Tesla’s Cybertruck is a dystopian, masturbatory fantasy
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 …read more
