Cybertruck's Launch Is Already an Exhausting Joke

In 2019, Tesla revealed two new cars. In March, it revealed the Model Y, a slightly taller version of the Model 3 with a rear hatch door instead of a trunk. It was largely hailed as a smart but boring car. This is what grown-up car companies do: They iterate on successful models year after year, decade after decade. The Model Y is now one of the world’s best-selling cars, a genuine hit, and easily the best and most profitable product Elon Musk has ever helped make. Musk has tweeted about the Model Y just seven times. And then, Cybertruck came along.

Six months later, Tesla revealed the Cybertruck, which is supposedly getting delivered at the end of the month to very patient customers who placed a deposit for the car before the pandemic. The Cybertruck is already a laughing stock, and the steady drip of worrying videos and images going viral ahead of its release aren't helping. 

Deliveries were supposed to begin in 2021. It was supposed to be an off-roading champion and speed demon, modular but “literally bulletproof,” with a base price starting around $40,000. During the reveal, the unbreakable windows broke. In recent weeks, the Cybertruck has been widely mocked online for failing to summit a small dirt hill, having a dumb logo, looking ridiculous from behind, and panel gaps through which a much more reasonably sized car could drive. It cannot be sold in Europe, a huge market for Tesla, because it is too big and lacks life-saving crumple zones in the case of a crash. Tesla also said it retained the right to sue owners who resell their Cybertrucks within a year before quietly removing that section from its terms. And these are just the tidbits that have come out while the prototypes are in the hands of some of Musk’s most fervent fans. Elon Musk has tweeted about the Cybertruck 27 times.

All of this has led some people to wonder why the Cybertruck exists. The short answer is that the Cybertruck exists because it is the perfect Elon Musk car, the total embodiment of everything he is—a thing that tries to be a bunch of different things at once and is not very good at any of them, but, seems revolutionary and interesting if you look at it very briefly, only for just a second. 

The full explanation here involves remembering the pre-pandemic Elon Musk. This was before he became a far-right troll, hobnobbing with white nationalists and Nazis on Twitter and telling them they make good points. This was before he owned Twitter, very publicly turned it into a garbage fire of uselessness, and changed its name to a letter he likes. This was before he supported Kanye West for president and predicted there would be “close to zero new cases” of Covid by the end of April 2020. Back in 2019, it was still controversial to say Elon Musk wasn’t the generational genius many thought he was.

In 2019, I worked for a car website that covered the auto industry. Musk was both a constant source of debate and also an exhausting human to think about. We were sick of him, but also couldn’t get enough. Musk’s outsized impact on the otherwise boring, staid auto industry was a chaos particle in an otherwise closed system. Musk, for all of his faults, did shit we didn’t expect. He generated news and gave us things to write about. Musk exploited this, getting free advertisement for his car company by constantly saying newsworthy stuff which would get him free press coverage. It seems pretty obvious to me now that at some point the part of his brain that understood the game atrophied and died, leaving the part of his brain that thinks of crazy things to say sole proprietorship over his thoughts. Still, there was little debate at the car website that Musk was, on the most basic level, a smart guy. He had to be. Look at Tesla.

There is now an adage, which I will credit to former Twitter engineer Rod Hilton, that everyone thinks Musk is a genius until you hear him talk about a subject you know something about. As Hilton put it, “He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius. Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.”

I had a similar trajectory. Before I worked for the car website I covered public transportation. Musk famously hates public transportation and started a whole tunneling company for his cars specifically to make it obsolete. Some of the dumbest things I have ever heard someone say about public transportation came out of Elon Musk’s mouth. These were the kind of things that aren’t even debatable or questionable but are just plain ignorant, the kind of thoughts a five-year-old playing with toy cars might say. Hundreds of tunnels under a city would eliminate traffic forever, he claimed. It was then, around the time Musk created The Boring Company in 2016, that I realized Musk has two undeniable skill sets: generating attention for himself and playing the role of a smart person.

Musk is an entertainer. He is an actor playing a smart person, and like all good entertainers, he’s good at making his fans feel entertained. When the Cybertruck was released, all of our posts about it on the car website did monster traffic, because people were entertained. Friends and family who know nothing about cars were texting me to ask about the Cybertruck. It was a genuinely shocking car reveal, the complete opposite of the Model Y in every way, and therefore pure Musk. Even the window shattering was played to laughs and applause. In 2019, the Cybertruck won Motortrend’s Concept Car of the Year because car writers were entertained, too. 

For those who regard cars as little more than necessary appliances like a washing machine or refrigerator—which, ironically, the Cybertruck bears a great deal of resemblance to—a concept car is not a new thing. It is a prototype, usually not even functional, wheeled out during motor show conventions for marketing purposes. It is a way, along with sponsoring racing teams, traditional car companies signal they’re thinking big, exciting, radical new ideas while releasing the 48th version of the Honda Accord or whatever. Most of these companies are smart enough to not turn the concept cars into real cars, because concept cars, almost by definition, are wildly impractical vehicles that would be near impossible to manufacture reliably on a massive scale and that no one in their right mind would want to buy.

I have no idea if the Cybertruck will sell. Another infamous entertainer, P.T. Barnum, is widely associated with the saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” which leaves an awful lot of possibilities for a shameless self-promoter like Musk to make a buck. But I do know why the Cybertruck exists. It is three years late, has barely appeared in public, lacks many of the promised specifications, and has been promoted with precisely zero dollars in advertising. But here we are talking about it, and the man who revealed it. That is, after all, what he wants.

Correction: A previous version of this story said the Model Y has a hatch instead of a frunk. The Model Y also has a frunk. It does not have a trunk.