A Tesla Cybertruck owner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has raised a serious concern regarding what is supposed to be a frightening mechanical failure, which has left his vehicle stranded in the middle of the road with both of its front wheels pointed sharply.
Steven Vining, the car’s owner, thinks foul play was at work and that the accident may have been done on purpose. Steven Vining said that while he was driving his Cybertruck with attendants on the highway at 70 mph, he started to experience an oversensitive wobble in steering. Just a short while later, both of the front wheels suddenly faced inward towards one another, paralysing both the vehicle and traffic.
Luckily, Steven had already taken it on the brakes to take his kids out safely before total failure. “My children were just in this truck, just going 70 miles an hour down the road,” Steven narrated in a video about the incident. “Luckily, we were not at full speed when steering went.”
“The Tie Rod Is Completely Unbolted”
The most concerning thing that Steven found was the undercarriage of the truck. The tie rod – an important piece linking the steering apparatus to the front wheels – was completely unscrewed. Steven stated that it was not broken or stripped, just disconnected.
“But if you look, this tie rod is completely unbolted and out of the hole,” Steven says in the video, looking clear, worried. “It’s not broken, it’s not stripped; it’s unbolted. I hope nobody would do that on purpose.
The video, which begins from inside the Cybertruck cabin and ends with a close-up of the misplaced wheels, was posted under the title: “Someone tampered with my Cybertruck????”
Steven’s assertion quickly sparked a debate across social media platforms. He suspects sabotage is a possibility, referencing past visits to a Tesla with protesters. “Proof of paranoia after all the nonsense I have been dealing with”, Steven commented. ‘I’ve worked on cars all my life. This doesn’t happen.”
Miles, meanwhile, quickly dismissed his theory by some Tesla owners and fans. A commenter, Ashley Seay, replied, “That’s the pot he’s stirrin’ now. Why waste the time to unbolt the tie rods to screw a Tesla owner? That makes no sense.”
However, others speculated it was a problem of low control quality on Tesla’s part. Locking nuts and a cotter pin — the parts poised to prevent dovetailing nicely, to prevent loosening, are employed to secure tie-rods. The thing is that these were allegedly missing or undone without any physical harm to raise eyebrows in die-hard automotive fanatics.
Expert Opinions
A self-professing mechanic and Cybertruck backer chimed in on the matter, siding more with the manufacturing failure scenario. “I’m a mechanic. I think it was a quality control error on the part of Tesla, he wrote.” Reacting snarkily to the sabotage theory, he added, “What leftist do you know well enough to remove the cotter pin and tie rod nut without spilling latte?”
The joke aside, the incident has raised fears that Tesla is shipping its new Cybertruck models without sufficient post-assembly inspection and quality control, considering the vehicle’s new steer-by-wire system, which doesn’t have a traditional mechanical steering link.
Steven had the Cybertruck transported to a Tesla service centre for an extensive check. That investigation is still ongoing, and at this writing, Tesla hasn’t had anything to provide on the situation.
Whether this will turn out to be a one-off manufacturing flaw, a maintenance error, or an extremely rare act of vandalism, the incident has triggered a new wave of attention to Tesla’s assembly quality, especially on its latest and most experimental vehicle to this point.
Conclusion
Whatever the reason behind the near-disaster involving Steven and his sons and daughters, the case raises critical questions regarding vehicle protection, post-discharge examinations, and the liability of organizations to guarantee that serious parts are safe.
With the Cybertruck still spreading across the country and captivating the world headlines, incidents like this serve as a reminder that even the most revolutionary car still comes as a realization of a very simple principle in vehicle design: making sure the wheels stay on the road.
