Farewell To The Cybertruck, A Total Failure

The Tesla car company “will be winding down production of the Cybertruck” in 2027, according to a tweet from Elon Musk. Like everything else Musk says, ever, this must be treated as having essentially no truth value whatsoever and at best a coincidental relationship to anything that later happens with or to Cybertruck production. It’s noteworthy as an index of what Musk wants people to believe—it’s noteworthy, then, that Musk wants people to believe that the era of Cybertruck production is coming to an end.

And by “noteworthy,” I mean: fucking hilarious!

Few vehicles live on in history as metonyms for failure and embarrassment. Edsel, DeLorean, whatever poor beleaguered machine ferries the Sacramento Kings to a given road game instead of doing them the favor of exploding along the way. Add to these the Cybertruck, one of the most hyped vehicles of all time; Tesla’s production capacity for the Cybertruck reportedly was something like 250,000 units per year, and, should the end of its production in fact come in 2027, it will wrap up its four-year run certainly having sold, in total, worldwide, under half of that number. Given the ballooning demand for electric vehicles, the relative lack of competition among all-electric trucks, Tesla’s huge head-start in EV production, the unparalleled hype around the Cybertruck’s release, and its flowering into a rolling emblem of Musk’s personal toxicity, the Cybertruck deserves to endure in history as among the most embarrassing mass-produced products ever available for purchase by human beings. I’d rather carry a battery-powered Big Mouth Billy Bass around under my arm for a year than be seen, by any single person, climbing into or out of a Cybertruck once.

Musk says the reason for winding down Cybertruck production is so that Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas can be repurposed for production of Tesla’s “Cybercab.” You can go ahead and treat that as a heap of bullshit. A cab transports hundreds of different people in a day, unlike a personal vehicle; the only legible case for Cybercab, a theoretically autonomous taxi built entirely without a steering wheel, pedals, and side mirrors, is one based on there not needing to be a lot of them in existence. There is no version of the world in which there will ever be demand for anything like a quarter million Cybercabs a year. Not even the purely imaginary versions in which Tesla’s autonomous self-driving technology actually works. And anyway, Tesla already has more than enough factory capacity to build both Cybertrucks and Cybercabs, if anyone actually wanted either.

What a dumb, ugly, crappy lump of trash the Cybertruck was. A hideous eyesore at best, visibly shoddy in assembly, inept at truck stuff and even worse at being a car, its huge single touchscreen console outdated by the time it came into existence (as smarter automakers make the long overdue pivot back to safer and infinitely superior analog buttons and knobs), it had no appeal to pickup-truck buyers and even less to normal people looking to make the switch from internal combustion to EVs. Buying and driving a Cybertruck, then, pretty much by definition marked you as a simp for Musk, a sucker, a cornball, a dork, a tryhard—Total Recall‘s Johnny Cab minus critical thinking and sex appeal, but with personal fealty to a multibillionaire Nazi half as charming as the smell of an uncapped septic tank. And it marks you that way at gargantuan size and instantly recognizable shape: Pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers can spot a Cybertruck from half a mile away, giving them plenty of time to prepare their thumbs-down or their middle finger.

Imagine driving a Winchester Mystery House on wheels. Imagine going to the barber and being like “Give me the Mark Davis.” Imagine owning a totem of some other asshole’s hubris, prepubescent taste, and piss-poor judgment. The only thing more pathetic than conceiving and designing the Cybertruck is buying one.