When Mega Construx made a big return to South Africa it did so with products at all price ranges, but the king of the line is a Tesla Cybertruck.

The suggested retail price of the Mega Construx Tesla Cybertruck is R4 399.99 but, at the time of publication, it can be bought for less. Takealot (R4 175) and Toy Kingdom (R4 349) both have the set for less than that right now but regardless of where you buy it you will be forking over quite a bit.

We’ve spent the past week or so steadily building this 3 283 piece behemoth and can now report back on what it’s like to assemble and display.

For those who care about the unboxing experience, the Cybertruck is fantastic in this regard. The extremely large box has several, smaller boxes inside of it which correlates to the sections in the massive printed instruction booklet.

Everything is packaged nice and securely and there’s some appreciated thoughtfulness such as the fact that the windscreen pieces – parts of models which are usually scratched – are kept in their own protective box and even provided with a layer of removable film to make sure your pieces are in pristine condition.

On top of this Mega Construx has also been kinder to the environment by using paper bags inside of the boxes. Its competitor LEGO has been promising to make this change for a long time now but is still packaging their sets with single use plastic bags.

We’ll get back to LEGO comparisons near the end of this feature but everything involved in the steps before you start building are fantastic.

Unfortunately this takes a turn for the worst very quickly. Mega Construx provides a leaflet in the box warning that it will be easy to confuse black and dark grey pieces with each other. This problem isn’t helped by the fact that the entire base of the Cybertruck, onto which everything else is built, is mostly made up of these similar looking pieces.

It’s very easy to make a mistake and we did once or twice. This is a bit perplexing as this problem has been solved for the longest time in the brick building world by either using different colour pieces in sections that are unseen in the final build, or by simply not including similar pieces with similar colours.

This frustration aside the quality of the plastics and the moulding are rather good. You can see our coverage of a past Mega Construx product, the Skeletor Havoc Staff, for more information on the plastic quality of this brand.

Problems continue, however, with massive colour variations between pieces. Toy makers of all kinds struggle with proper colour matching, especially with colours like grey, and it’s on full display where you can place two pieces next to each other and clearly see the big difference between them even though they’re supposed to be identical.

This problem is made worse by the choice of pieces here. Like the dark colours use in the base, as you get higher up, other parts of problems and should have maybe been switched out. The sunroof is a particularly egregious example with two different types of transparent plastic used resulting in this subassembly which looks rather ugly.

The rest of the building is a mixed bag. There’s a lot of fun and well engineered subassemblies which come together beautifully. Then there’s other which seem like they got much less time and attention.

The worst part of this, and arguably the worst part of the entire model, is the hilariously large panel gaps around the doors. After we had installed them we honestly believed we had made some massive error as the gaps are not at all present in the marketing material for the set.

After triple checking the instructions and seeing other pictures of the build from consumers, we can confirm that this is the intended look.

With all of these problems in mind, once the set is complete and on the shelf as intended for a display model, it looks rather good.

Friends and family, even those unfamiliar with Tesla and the Cybertruck, will easily be able to tell what this is and will be surprised that it’s made from bricks.

For those wanting a display model that comes with the added experience of building it too, we think they will be happy if they take the part colour problems and panel gaps into consideration.

And, while the price is very high, you will be hard pressed to find such a large display model at this price point, especially for a brand like Tesla which, while popular, doesn’t have the presence of the bigger and old car makers in the world of toys and collectibles.

What else is out there?

If you’re in the market for buildable model cars LEGO has several options available which we have compiled into a short table below which allows for a more direct comparison to the Mega Construx Tesla Cybertruck.

The below is not all the model cars LEGO sells, just most of them which are comparable for those who want a large building experience.

We’ve stuck to non-fiction vehicles leaving out 10300: Back to the Future Time Machine and 10274: Ghostbusters ECTO-1. While both of these are based on real cars, the versions sold are the non-production models, so we’ve decided to leave them out.

It’s worth noting some caveats about the provided size of the Cybertruck, however.

The first is that we had to measure this one ourselves, to the nearest centimetre, as full measurements are not listed on any product pages for the set. For LEGO we used the provided numbers from the company.

The second is that the Cybertruck has adjustable suspension accomplished with some gears and rubber bands. This mostly stays out of the way when on display and all the mechanisms for it are hidden in compartments in the front and the back. Our measurements are with the suspension set to its highest point.

As you can see from the table above Mega Construx, or more accurately parent company Mattel, was very shrewd picking a price, part count and overall size that is not directly competing with anything LEGO offers.

On top of that LEGO simply doesn’t have the Tesla licence, so Mega Construx is the only game in town for an officially branded product.

Because of this the two companies don’t really compete and instead fans of the specific cars and brands can choose what they want, or what they’re comfortable with paying.

This all feeds back to our original question: is the Mega Construx Tesla Cybertruck worth R4 400? It is for the people who want this specific car, at this size and price, but for everyone else it isn’t.

We can’t see a non-Tesla fan randomly picking this up on a trip to the toy store or idle browsing of an online marketplace, while we can see that happening with some of the LEGO mentioned above.

Outside of licences and price there are objective problems mentioned earlier with the colour matching and panel gaps a real sore point, especially at this price.

Those who like what they see and have the means will likely not be dissuaded, and for them it’s good news to see that this is officially sold in South Africa and the hoops and expenses of import don’t need to be jumped through.