Tesla's Cybertruck is Fast Fashion on Wheels
Projecting a vibe, poorly designed, and seemingly destined to fall apart
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.
It seems like all of a sudden, Tesla Cybertrucks are popping up everywhere, a bit like mushrooms after a heavy rain. I noticed at least three of them on the road over the past week after barely seeing any.
The Cybertruck was first announced in 2019, with a demonstration of its features which didn’t go quite as planned. Then it just kind of went away for a while. Nearly two years ago, I wrote about how I had forgotten all about it and compared it to the Pontiac Aztec. It would take another year and a half before deliveries finally started.
The problems with the Cybertruck are long and well documented, everything from rust to the accelerator pedal sticking to car washes voiding the warranty if not done correctly.
But I’m not here to shit on the design of the Cybertruck or the people who chose to purchase or drive it. Instead, I wanted to share some of my personal experience with the Cybertruck and discuss how it’s actually kind of the perfect car for 2024. I don’t mean it’s the perfect car to own or the perfect car to drive. Instead, it really encapsulates where we are in 2024. But we’ll get there.
The first time I remember seeing a Cybertruck in person back in June when we were camping in Orlando. One day when walking my dog around the campground, I noticed the Cybertruck with a tent attachment parked in a campsite. (The official Tesla tent accessory retails for nearly $3,000).
Honestly, surrounded by palm trees and tall pines, it didn’t look awful. The stainless steel body was reminiscent of an Airstream trailer, although without the pleasing curves. It also didn’t look like it would be the most comfortable option for camping, but I’m sure there are people that scoff at motorhomes like mine, pop-up trailers, or tents too. To each their own.
In that first encounter with the Cybertruck, it was parked. I soon started noticing them on the road, and they definitely give off a different feel when moving. The sharp angles and dark tints on the windows feel foreboding (I suppose that’s the intention) and something about the black rims with black tires makes the whole vehicle feel unfinished. It’s a head turner, but not in a good way.
At any rate, I was still only looking at Cybertrucks from a distance until a few weeks ago.
We were on vacation in Manhattan, on our way to take the kids to see The Highline, an elevated train right of way that was converted into a city park.
As we walked to the Highline, our kids spotted a Tesla showroom and asked to go inside. They had been in the Tesla store before at the mall and the salespeople were always eager to let our kids climb in the cars, sometimes even taking time to show off certain features. We’ve never had any intention of buying a Tesla, but the kids like sitting in the cars and pushing buttons, so we decided to stop in.
The Tesla store in the Meatpacking District happened to have a Cybertruck on display, the first time I’d encountered one in a showroom. It was early in the morning when we visited and the place was empty. My kids were excited to see one close up.
Before we could get too close to the vehicle, we were stopped by a salesperson. He said that in order for us to sit in the truck, he would need to collect our personal information. This has never happened to us at any car dealership before, nor at any other Tesla store, so that seemed odd.
He handed me an iPad and asked me to input my name and contact information (I may or may not have given accurate data…).
For anyone who has ever been to any car showroom anywhere- new, used, electric, ICE, dealership, or independent- this is bizarre. Furthermore, the Tesla stores are built more on an Apple Store model than a dealership, and again, I’ve never had to register to stop in and touch the latest iPhone or MacBook.
After I handed back the iPad, the salesperson gave us a brief orientation on the car including special instructions for us on what could and couldn’t be touched on the Cybertruck and how we were to handle it.
The salesperson was especially strict about how we opened the door, instructing us to only grab the door from the top and not from the side. It was unclear if the concern was one of safety for us or one of durability for the car- perhaps both? The showroom car also seemed to be covered in handprints and fingerprints around the door area.
Upon opening the door, we found the only logo of any kind visible- the word “Cybertruck” written in a graffiti style reminiscent of the early 1990s. It felt out of place in this otherwise spartan, modernist interior.
I’ve never driven a Tesla so I’m not sure how the Cybertruck compares, but sitting in the driver’s seat was not especially comfortable. There’s something about the undersized steering wheel, the absence of any physical buttons, and the long angle of the windshield that just felt unsafe. It was hard to tell in the showroom, but it didn’t feel like the kind of vehicle that would have good visibility.
The Cybertruck is billed as a truck, which means it has a bed instead of a trunk. The bed didn’t feel especially designed for hauling stuff and had the feel of the bed of a smaller truck like a Hyundai Santa Cruz than an F150, even if dimensionally it may have been a decent size. Perhaps the angled rear walls above the bed line make the bed feel smaller. This was a design feature the original Honda Ridgeline trucks also had, which have since been discontinued in favor of normal bed sides.
The one feature that I did appreciate in the bed was the clean LED strip mounted near the edge. I could imagine that coming in handy.
Honestly, the entire experience of getting close up to a Cybertruck just felt cheap. It still feels more like a prototype than an actual production model, and that’s nearly five years after its initial debut and after countless delays. It felt like it was held together with duct tape and that it wasn’t really meant to be driven, certainly not in the way a typical truck is meant to be.
It seems to be all about projecting a certain image to the world and about making a loud statement without paying any attention to details or quality.
And that’s what makes it the perfect vehicle for 2024.
In fact, my impression of the Cybertruck was that it was literally fast fashion on wheels.
Fast fashion is the cheaply made, nearly disposable, clothing sold in most mall stores these days. Oftentimes it’s meant to give the illusion of something nice or make the wearer appear put together and stylish, but it’s not designed to last. Clothing manufacturers and retailers only care about selling their wares at the lowest price possible, and when you start looking closely, you’ll see sloppy seams, loose threads, or just simply bad design.
But none of that really matters, because fast fashion isn’t meant to be worn for years on end. It’s supposed to be used 2-3 times and then discarded. (If you want to hear about where all those clothes end up, listen to my podcast episode with Francisca Gajardo).
Furthermore, I’ve been noticing lately that fast fashion has stopped offering actual clothing designs at all, defaulting instead to using familiar, nostalgic logos and hoping that the warm feelings from an intellectual property will move clothes. You’ll see this with Disney, Nintendo, the Simpsons, sports teams, even the MTV logo put on everything and anything at H&M, Primark, Target, and more.
Fast fashion seems to have been distilled to its simplest form- no longer offering a stylish body covering, but instead projecting a message like “I’m the kind of person who enjoys the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Pizza Hut” whether or not there’s any quality behind that message at all. And yes, that’s an actual garment you can buy.
The Cybertruck also feels hastily designed and poorly thought out, with no focus given to longevity. If the wheels fall off one month into ownership, so be it. Caveat emptor, right?
Beyond that though, the Cybertruck is more about projecting a vibe than it is about any actual substance. That vibe is going to vary for different people, but it’s seems to be designed for some version of a cosplaying survivalist alpha male.
The Cybertruck is made to look like it would be practical after the apocalypse or could outrun a drug cartel’s henchmen out to assassinate you, but that’s all set dressing and stagecraft. The truck can barely be driven off road.
The Cybertruck’s starting price is nearly $100,000, yet it doesn’t feel like a luxury vehicle worthy of that tag. The ones I saw on the road this week already looked dirty and worn down, though I’d guess their odometer is still only four digits.
Whether a car’s price tag is $20,000 or $100,000, any car on the road these days should be designed with longevity in mind. When I wrote about my Honda Odyssey last month, I noted that it was nine years old and with more than 125,000 miles on it. I expect it to last to at least 200,000 miles.
Given how dirty the showroom vehicle already looks, the challenge of running the car through a car wash, and the bizarre warning about how to open the door from the salesperson, I cannot fathom a scenario where most Cybertrucks sold today are still on the road in five or ten years.
Beyond that, at the end of the day, the Cybertruck doesn’t strike me as a good fit for most people. It’s not a great family car (though you probably know I’m partial to minivans). I can’t see it being practical for a contractor. I wouldn’t trust it to tow a boat or camper. It seems designed for the short term, a head turner because of the novelty when first spotted, but with no thought for the second, third, or tenth impression.
Like so much of our society today, it’s overpriced, poorly built, designed to fall apart, and not really made with anybody in mind. So 2024.
Are you a Cybertruck driver or considering one? Or do you think they’re the ugliest thing on four wheels? Do you agree that they seem flimsy and poorly executed or am I way off base and just don’t get it? Let me know what you’re thinking in the comments- I’d love to hear from you!
Thanks for reading Willoughby Hills! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Related Reading
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
The Cybertruck reminds me of the pinewood derby cars we made in the cub scouts when I was a kid. What a joke of a vehicle!
“Cosplaying survivalist alpha male” is the best description I’ve seen of the drivers of this monstrosity!