Don't hate the Cybertruck, hate the game

The Cybertruck is the fruit of many frustrating trends in the industry.

Shot from the ground in 2019.

I've been keeping mostly mum on the Cybertruck since its unveiling last week. For one thing, I figured there'd be plenty enough hot takes to keep all those social networks warm without me. Beyond that, frankly, I was enjoying a little hard-earned time away from my keyboard. For once in my life, I decided I wasn't going to let some high-profile product launch screw that up.

Dear reader, I must confess it was awfully refreshing to willfully sit on the metaphorical beach and let the wave of hysteria roll right on by.

But since I was there at the unveiling for the thing it feels remiss to sit this news cycle out completely. I do want to weigh in with some thoughts, not so much on the specifics of the truck itself, but more about how it was launched and what it as a product says about Musk, Tesla, and the state of the automotive industry as a whole.

If you go back and watch my initial coverage of the truck from that odd-ball, cyberpunk cosplay unveiling four years ago, it's pretty clear I was swept up in the hype of the moment. I was genuinely excited about the promise of the thing.

But can you blame me? I was excited about an EV that would go 500 miles on a charge with a starting price under $40,000. I was also excited by an EV with the practicality of a truck.

Remember, this was 2019. The R1T was still years away. The F-150 Lightning was still just a twinkle in the eye of some product planner at Ford. And, perhaps most crucially, Tesla as a brand was far less controversial than it is today.

Musk’s 2019 Cybertruck promises, of course, proved false. I won't do a full breakdown for you as Alex Kierstein has done that for you at MotorTrend. Suffice to say: Today's Cybertruck offers far less functionality and range for far more money.

But we all knew it would. In my Cybertruck retrospective over at The Information this summer, I expressed extreme doubt in Tesla's ability to deliver on its promises. Most of the pre-orderers I interviewed for that piece were similarly skeptical.

Tesla’s surely aware of this. The selection of personalities given early access to the truck, and the seemingly narrow boundaries in which they were allowed to operate, is quite telling. The result was a series of bombastic (though, as least in the case of Camissa's piece for Hagerty, remarkably impressive) videos that feel decidedly light on substance.

We got all the drag races you could ever want, plenty of breathless admiration for bulletproofing and battery technology, yet hardly anyone doing some actual truck stuff. As far as I can tell, not a soul tried to better the Cybertruck's woeful climbing demonstration or even challenged the simplest of off-road challenges.

This is Tesla narrowing access to ensure that only its chosen highlights get through. It's easy to look at this with derision, and you should, but I can’t fault Tesla for following the same playbook that other automotive OEMs have been doing for years.

I've been on many car launches in many exotic locales. Oftentimes those places are chosen because they’re the ideal playground to demonstrate a car’s capabilities. Like, driving the Porsche 911 Dakar across the dunes in Morocco. However, I’ve been on a few launches where the locale was seemingly chosen to hide a car’s flaws. The Lotus Eletre comes to mind. That SUV launched in Norway, ostensibly because of that country’s penchant for EVs. As it happens, it’s also a country with ultra-smooth roads and cripplingly low speed limits.

Even on a closed runway, we weren't allowed to run at high speed. Clearly, that rig, impressive as it is in many ways, wasn’t ready for a proper test.

I think this was Tesla’s way of doing the same, but rather than being bitter about that, I’d rather point to a counter example: the launch of the F-150 Lightning.

Not only did Ford invite hundreds of journalists and influencers in to drive the thing, the company set up a playground for truck stuff in which we could spend plenty of time on-road, off-road, and even tow and haul everything from wine casks to horse trailers.

It wasn’t a perfect launch, I remember rushing around like mad trying to get footage of everything we needed in a short time, but the breadth of testing available showed that Ford was fundamentally confident in the Lightning. It was designed to be the ideal electric truck for people who really use their trucks, and Ford created an excellent venue for showing that off.

Toyota’s delightfully basic IMV 0. Credit: Toyota

The Cybertruck's fluffy launch makes it abundantly clear that this machine is not designed for work. It's yet another example of what I talked about in my recent piece for Motor1 on Toyota's IMV 0, a little $10,000 truck that I desperately wish were legal here in the U.S.

Even if it were legal, it would fail, because that's a truck designed for work and work alone. While more people buy more trucks here than anywhere else, the U.S. truck market is obsessed with machines that compromise utility in pursuit of what I can only describe as machismo. I don't necessarily mind that -- hell, I love a good Lamborghini, and they're practically dripping in the stuff -- but I am annoyed that American trucks increasingly made to be pointlessly large and needlessly menacing.

And I meant that literally. I recently reviewed the Chevrolet Silverado 2500 HD, a truck with a hood that is tall not to clear a giant engine underneath, but to make room for a big, chrome, fake hood scoop. That's bad enough, but worse is that the truck only has proximity sensors at the rear. It won't won't help you from driving over your kids as you pull out of the driveway.

It's a head-scratching omission, and while the sight lines on the Cybertruck do look far better, I'm more concerned about what's going to happen when the masses get their hands on a 6,800-pound stainless steel brick that can accelerate to 60 in 2.6 seconds. We all know that "Full Self Driving" isn't going to save anybody.

This loss of fundamental purpose in modern trucks is worrying, but it’s certainly happening in other segments, too. After all, just look at that Lotus SUV I referenced above. The Eletre is about as far away from that brand’s one-time core values as you can possibly get, yet it is apparently what the market demands.

So, in the spirit of “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” I’ll say for the record that I don’t hate the Cybertruck. However, I hate how under-baked it is despite being in the oven so long, and I hate that Tesla will sell every one of the things that it can possibly build despite whiffing on the initial promises. Most of all, I hate that this will give Musk all the more incentive to just keep on over-promising and under-delivering.