finally saw one in the wild. a beautiful vehicle, photos don't do it justice pic.twitter.com/JQyQNEfuDe
— Rob DenBleyker (@RobDenBleyker) May 18, 2024
I finally saw my first Cybertruck today and it didn't disappoint. Looked like an enormous version of one of those old VHS-tape rewinders, both driver and passenger looked uncomfortable, stain on the door. It's not in the way he intended, but this is absolutely Elon: The Car. A masterpiece.
— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) May 19, 2024 at 11:07 PM
Have you seen a Cybertruck yet? https://t.co/frRfYzC3B2
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) May 21, 2024
… The experience was not any less startling or unsettling for how ready I considered myself to be for it. I had read about the Cybertruck for some time, and watched numerous videos of Cybertrucks doing rudimentary four-wheel-drive shit with the sort of dexterity and confidence generally associated with concepts like “George C. Scott’s first capoeira class” or “Robocop doing burpees.” I have also been following Elon Musk’s uncanny transformation into the single most unfortunate middle-aged outcome for the Butt-Head character from Beavis And Butt-Head. I knew that his pretty vile company had made him very rich, and I also knew that despite some duffed hagiography and thanks mostly to his world-historic dedication to showing his ass, Musk himself is now most famous as a wrecker and creep, and also that the cars he makes, the Cybertruck in particular, extremely do not work. I knew what he was like, and I knew that this dorky truck was his passion project. This would seem like pretty good preparation for seeing his latest vehicle, but I can tell you that it absolutely was not.
… The Cybertruck was made to not look like other cars and trucks, which is a statement that would scan as a compliment if you had not seen a Cybertruck. The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in a version of Freejack in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.