Owner of Cybertruck's new Basecamp tent shows the reality of $3,000 accessory

Now that the Cybertruck has been available for a few months (albeit with a waiting list and slow delivery times), Tesla is finally starting to catch up with some of its pre-release promises.

One perfect example is the Basecamp tent, an accessory that Tesla showed off years ago when it was trying to demonstrate how useful the Cybertruck would be.

Renders of the tent attachment showed it basically clipping onto the top of the Cybertruck's angled truck bed, mirroring the truck's design with really clean lines and an angular aesthetic.

Now, though, Tesla is finally ready to actually sell the Basecamp, and a new video posted by InsideEVs has shown off what it's like to actually install and use.

The tent is clearly a fairly carefully designed bit of kit, as you'd hope given its chunky $3,000 price tag, but it's also a far cry from those first promotional images.

It's almost like a folded-up sofa bed that you carefully clamp into your Cybertruck's bed, with plenty of sturdy bolts to keep it in place. This lets it fold up and away when it's not in use.

When you do want to use it, you fold out its bed, then clip and mount the tent's ceiling and various flaps to designated spots on the Cybertruck's roof and sides.

This creates a tent on the back of your truck with a slightly raised sleeping area that pretty easily fits two people, and it also includes an inflatable base for a more comfortable experience (which you'd augment with sleeping bags).

In fact, it's not just the bed that's inflatable - the whole tent uses air pressure cleverly to get a bit more structural rigidity. Sadly the production Cybertruck doesn't have a built-in air compressor to help with this step, so you'll likely have to pump this manually, as the video shows.

Tesla does have an air compressor kit ready for the Cybertruck, in theory, but it's not on sale yet and is still listed as arriving in "early 2024".

Overall, once the tent is installed for the first time, it looks like you could quite quickly learn how to get it out of its cover and ready for a night's sleep nice and rapidly. That said, though, there's no escaping the fact that $3,000 is a heck of a lot of money for it.

But it does look like a decent bit of kit to add the finishing touches to your ride.