It’s been four years since Tesla first announced the Cybertruck, a hideously ugly electric pickup truck that didn’t seem to improve either electric cars or pickups in any meaningful way. Instead, the 6,600-pound hunk of “stainless super steel” seemed more like the culmination of one man’s bizarre fantasy, and that man just happened to own an entire company that he could use to make that fantasy, with all its sharp angles and unnecessary light bars, a reality.
Today, in a livestream on CEO Elon Musk’s decimated X platform, Tesla finally delivered the first, long-delayed production Cybertrucks to 10 buyers, the first of an unknown number of wealthy consumers who have bought into his grim vision of the future. It’s a car that promises – for those who can afford it – a blank cheque for vehicular manslaughter and unnecessary survivability from semi-automatic firearms. Its slogan (“more utility than a truck, faster than a sports car”) speaks almost poetically to two distinct but orthogonal archetypes of threatened masculinity: the tacticool milspec dork and the ostentatious rich guy.
A “bulletproof” body has been a key feature of the Cybertruck since its 2019 launch, and today Musk admitted that it was there for no good reason. “Why did you make it bulletproof?” Musk said. “Why not?” he said with a broad grin, before metaphorically waving his genitals at the cheering crowd, while also promising metaphorically bigger genitals to anyone who buys the Cybertruck. “How tough is your truck?” Musk grinned.
This admission came alongside video footage of a Cybertruck being sprayed with rounds from a .45-calibre Tommy gun, a Glock 9mm and an MP5-SD submachine gun, which also uses 9mm rounds. We’d ask Tesla what cartridges they were firing, and whether they were being shot from within the effective range of any of these weapons, but the company disbanded its PR team in 2019.
It was a silly but expected bit of showboating from Musk during his rambling presentation. Just before the shooting demonstration, Musk touted the truck’s overall toughness, noting that its low centre of gravity made it extremely difficult to tip over in an accident. A video also showed the Cybertruck barely moving after being hit by a much smaller vehicle travelling at 38mph. In response, Musk commented that “if you ever get into an argument with another car, you’re going to win”, lightheartedly encouraging Cybertruck owners to engage in such “arguments”.
In a country where both road deaths and gun violence have soared in recent years, it’s a little galling to see Musk promoting his vehicle as some sort of tool for rich people to survive the apocalypse, or even just the inconveniences of a world where their lesser selves take up any space at all. (Four-wheel-drive Cybertrucks start at around $80,000; a $60,000 RWD model is due out in 2025). “Sometimes you get these late civilisation vibes, the apocalypse could come at any moment, and here at Tesla we have the best apocalypse technology,” Musk mused.
There is also the simple fact that SUVs and trucks have got dramatically bigger and heavier over the past decade. EVs weigh more because of their batteries, of course, but carmakers have also been making the fronts of cars bigger and higher in recent years. It’s a combination that makes these vehicles more dangerous for pedestrians and other drivers.
“Regardless of the shape of their nose, pickups, SUVs and vans with a bonnet height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities than cars and other vehicles with a bonnet height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile,” according to research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. It also found that pedestrian deaths have increased by 80 per cent since a low point in 2009. If you’ve ever walked or cycled in a city, you’ve probably felt the danger, and it’s even more frightening when the wall of a lorry stops short as you cross the road. After all, it’s well known that the speed of a car has a dramatic effect on a pedestrian’s chances of survival, which isn’t great when an extremely heavy car can do 0-60 in less than three seconds.
Now that the Cybertruck is almost ready for public consumption, it looks like Musk has basically built a vehicle that, for a high price, enables the worst impulses of US drivers and gives them the “freedom” to do whatever they want. It doesn’t matter if the Cybertruck’s lightbar headlights blind drivers of smaller vehicles; they should get the hell out of the left lane. And if someone else on the road annoys a Cybertruck driver, who cares? Other drivers should just accept that they’re about to lose a very expensive and potentially life-threatening ‘argument’ with the Cybertruck’s front fender.
All this should have been obvious from the start. From day one, the Cybertruck has hinted at a cyberpunk future, a genre with cool haircuts and hacking and slightly problematic orientalism, yes – but also one where wealth inequality is even worse than it is now, and the rules don’t apply to those with money. The implicit promise of the Cybertruck has always been a vehicle that bypasses social norms for people who can afford it, and today’s spectacle made that explicit. To that end, the marketing may be as much genius as nonsense.
“If Al Capone showed up with a Tommy gun and emptied the entire clip into the car door, you’d still be alive,” Musk crowed at one point, either promising to revive the dead or forgetting the frightening number of people who use guns to commit acts of violence. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where the presence of lethal weaponry is something I have to consider when buying a car. Maybe the rich survivalists playing Blade Runner meets Mad Max in their Cybertrucks haven’t considered that when everything burns down, the power grid goes down too.
