Oh No! I Bought A Cybertruck!

An Occasional Advice Column, Vol. 4

What to do when you’ve bought a Cybertruck. Part of an ongoing and occasional advice series examining the stakes of only somewhat serious questions.

The Top 5 Reasons to Buy a Cybertruck

J/K. I can’t think of five. But here are two:

1. You want to buy something electric. Fair enough. Such impulses have been around for a long time, and while you could have brought a Prius or a Volt, those are kind of half-measures if the real issue for buying an electric car is to avoid buying gas. The problem here, though, is that you have to charge it, and the electricity for your home is most likely produced by some kind of fossil fuel. If you’ve been able to create a total ecosystem which is independent of fossil fuels—relying upon solar energy to run the house which in turn recharges your electric car—then you’re on to something. But this reason has to dig down and view electric cars as part of an ecology of which the Cybertruck is just a part. Having an electric car which ultimately drives up your fossil fuel consumption seems nonsensical to me if that’s the aim.

2. You think that the Cybertruck is genuinely a quality vehicle. You’re not wrong by several measures! As far as efficiency goes, it has great acceleration, good horsepower, and a range similar to a Kia Soul. No small feat for a vehicle which is twice the weight of a Soul! It has a modest amount of space inside, which is drawback, but if you weren’t planning on having an open truck bed, then this too can be overlooked.

There are ample jokes to make about the Cybertruck: that it looks like what I thought a car looked like when I learned to draw, that it’s a win for those who think refrigerators have good aesthetics. But these seem to be kind of insignificant critiques, even if it’s most of what people want to talk about. And they are insignificant because they dwell on matters of taste: good, bad, or otherwise.

The fact that it has an 18 inch monitor in the middle of the console is a far greater problem, because the very first thing that every car needs is a giant screen to distract the driver. The fact that it relies upon a battery that costs about 7k to replace, and that it’s unclear how quickly the batter degrades is an issue. The fact that it costs 75k to start is, arguably, a problem, even if cost of a thing alone isn’t necessarily a good metric.

But again: none of the rational features are really what drive people to or away from the Cybertruck. Put all of these features into a different body, have it made by a less polarizing figure than Musk, and we wouldn’t be talking about the Tesla Cybertruck at all. The aesthetics and the emotions surrounding Musk are what drive it forward any talk about the Cybertruck. And people have strong feelings about how dope(y) it looks.

The real stakes are what Cybertruck discourse reveals about how we usually have moral arguments: it’s all about the emotions.