It’s been four years since Tesla first announced the Cybertruck, a hideously ugly electric pickup truck that didn’t seem to actually improve on EVs or pickups in any meaningful way. Instead, the 6,600-pound mass of “stainless super steel” seems to be more the culmination of one man’s bizarre fantasy, and that man just so happened to own an entire company he could leverage to birth that fantasy, with all its sharp angles and unnecessary lighting bars, into reality.
Today, Tesla finally delivered the first, long-delayed production Cybertrucks to 10 buyers in a livestream on CEO Elon Musk’s decimated X platform, 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 only those who can afford them — a blank check for vehicular manslaughter and unnecessary survivability from semi-automatic firearms. Its tagline (“more utility than a truck, faster than a sports car”) speaks almost poetically to two distinct but orthogonal archetypes of threatened masculinity: the tacti-cool milspec dork, and the showboating rich guy.
A “bulletproof” body has been a key feature since the Cybertruck’s introduction in 2019; today Musk admitted 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 larger genitals to anyone who buys the Cybertruck. “How tough is your truck?” Musk smirked.
This admission came alongside video footage of a Cybertruck being sprayed with rounds from a .45 caliber tommy gun, a Glock 9mm and a MP5-SD submachine gun, which also uses 9mm rounds. We’d ask Tesla what cartridges they were firing and if they were being shot from within the effective range of any of these weapons, but the company dissolved its PR team in 2019.
It was a stupid but expected bit of showboating from Musk during his rambling presentation. Right before the gunfire demo, Musk touted the truck’s overall toughness, noting that its low center of gravity made it extremely difficult to flip in an accident. A video also showed the Cybertruck barely moving after a much smaller vehicle moving at 38 mph collided with it. To that, Musk commented that “if you’re ever in an argument with another car, you will win,” glibly encouraging Cybertruck owners to engage in such “arguments.”
In a country where both traffic fatalities and gun violence have surged 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 lessers occupy space at all. (All-wheel drive Cybertrucks start at about $80,000; a $60,000 RWD model is supposedly arriving in 2025.) “Sometimes you get these late civilization vibes, the apocalypse could come along at any moment, and here at Tesla we have the finest apocalypse technology,” Musk mused.
Beyond that is the simple fact that SUVs and trucks have gotten dramatically bigger and heavier in the past decade or so. EVs naturally weigh more because of their batteries, but auto manufacturers have been making the fronts of cars larger and taller in recent years, too. That’s a combo that makes these vehicles more dangerous for pedestrians and other drivers alike.
“Whatever their nose shape, pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile,” research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety states. It also noted that pedestrian crash deaths have risen 80 percent since a low in 2009. Anyone who walks or bikes around a city has probably felt that danger before, and it’s even more startling when the wall of a truck stops short when you’re crossing the…
Read More: Tesla’s Cybertruck is a dystopian, masturbatory fantasy