous base of the windshield wiper flares out a couple inches. That visual reference sets a marker in the center of the lane to my left.
And with that, everything narrows. The chaos of visual inputs fed through the enormous windshield tightens.
That base of the A-pillar begins scribing a line of ink, blood thin, across the landscape.
Now more than halfway up, the memories of those countless runs comes tumbling back to me. The corners are like old friends, welcoming me home.
The rhythm floats there, tantalizing, like a translucent ghost. The musical stanza that, captured, ties everything together. The car. The road. The pavement. The camber. The place where the sound of the tires is far away, your brain is a few hundred of feet in front of you, and you’re no longer thinking about doing any of this. The minutiae falls away and it’s just… driving.
The miracle of the Cybertruck is how it rails. Despite its weight. Despite its size. Despite everything.
You feel the G-forces hard against your body, pushing the side of your head. The seat suddenly matters. And yet through it all the Cybertruck remains as quiet and composed as a drive to Sunday School.
There are some other cars that will do this. A very few.
But there are no trucks. This is not a place for body-on-frame.
I’m pulled out of my reverie when I see the white painted lines, the caution markers, splashed across all three lanes.
“Hey John, how you doing?” I quietly murmur as I come out of the throttle, letting the truck ease back to the speed limit.
The corner ahead is blind and twenty-some years ago a Yamaha R1 pilot busted the corner coming down. John and his brother Peter were heading up on their own bikes, with John in the lead.
My question hangs in the air, like it always does.
I never knew either brother. But, yeah, John would have loved the Cybertruck.
It’s not that there aren’t curves. It’s just that you glide through one and then you have a little distance, a few moments, before the next one arrives. It’s all very gentle.
Back in the day, it’s where you’d be putting heat in the tires.
Today, on this early January morning – and with the mountain now here - I reach forward to the display and pause the music, then bring up the Dynamics page.
“Sport.”
You listen – not just with your ears, but with all you’ve got – and you feel the truck change. Everything tightens.
FSD made its turn for me two months ago. The 2,000-mile trip to Missouri in the HW3 Model 3. Even that now-seems-ancient v12.6.4 stunned me with its broad competence.
Then, back home with the Cybertruck, v14, despite a cacophony of little niggles, continued that journey.
Mostly.
The one place it fails spectacularly is on a good road at speed. Somehow, despite what they call their most aggressive driver profile, I’m thinking the internal codename used by Tesla for the software stack isn’t Verstappen.
Which is okay. God made roads like this for drivers.
And so it’s not surprising that I feel this sudden, blooming impatience. There’s a decreasing radius corner just up from the bottom that has held my attention. The scene of many crashes back in the day, I have been curious how FSD would handle it.
Sigh.
There’s a blue RAV4 crawling along at the speed limit just in front of us and FSD seems perfectly happy to trundle along behind it. We haven’t even really begun and I’m already shaking my head.
Around the horseshoe turn at the bottom, the first one that turns back in on itself, announcing the point where things get serious. Then the lift for a couple hundred feet. Then the sudden, sharp decreasing radius cooker.
Midway through that corner I can’t take it anymore. A quick stab of the brake to disengage FSD and my hands return to the yoke for the first time in 30 minutes.
It’s always a miracle, that feeling. The vehicle, back in your hands, alive.
I swing into the left lane – there are two lanes on the ascent; one lane heading down – and pressure the throttle. In seconds the blue RAV4 is gone, lost forever in the tapestry of turns quickly multiplying between us.
The mountain is four miles up, four miles down. Its curves are written in blood, its long, checkered history the same-same stories of riders and drivers who pushed too far. Drivers who misgauged their own skill. Riders who tried to impress one pal too many.
I’ve ridden it a thousand times, two wheels and four. It was where I once came to scrub in new tires. It was the last place my wife ever rode with me on a motorcycle, the footpeg upon which her foot rested sealing the deal when it scurred along the pavement. It was the place, a lifetime ago, where two troopers tag-teamed me with their blue lights. Eighty in a fifty-five and the saddlebag defense failing epically that afternoon, the local county circuit court soon having another reckless driving case to try.
It's been a long time.
For sure my Cybertruck has been given its legs. It’s been on this very mountain, in fact. And it’s absolutely been driven hard. I’m not sure it holds many surprises for me anymore.
But it’s never been driven with the same hard intent that I used to bring here, to this mountain, every week. It hasn’t been driven with prejudice. That’s what today is about.
It was the YouTube video, sitting on the couch yesterday, that prompted everything. The 911 driver down in North Carolina who had to drive two and a half hours to get to the really good roads. The kind of roads needed to let his Carrera do the things its engineers had imagined.
The Cybertruck needs a good road too.
After the RAV4, the next few turns are… not my best. They’re not bad. They’re not ugly. They’re not sideways, by any measure.
But a good turn, taken well, isn’t something you see. It’s something you feel. And to feel that, you first have to feel the road.
My eyes search for the old clues, willing long-forgotten synapses to fire. Speed slowly starts to build, a long, uncoiling thread spooling out behind me.
My right knee rests gently against the edge of the center console. My right foot lies slanted across the throttle pedal, the toe of my boot fixed softly against the riser in the center of the floor. The throttle needs subtlety and that’s what those two references give me.
Faster now into the next turn, spun, smooth, accelerating into the exit. My heartbeat rises in kind.
This is the place most people get hurt. It feels so good, so effortless. It’s a seductress smiling at you. But this is a technical road with a cornucopia of problems to solve. The next curve tightens more than the last and if you don’t somehow square that circle you’re done.
Easing out of the throttle the tiniest amount, I can feel the truck’s sudden restraint, measured and perfect, like it’s been lassoed by an angel. And then a moment later I’m back into the throttle and the angel smiles and lets go her thread.
As glorious as it all is, it doesn’t last. You know you’re in a different place when regenerative braking is no longer enough. When one-pedal driving won’t get it done. When the hydraulic brakes have to join the party.
But that’s okay.
The challenge with the Cybertruck isn’t its length or its weight or its sheer mass. It isn’t the massive front windshield. It isn’t the A-pillar.
The challenge with the Cybertruck is its width. Broad of beam, on a narrow road the Cybertruck soon consumes nearly its entire share of pavement. At speed, around a blind corner, that brings considerations that matter.
On a racetrack you’ve got berms and tiger stripes and runoff. There’s none of that here.
But I do have two lanes heading up the mountain. Hard into the right-hand lane, my eyes find the bottom of that much-maligned A-pillar, the spot in your vision where the bulbous base of the windshield wiper flares out a couple inches. That visual reference sets a marker in the center of the lane to my left.
And with that, everything narrows. The chaos of visual inputs fed through the enormous windshield tightens.
That base of the A-pillar begins scribing a line of ink, blood thin, across the landscape.
Now more than halfway up, the memories of those countless runs comes tumbling back to me. The corners are like old friends, welcoming me home.
The rhythm floats there, tantalizing, like a translucent ghost. The musical stanza that, captured, ties everything together. The car. The road. The pavement. The camber. The place where the sound of the tires is far away, your brain is a few hundred of feet in front of you, and you’re no longer thinking about doing any of this. The minutiae falls away and it’s just… driving.
The miracle of the Cybertruck is how it rails. Despite its weight. Despite its size. Despite everything.
You feel the G-forces hard against your body, pushing the side of your head. The seat suddenly matters. And yet through it all the Cybertruck remains as quiet and composed as a drive to Sunday School.
There are some other cars that will do this. A very few.
But there are no trucks. This is not a place for body-on-frame.
I’m pulled out of my reverie when I see the white painted lines, the caution markers, splashed across all three lanes.
“Hey John, how you doing?” I quietly murmur as I come out of the throttle, letting the truck ease back to the speed limit.
The corner ahead is blind and twenty-some years ago a Yamaha R1 pilot busted the corner coming down. John and his brother Peter were heading up on their own bikes, with John in the lead.
My question hangs in the air, like it always does.
I never knew either brother. But, yeah, John would have loved the Cybertruck.
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