The Cybertruck is the first Tesla to offer 'wade mode,' which lets you drive through around 30 inches of water

• The Cybertruck is the first Tesla vehicle with "wade mode."
• The feature allows the truck to drive through around 30 inches of water.
• Turning on wade mode "raises ride height and pressurizes battery when driving through water."

While the Cybertruck isn't able to cross lakes and seas like Musk once promised, it does have something called "wade mode" that allows the vehicle to be driven through some rivers if the water is low enough.

The feature, the first for a Tesla, can be found and toggled on or off in the vehicle's off-road settings. Tesla says wade mode "raises ride height and pressurizes battery when driving through water."

"This is a truck," Tesla's head of design, Franz von Holzhausen, said in a video tour of the Cybertruck with Jay Leno. "And trucks are meant to do all kinds of things, and really be able to go anywhere. If you want to go through a river, we wanted to make sure you could do that."

The informational screen in the vehicle reads that water levels shouldn't be higher than the top of the bumper, and that the mode can take up to 10 minutes to activate and has a time limit of 30 minutes, after which point the mode will automatically deactivate.

Using a technology von Holzhausen called the "scuba pack," the designers used the Cybertruck's air suspension system to pressurize the battery.

"It forces air into the pack," von Holzhausen said. "All you need to keep the water out — because it is a sealed pack — is just a little bit of positive pressure."

According to von Holzhausen, it's possible to go through a little more than two and a half feet of water, or around 30 inches, without any water getting into the cabin. Tesla has not yet elaborated on whether or not the Cybertruck is equipped to handle salt water.

Meanwhile, Musk is still determined for the Cybertruck to function as a boat: he recently said in a post on X that Tesla will be offering a mod package for the Cybertruck to "traverse at least 100m of water as a boat" by upgrading the "cabin door seals."

Until then, von Holzhausen says that a handy Cybertruck owner could theoretically turn their vehicle into a boat themselves with a bit of DIY-ing.

"The vehicle almost floats — maybe you have to add a little bit of extra buoyancy just to keep it up," von Holzhausen says in the video. "If you're creative, and you want, you can figure out how to put on an outboard motor, plug it into your outlet, turn it on from your screen, and go boating."