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Simone Giertz parked her homemade Tesla pickup right next to Elon Musk’s stainless-steel Cybertruck — and nobody stopped her.
Inventor and YouTuber Simone Giertz dropped a new video in late November 2019 titled “Driving my car around is… weird || TRUCKLA UPDATE + CYBERTRUCK,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like: half day-in-the-life update on her custom electric pickup, half road-trip diary to Tesla’s Cybertruck reveal. The truck in question is Truckla, the DIY conversion Giertz built earlier in 2019 by chopping the bed off a brand-new Tesla Model 3. This time the cameras follow her from Bay Area gawkers all the way to the Cybertruck’s unveiling in Southern California.
- Giertz films Bay Area pedestrians and drivers staring, pointing, and filming Truckla as she drives it around — and playfully “creeps” back on them with her own camera.
- She drove Truckla to Tesla’s official Cybertruck unveiling on November 21, 2019, despite reportedly being asked in advance not to bring it — and drove straight onto the event grounds unchallenged.
- Parking outside the venue let her put Truckla’s rounded, practical Model 3 body directly next to Musk’s angular, brutalist Cybertruck for a real side-by-side comparison.
Life as the Only Truckla on the Road
The first chunk of the video is pure Bay Area street reaction. Giertz points her camera at strangers catching sight of Truckla — a vehicle that still doesn’t look like anything else on the road, a Model 3 sedan with its rear end sawed off and replaced with an open cargo bed. Drivers slow down, pedestrians pull out their phones, and Giertz leans into the attention instead of hiding from it, narrating the whole thing with the same deadpan humor that’s defined her build videos since the conversion first went viral.
It’s a fitting warm-up for what’s coming. Truckla has always drawn a crowd simply by existing — a one-off DIY pickup built from a car Tesla never intended to become a truck. That novelty is exactly why Giertz decided the vehicle needed to make an appearance at Tesla’s next big reveal.
Driving Into the Cybertruck Event Uninvited
The video’s centerpiece is Giertz’s trip down to Tesla’s Cybertruck unveiling on November 21, 2019. According to her own account in the video, she’d reportedly been asked ahead of time not to bring Truckla to the venue. She brought it anyway, and drove it straight onto the event grounds without anyone stopping her.
She was asked not to bring Truckla to the Cybertruck event — and drove it straight onto the grounds unchallenged.
That access is what makes the footage valuable beyond just a funny stunt. Parking Truckla outside the venue put two philosophies of “Tesla pickup” side by side in the same frame: Giertz’s hand-built, rounded Model 3 conversion, and Musk’s angular, stainless-steel Cybertruck making its public debut just yards away. For a build that started as a garage project, sharing a parking lot with Tesla’s own factory-designed truck was the payoff.
Two Trucks, One Frame
The visual comparison is the whole point. Truckla is soft-edged, familiar, and obviously born from a sedan — the compromises of the conversion are visible in every panel gap. The Cybertruck, revealed onstage that night, is the opposite: flat planes, sharp angles, and a stainless-steel exoskeleton that looks like nothing else Tesla — or anyone else — has put on a showroom floor. Giertz’s camera catches her genuinely stunned reaction the moment the Cybertruck rolls out, the kind of unscripted response that’s hard to fake on a first look at something that radical.
Viewers curious about how DIY builders have approached other unconventional vehicle projects can find more ground-up conversions in 10 Most Unusual Vehicles, while the reveal itself became its own story in Tesla’s Cybertruck Tug-of-War Stunt Was Pointless.
Whatever happens to the Cybertruck’s design between the reveal and actual production, Truckla is still the only Tesla pickup you can point a camera at and see parked in an ordinary driveway — and for one night in Southern California, Giertz got it parked close enough to Musk’s stainless-steel wedge to put both trucks in the same shot.
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