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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Late Night Open Thread: CYBERTRUCK Is Coming After You

Late Night Open Thread: CYBERTRUCK Is Coming After You

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Assuming there’s a handy ramp and some willing helpers available. An excuse to share Albert Burneko’s glorious rant!

The Tesla Cybertruck looks like shit. That is the first thing about it. It looks like somebody should be pulling it out of a men’s size-10 loafer in a shoe store in Times Square. It looks like a beard trimmer that plays Phil Collins songs. It looks like it should come free with a Sports Illustrated print subscription in 1987. Maybe it’ll look better if you hit ctrl-alt-delete a few times or close WordPerfect in the background. Maybe it’s just weird to see it outside of its natural environment, upright on the wall of a public restroom, dispensing paper towels.

Were the Cybertruck not so clearly intended to make a visual statement, you could shrug its ridiculous ugliness off. This is a pickup truck, you would say, in that case. A utility vehicle. Its function is not to be cool-looking. Its function is to haul stuff, possibly off-road. The problem there is that if that were true—”We got to move these refrigerators,” the Cybertruck’s ideal buyer might say, “we got to move these color TVs”—the Cybertruck would not look the way it does; there would be no affirmative reason to make it look like that. But still. You could imagine imagining that its appearance didn’t matter.

Of course, that would require the Cybertruck to do truck stuff capably…

I don’t know about you, but what I look for in a utility vehicle is all the torque and raw power of a Roomba, but without any of the gratuitous sex appeal. At least the Cybertruck’s brutal looks will be sure to command the attention of all the moms in the Whole Foods parking lot as it feebly rolls back down the front of a speedbump. Maybe some of them will help push it. I’d give the Cybertruck a reassuring pat after its long trek up that hill in the video up there, if its stainless steel body panels weren’t 11 million degrees Fahrenheit in the sun.

A fun irony here is that the Cybertruck’s evident frailty as a heavy-duty utility vehicle will disqualify it, absolutely, in the eyes of the median American pickup-truck buyer—even though the median American pickup truck driver never asks his gigantic blacked-out coal-rolling Ford F-150 Raptor to do anything brawnier than toting a 32-pack of plastic 16-ounce water bottles from the Walmart back to the McMansion. It’s important that your pickup truck at least contain the capacity to function as an off-road death-squad conveyance, in the event you get called up to the big leagues to behead some liberation theologists on short notice.

The Cybertruck fails in both regards here: It is neither powerful enough (to pull a Radio Flyer wagon behind it), nor terrifying to behold. It looks like something you’d use to remove pilled wool from an old sweater; unfortunately it doesn’t have the torque for that. I’d suggest toughening its looks up a little with a strategically placed Punisher logo decal, but that’s more freight than it can haul…

But, then again, SRSLY:

Reader Interactions

66Comments

  1. 1.

    Anotherlurker

    That is, by far, the ugliest thing I have ever seen masquerading as a pick-up truck.

    From what I gather, its performance is, at best , anemic.

  2. 2.

    Chetan Murthy

    I could swear I remember reading that *torque* was one of the big selling points of EVs.  You’d think that that would make climbing up a curb a doddle …. I mean, it’s all about how much *torque* you can apply, innit?

  4. 4.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I wanted to defend that the cybertruck looks like a science fiction vehicle, but… it looks like a science fiction vehicle from a very low budget 70s movie, where they spray paint shiny metal color on a prop they made out of cardboard.  If you were an 80s kid, you can see the aesthetic Musk is trying for, but he’s failing.

    Isn’t that pathetic?  Richest guy in the world (then), and he couldn’t get his fake sci-fi toy to look high tech.

    Musk’s investors day presentation should be fascinating.  He’s angry, his businesses are suffering, and his undelivered promises are becoming publicly visible.  An anti-woke rant is a nonzero chance.  On the other hand, with his attention on Twitter, Tesla’s engineers may have been able to put together a display that works, for once.

  5. 5.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    Musk’s truck sucks just a bit less then himself. Still, a massive amount of suck between them that could be used to suck out a septic tank.

    Speaking of trucks, I am really impressed with the number of lifted trucks in my area that are equipped with a handicapped parking permit. The other day a guy parked his jacked-up blinged-out truck with extra large and wide bling-bling big boy pretty sparkly wheels and oversize tires in the handicapped spot and sure enough, he had his permit. The damned truck just about blocks the parking lane as he didn’t pull all of the way in to the spot and if he was actually handicapped he would need a lift to get into the truck.

    He came back out about five minutes later carrying two 12 packs of Bud and left. Hopped right in the truck, no difficulty.

  9. 9.

    Burnspbesq

    Rivian and Ford are going to eat Tesla’s lunch in the pickup segment. VW and Hyundai/Kia are drinking Tesla’s milkshake in the SUV segment. Porsche and BMW are formidable competitors in the luxury-sedan segment. Tesla is in the process of voluntarily forfeiting its only real competitive advantage, the Supercharger network.

    Can you say “existebtial crisis?”

  10. 10.

    NotMax

    @Odie Hugh Manatee

    Handicapped placards don’t necessarily equate to being mobility impaired. For example, those whose respiratory system is compromised.

    Not making excuses for Mr. Bling, just saying it’s not always due to a plainly visible infirmity.

    Inapplicable to your encounter but shall mention it took years of noodging to finally get Mom to request her doctor sign off on one. “I don’t want to take up a space from someone who really needs it” was the refrain until she finally relented at age 93.

  11. 11.

    Burnspbesq

    ETA: and if the electric Macan lives up to its promise, Porsche is going to take a huge bite out of Model X sales.

  12. 12.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @NotMax:

    I know and I agree, it’s just that I know when I can see someone who needs better parking and someone who wants convenience. One of my customers has a placard because of his wife and he uses it in his truck for convenient parking when she’s not with him. I’ve even given him a bit of crap about it and he blows it off claiming that the spots are empty most of the time anyway. Excuses/assholes…

    I stand by my statement because my eyes tell me that he’s not the only one who does this. It’s not a blanket statement though.

  16. 16.

    opiejeanne

    David wants a new car, a hybrid, but we’re not sure about whether a plug-in or not; I’d just as soon have an EV. We just started researching EVs and hybrids and I’m not much wiser than when I started. I should mention that it needs to be an SUV, and one we can see out of the sides and rear without the need for the cameras, although those are nice. We’re short, so some car designs have terrible blind spots for us.

    We really like our Subaru Forester, great car, 10 years old, 123k miles on it, no major repairs. We’ve basically replaced the oil and the tires and brakes when needed. The only reason we’re considering this is that one of our kids needs a better car, desperately so we’ll give the other two kids the equivalent cash.

    We’re not buying a Tesla, although there was a time that I wanted to test drive one.  I counted 42 of them during a 12 mile drive last week, plus 2 Rivians, and 1 Nissan Leaf. Granted, we were driving through Issaquah and Redmond Washington, and there’s a lot of money situated there, all of those early Microsoft employees who were given stock when the company first started.

  18. 18.

    p.a.

    Designing something like that is fine, but SIGNING OFF to actually produce it is 🤦🏼‍♂️.

    OR; have fun thinking Tesla did a focus-group test of designs; what kind of people were in this group!!??

  20. 20.

    prostratedragon

    @NotMax: ​What I thought I saw at first glance on my phone. And again when I watched the poor thing try to take that curb. The excuses made in the comments are amusing.

  23. 23.

    ColoradoGuy

    Not going to impress the F150 and F250 drivers around here. Half the reason folks buy these things is they are a more practical choice for off-road and snow driving than Jeeps. Subarus are all over Colorado, of course, and are great all-around road cars … except for mediocre gas mileage and some issues with head-gasket failures.

    Not that I do any off-roading myself, but an awful lot of Colorado is only accessible to vehicles with high ground clearance, which means 4×4 trucks and Jeeps.  And plenty of torque and special low gears for fresh snow, compacted ice, mud or loose-gravel conditions. Unless a truck can beat an F150 at its own game, it won’t be competitive here, or other areas with rugged terrain that is far from towing services.

  24. 24.

    opiejeanne

    @raven: That’s on the list right now. Now I just have to drag him out to do the car shopping with me, which he hates. He’s so reluctant that I might just put it off, keep ours, and find them an equivalent car instead.

  26. 26.

    Splitting Image

    Elon Musk has been Phoney Stark to me for so long that I can’t think of Iron Man anymore without thinking of him.

    Watching the Cybertruck video made me think of Iron Man attempting to rescue a cat out of a tree in his new battle armour, and hordes of bystanders excusing his tentative efforts to get to the first branch as concern for the tree, it being municipal property.

  28. 28.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @p.a.: I think the problem is that the focus group is overpopulated with Elon Musk. A lot of the design decisions seem to be based on “I think this is cool. Do it.” Case in point: the yoke replacing the steering wheel, that really needs a sort of variable ratio steering system, which Tesla doesn’t have. (Apparently Lexus is experimenting with steering yokes, but they’re coupling it with a steer-by-wire system. Tesla, not so much.)

  30. 30.

    NobodySpecial

    What’s even more depressing is that thing will be street valued at more than what I still owe on my house.

    I thought briefly about EVs a few years ago, but the chip shortage and the spike in car prices doesn’t inspire confidence I won’t just drive my 2006 until I’m stuck getting rides from assisted living.

  32. 32.

    oldster

    Burneko’s comparison to a paper-towel dispenser hanging vertically on a bathroom wall is perfect. The whole rant is beautiful.

  33. 33.

    WereBear

    @ColoradoGuy: Adirondack Mountains are similar conditions.

    I don’t want a giant vehicle. I like my Eco Sport.

    Of course Ford’s not selling it in the US anymore but we want to hang onto this one as long as we can.

  35. 35.

    NotMax

    Made a rare extra trip into town on Tuesday in the hybrid Maverick and managed to hit 57.6 mpg while tooling around in-town stop and go traffic according to the readout on the dash on one leg of the journey. Yowza!

  36. 36.

    Low Key Swagger

    Dead thread, likely…but I want trucks (and have them) that are 1970-2005.  I’m partial to chevys, so that’s what I own.  Trucks should have sheet metal bodies, a minimum of sensors, and properly paired engines/transmissions.  These plastic show trucks on the market now can’t compare.

  37. 37.

    Gvg

    I would like a vehicular that doesn’t exist because I am so weird a niche market. First I don’t have much money so that means I am less attractive to sellers but if there were more like me with money, I could hope to buy used.. I need a car most of the time, safety, hauling stuff inside, people, a dog, other things, but sometimes I want to haul manure or mulch for my garden and it is so labor intensive to go bag it up tightly and careful place in my van. I would like a really small pickup trunk, like half size on a car so that I could be a truck when I needed to be. Almost the reverse of an el Camino. The urban version anyway. Wouldn’t mind if it was EV but that’s where the money gets impossible and small niche etc. It’s just that nothing really does a garden as much good as smelly manure and yet it’s a concern in my car even carefully put in heavy duty bags.

    Musk must be blind to think that ugly thing will sell, or hate trucks.

  39. 39.

    JML

    I look at that POS Cybertruck and it doesn’t look like it could haul anything. It looks like a bizarro version of the batmobile in silver. A lot of people buy more truck than they actually need because they’re thinking about they might need. What if they’re going to build a gazebo and need to haul the lumber. What if they want to rent a wood-chipper and need to drive it home. It’s all those what-ifs that happen maybe 1-2 times a year that drive people to get more truck than they need on a daily basis. Those people are going to look at this POS and pass every time.

    I think Ford is going to own the electric truck market. The Lightning is selling as fast as they can make it even with it’s stupid crazy prices. And once the fad aspect passes, I’m sure the price will slide down to the market rate.

  41. 41.

    Tony G

    Elon Musk, of course, rose up from his hardscrabble origins as the heir to an apartheid emerald mine.  However, it remains a mystery to me how this nincompoop accumulated his tens of billons after that.  Are investors really so dumb as to fall for this obvious fraud?  Maybe he’s a one-man money laundering operation.

  43. 43.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I bet the cybertruck is based on something Musk drew in his journal as a lonely teen as part of his Tony Stark fantasy.

  44. 44.

    Tony G

    @Frankensteinbeck: Good point.  I’ve worked for managers who increase the productivity of their subordinates whenever they’re away on vacation — because it frees up the workers from constant interruptions.

  45. 45.

    Paul in KY

    It’s not even a real truck. Is more like an El Camino or that Nissan thing. The truck bed is not separated from the cab, so it can’t really haul a large load of anything in the bed. Look at all ‘real’ trucks and you will see the truck bed is separated from the cab. that’s because if you are hauling a large load, sometimes that load needs to flex in the opposite manner from the cab.

    So (natch) Elon’s truck is a fake truck.

  47. 47.

    SFAW

    You haters better STFU after you realize that The World’s Greatest Truck (from The World’s Smartest Man) has “the ability to pull near infinite mass.”

  48. 48.

    SFAW

    I don’t know about you, but what I look for in a utility vehicle is all the torque and raw power of a Roomba, but without any of the gratuitous sex appeal.

    Might not win today’s Intertubez, but it’s in the running.

  49. 49.

    Marc

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR:Case in point: the yoke replacing the steering wheel, that really needs a sort of variable ratio steering system, which Tesla doesn’t have.

    Teslas, like many modern cars, are “steer by wire”.  There’s no physical connection between the steering wheel and the steering rack.  Variable ratio steering is a “mere matter of software”.  Whether they’ve implemented that correctly is the question.

  51. 51.

    kindness

    Tesla’s truck isn’t a truck.  You could call it an El Camino thing but not a truck.  A true truck has a bed that is separate from it’s cab.  There is a reason for this.  When loaded the bed will need to flex separate from the cab/engine/drive train as the center of gravity in the loaded bed won’t be the same as the cab.

  54. 54.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Frankensteinbeck: I think the aesthetic sorta worked. When it was announcedI kinda wanted one because it looked so weird – like a car from an mid 90s computer game where they were limited to 30 polygons per car.

    “Stunt Race FX” chic.

    But its just an odd design that doesn’t hold up well, and Tesla has had enough problems even before Elon was exposed as a racist fraud for me to co sider buying their stuff.

  55. 55.

    Aziz, light!

    My truck is a Chevy Colorado ZR2, Bison edition. It’s the offroadiest mid-sized pickup one can buy from a dealership. We use it to drive the gnarliest backcountry roads in North America we can find in our quest to access remote wilderness areas as far from the madding crowd as we can get. Then we camp for weeks there, or head off with our backpacks. Plenty of us use our trucks the way that 4×4 God intended, so I resent the facile way in which some commentators dismiss us as posers who drive such trucks only to get toilet paper home from Costco, or who bought the trucks only to serve as penis enlargers.

    That said, the Cybertruck is a joke. Hopefully it will help fuck Elmo.

  57. 57.

    Paul in KY

    @MisterForkbeard: I don’t really mind the styling, as it looks ‘futuristic’. I grew up in 60s – 70s and one of my pet peeves about current time is that stuff (in general) doesn’t look as ’21st Century’ as I was led to believe back then :-)

  59. 59.

    Another Scott

    @Chetan Murthy: I’m sure they were worried about scratching the bottom of the bumper or something.

    Still, it says something about the design if they can jack up the suspension like that and still worry about damage going over a curb…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  62. 62.

    JaneE

    Pickup trucks, the full sized ones especially, look very intimidating in your rear view mirror.  The same was true of the muscle cars and even some Corvettes.  One look at one of those speeding up your rear and you moved over.  This does that very well too.  Other than that, not so much.

  63. 63.

    Geminid

    @Nilnoc: I can think of a couple jackals who stand by their Teslas. They’re not Musk fans, they just like the cars they purchased several years ago.

  66. 66.

    SWMBO

    @Odie Hugh Manatee: I have a handicapped plate and a sticker to use in other vehicles.  I’ve had it for years and use it.  I was trying to find a spot to park at a Walmart (this was ages ago.  I haven’t been in Walmart in years.)  The cop parked behind several cars and asked to see the driver’s license and registration of the vehicle and the placard (it comes with a separate registration for the placard.  The plate registration is one registration that references the handicapped plate number.  Handicapped plate or placard has the driver’s license or photo id of the person legally allowed to use it. It’s tied to a specific id.)

    One lady said she just was running in for her mother to get her things.  The cop asked where her mother was and was told at home.  The cop wrote her up ($250 fine) because you aren’t supposed to use it that way.  It’s not a convenience for someone acting on the behalf of someone who needs it.  While I was there watching, the cop busted 3 or 4 people who got a hefty fine for abusing the system.

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