A Culture War on Wheels

Joseph Bernstein

If a car can embody the age that created it, the Tesla Cybertruck is, fittingly, a culture war on wheels.

When Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, unveiled it at a presentation in Los Angeles five years ago, he seemed to know this hulking wedge of stainless steel would be polarizing. “It’s not going to be for everyone,” he said at the time.

Since the electric behemoth started rolling off the Tesla factory floor last November, its hard-edged geometric form has indeed proved to be a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. And more than any other Tesla, the Cybertruck seems to represent Musk himself  an extremely online attention seeker loved by some and loathed by others.

Lately it has become a sport among the vehicle’s detractors to spot Cybertruck owners parking improperly and driving aggressively  and to generalize about the type of people who would identify themselves with such a conspicuous machine. A microgenre of online videos has also sprung up, showing Cybertrucks immobilized by sand, water and snow. The posts are often accompanied by commentary laden with Schadenfreude.

In May, a news site in Nantucket, Mass., got in on the act, shaming a Cybertruck driver for encroaching on a crosswalk on the affluent island and getting stuck while doing some off-roading on a beach. The scrutiny has left some Cybertruck owners feeling a little embattled. “At first, I didn’t care  but now it’s starting to get annoying,” one driver wrote in a Cybertruck drivers’ forum in a thread titled “Cybertruck brings the haters.”

Richard Zhang, a Cybertruck owner from Pittsburgh, said the vast majority of the interactions he has about his truck have been positive. But the negative ones are really, really negative. “They are so filled with rage that they have lost all sense of human decency and respect,” Zhang, 30, said of the critics he has encountered.

Drew Magary, a writer for the San Francisco news site SFGate, recently took a Cybertruck out for a spin and hammered home some stereotypes about the vehicle’s fans in a satirical column. “I fit the customer profile for one to a T,” Magary wrote. “I am tall. I am white. I am loud. I don’t really have many friends where I live. Most important, I desperately want people to think I’m cool.”

Consumers have long expressed their personalities and lifestyles through their cars  think of the midlife crisis Corvette. But for many years there has not been an automobile or any consumer product, really  that has provoked such strong reactions, that has carried so much loaded cultural meaning. It all starts with Musk.

The years of the Cybertruck’s development roughly tracked the public transformation of the SpaceX boss. Once a Silicon Valley darling celebrated for his commitments to clean energy and space

exploration, Musk has become the combative owner of X, formerly Twitter, and an enthusiastic supporter of former President Donald J. Trump.

Some see Musk as a swaggering champion of free speech and a technological pioneer who has turned some innovative notions into riches; others see him as a self-interested, conspiracy-mongering multibillionaire.

Musk’s public image hasn’t entirely eclipsed the Tesla brand. David Tracy, the editor in chief of the car culture website The Autopian, said the company’s other offerings still exist apart  to a certain extent  from the man himself. “They’re logical,” Tracy, an automotive engineer, said of the rest of the Tesla lineup, sleek, electric sedans that largely blend in with other vehicles on the road. “They are aerodynamic, they are efficient, they make sense from a usability standpoint. You can convince yourself anybody would have developed this car.”

Still, Musk’s politics may be repelling some potential Tesla buyers, contributing to a recent slump in sales.

Perhaps that makes the drivers of Cybertrucks stick out even more. And in a culture obsessed with the political implications of consumer decisions, it’s probably inevitable that owning a Cybertruck reads as an endorsement of Musk and his ideas. “The Cybertruck is very hard to separate from Elon Musk, because it’s not really logical,” Tracy said.