If you’re not a typical truck guy but you like hunting, or outdoor sports, or helping the environment and you still hate this truck, my response is: give it a couple of years.
Why? Because Tesla’s taking a novel approach at the mindset of a potential truck driver who doesn't want to be associated with country music and classic truck culture. It’s in every aspect of the branding. From the ‘designed with only a ruler’ aesthetics to the vocab choice of ‘Cyber’ in its name.
They know the classic truck guys are a lost cause (at least for now) because your average Ford F-150 driver isn't going to make the switch from gas. Besides climate change not being real to many of them, the fear is that electric will fail. The mentality towards Tesla for them has long been, "It might be nice in SF or LA, but let's see it survive a mid-western winter, or inclement weather, or a few potholes." You can't win that argument just by showing them because they all have an anecdote of a fancy cousin whose Tesla failed. The only way they’ll come around is when oil finally becomes unaffordable and the products finally prove themselves against their non-Cyber counterparts in the field.
In the meantime, Musk is going for those who want the radically different. It's leftists, it's futurists, it's Trap music fans and people who use Gerber knives as envelope openers and carabiners as keychains. Lumberjack shirts who've never felled trees. For that guy, the Cyber Truck screams function over form with zero callbacks to the Great Depression and that's a good thing. Finally a truck for the post-Art Deco world. It also seats six without looking like a mini-SUV, making it a masculine non-soccer-mom alternative to a crossover for families of 6 or fewer.
We saw that it fits an ATV. The back opens up and can hold a tent. All you need is a mattress pad and you can watch the stars as you camp without having to sleep on the ground or fear bears.
One of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing says that if the category your product is trying to enter is too crowded, then create a new category. That's why this truck is so deliberately trying to not look like a truck. Everything from the fact that it's electric to its cyberpunk meets Trent Reznor aesthetics. Every pickup truck up until this point has hearkened back to the classic Ford pickup with its rounded edges, curved hoods, and rectangular backs.
Until now.
And it’s not just in automotive design. The Mandalorian is Rawhide and Wanted Dead or Alive in space with some RPG videogame elements thrown in. Survival movies are looking more and more like the Purge and less like the Revenant. Everywhere you look, America’s old frontiers of the past are being reimagined as the final frontiers of the future. These trucks are supposedly equipped with the same tech as Tesla’s Mars rovers, meaning that the inverse is just as likely to be true. Their performance on terra firma will likely inform Space X’s explorations of alien terrains. Thanks to factory farms, Impossible meats and Beyond burgers, the last cowboy may soon be dead and gone, but the spirit of the West is poised to make a comeback.
On the cultural level, we’re witnessing the birth of what comes after Superheroes. Or, rather, the meta-narrative that’s been happening all along: the cyber-fication of everything. The last two decades saw Science Fiction transform classic mythology into Thor: Ragnarok and Frankenstein into Ex Machina. Now it’s hungry for a new genre: the Western.
And that’s why I went ahead and put down a pre-order. In addition to being fully refundable, I’m willing to bet that in the intervening time between now and when the stainless steel slab with wheels rolls off the assembly line, enough hype beasts and mountain bikers will have come around.
You may hate it now, but as the world continues to embrace the cyberpunk aesthetic of harder materials, sharper edges and functional minimalism, everything else is going to look more and more out of place.