Has there ever been a car as polarizing as the Tesla Cybertruck?
The futuristic-looking electric pickup truck released by Elon Musk’s EV company last November recently became the best-selling vehicle priced at over $100,000. There is still great demand for the car – but there are as many detractors as there are fans.
Critics point to its technical problems – notably a faulty accelerator pedal that led to nearly 4,000 of the cars being recalled last April. Its stainless steel exterior makes it susceptible to dirt and annoying to clean, others say, while its angular, far-out design is reminiscent of a stainless steel bucket on wheels.
Ahmed Ibraheem, creator of the popular YouTube channel The Care Nut and a car diagnostic technician, sees both sides of the debate.
“I see it as a technical demonstration of what happens when you give car designers and engineers the freedom to do what they want,” Ibraheem told HuffPost. It’s a very impressive technological leap, he said — although you can get the same EV technology in other Teslas for a fraction of the price — but it’s a pain on the street.
“The body design reminds me of a 9-year-old’s idea of a car drawn on a piece of construction paper,” he said.
Still, he gives Tesla points for thinking outside the box given the same car design these days.
“It’s nice to see something different, whether it’s good-different or bad-different,” Ibraheem said.
Another reason Cybertruck is easy to mock? The high price tag ensures that only the wealthy (or reckless spenders) can afford it. The Internet is deep in its anti-consumerist “eat the rich” era, and such a flashy status symbol is an easy target for ridicule. (Plus, outside of Donald Trump himself, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more polarizing figure than Dark MAGA’s own Elon Musk.)
“The Cybertruck embodies the best and worst of America: Bold design and potent power meet frat boy attitude and scrappy excess,” said Tom Voelk, a YouTube car reviewer and NBC News contributor.
Generally, Voelk said, the cars we ridicule have a certain geekiness to them. If we man-made vehicles, cars like the Yugo, Pontiac Aztek, Chrysler PT Cruiser and AMC Pacer and Gremlin, with widely spaced headlights and round or boxy frames, are your boring friend. The Cybertruck is not your friend. It’s more like a humanoid alien Klaatu on four wheels, Voelk joked.
“Humanity has difficulty understanding whether it is friend or foe. It lacks human characteristics like curves, hips or a face,” he said. “The bulletproof stainless steel origami form is menacing yet strangely soulless. In the real world it looks like a lost robot.”
It also has some similarities to other love-it-or-hate-it car designs of the past, according to Victoria Scott, a staff writer at Motor1.com and author of “We Deserve This: A Transfeminine Automotive Lookbook.”
Like the Hummer H2 and DeLorean before it, it’s designed to beg for attention, but does a poor job of achieving its main purpose: being a pickup truck.
“It’s not just a bad truck, it represents conspicuous consumption that feels dated and light,” she said.
Gary Hershorn via Getty Images
Still, there’s definitely an audience for the car, said Scotty Reiss, founder of the website A Girls Guide to Cars. She personally finds the Cybertruck’s exterior a little boring, but she can see how the aesthetics are a tech bro-futurist’s dream.
“It’s like a video game fantasy — not only in its appearance, but also in its function,” she said. “It’s supposed to be able to go anywhere, to be impervious to objects, to protect its inhabitants in a post-apocalyptic world, which is how so many video games depict their universes.”
To Tesla’s credit, Reiss said there’s a lot of good technology in the car — its electronic steering system that eliminates the mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the wheels, for example, and an interesting flat-bottom steering wheel design. , which both other automakers have also experimented with.
In its price range, however, she thinks there are too many flaws in the design.
“There is poor visibility that limits the driver’s view to the rear and the stainless panels … have sharp edges and are dangerous for passengers,” she said.
On a Tesla fan forum, a Cybertruck owner said he accidentally cut himself on the side of a door. And then there’s the question of whether the stainless body panels really are “stainless”; owners report rust and stains on their Cybertrucks.
“The only way to really protect your investment is to have it wrapped,” Reiss said. (But wrapped Cybertrucks have also been mocked — notably one Internet celebrity Adin Ross gave Donald Trump recently, with a photo of the Republican presidential nominee moments after he survived an assassination attempt in July.)
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The Cybertruck annoys Elizabeth Blackstock, the American editor of the racing news site PlanetF1, simply because it flies in the face of all the logic of the established automotive world.
“The Cybertruck’s off-road capabilities are no different than any other off-road-focused truck, but the weight of the thing makes it a challenge to maneuver on a narrow road,” she said. “Electric cars still suffer from unreliable battery life and range, and the Cybertruck has repeatedly shown it can’t match its own promises.”
“It would be one thing if it exceeded its expectations, but it really hasn’t,” Blackstock added.
She traced her disappointment with the car to a live demo in 2019, when Musk awkwardly punched the “armored” glass panes that were supposed to be shatterproof. As the amplified crowd fell silent, Musk admitted there was “room for improvement.”
“The whole time we’ve had Elon Musk and a lot of massive Tesla fans trying to convince us that this truck is the best thing since sliced bread,” Blackstock said. “To be honest, it almost feels like the rest of us are being gaslighted on an industrial scale.”