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Explaining the CyberTruck’s Depressing Inspiration
As Rivian instills a sense of adventure, the CyberTruck wants to romanticize survival in a fictional cyberpunk dystopia.
So, listen… I’m really not impressed with the CyberTruck overall. I think it’s really ugly, impractical, and sort of, well, dumb. While we don’t know many details about the production model, it will most likely be capable — even if there’s a lot wrong with its functionality (most egregiously its sloped bed walls). But what I can’t stop thinking about is what CyberTrucks stand for.
I can’t imagine how people are going to react to these on the road. The design is so divisive and like nothing we’ve seen since the ill-fated DeLorean. That design is so important to Elon Musk it delayed the launch of the truck because it had to be built out of stainless steel to achieve its design goals. This required new production methods never before seen and whole bunch of considerations. I’m starting with this because it shows that the design of the CT is more important than just about anything else. I firmly believe Tesla could have made an equally capable truck a hell of a lot faster by using traditional materials. But they didn’t. They couldn’t. The design language of the CT is what makes it so special to Elon.
I’m genuinely shocked that Tesla let (now-legitimate) rival Rivian take such a massive first mover advantage to achieve its design which is credited for long production delays. Rivian has tens of thousands of trucks on the road today an is targeting a total of 52k produced this year. Rivian is cornering the “capable EV truck” market more every quarter. Just today I was walking to my R1T when I heard a family say, “Oh wow, another Rivian. There are lots of those everywhere now.” We’ll come back to comparing Rivian and Tesla again later in this post, but it’s no secret that CyberTruck’s success depends on enough people buying it that passersbys start to say the same thing. Time will tell if that happens, but, if it does, I’m pretty bummed out based on what the CyberTruck’s represents and its inspirations.
