This Is The Only Cybertruck Review That Doesn’t Mention Elon Musk At All (Except In The Headline)

What you are about to read will be an objective review of the Tesla Cybertruck. It’s not the first time we’ve tried this; my co-founder of the Autopian, David, wrote a very comprehensive and objective review of the Cybertruck almost a year ago, and the response to that was such a colossal fecalfest that a couple days later he wrote about how attempting to review the Cybertruck is a pointless exercise in futility. He may be right. But pointless and futile are half the words on my family’s coat of arms (the others are “moist” and “snacktabulous”) so I’m going to give it a try as well. The difference here is that while David acknowledged the cultural significance and impact of the Cybertruck on this particular moment in history, I’m not even going to do that.

Thanks to a complex and punishing regimen of pharmaceuticals, directed onanism, and a series of blows to the head with a well-sanded 2×4, I have managed to completely remove any and all cultural associations or opinions or political implications or, really, any greater knowledge of the Cybertruck other than as a machine designed to transport some humans and their stuff places. That’s it.

If you asked me who is in charge of Tesla as a company, I honestly couldn’t tell you. If I had to guess, I think I’d probably pick George Romney, whom, I imagine, after leaving both AMC in 1962 and human life in 1995, was seeking a new challenge. If I’m wrong, I don’t really care. I’m here to review a truck and chew gum, and I accidentally washed my gum in the pocket of my jeans.

Now, even though this review will only be about the Cybertruck itself, I do come into this review with my own automotive biases and opinions, because of course I have those. There are things I like in cars, and things I dislike, and those sets of things may or may not align with the sorts of things you like and dislike. This is just the nature of life on Earth, and I suspect most of you have acclimated to this fact. If it helps to understand the sorts of cars and trucks I tend to gravitate to, my currently most-driven cars in my extremely ramshackle fleet are a tiny Japanese-market car with corrugated body panels and making all of 52 horsepower, and a purpleish pickup truck that I often have to roll underneath with a wrench to get it to start. Both are manuals.

Okay, one last bit of preamble, and we’ll get to the review. I’m going to include this old Pontiac video of their promo song, Ride Pontiac Ride, to get everyone in the right sort of automotive mindspace to fully appreciate this review. In fact, if you find your mind wandering to any feelings or associations of the Cybertruck beyond what it is, automotively, positive or negative, I’m going to suggest you scroll back up here and watch the video again, at full volume, until those unhelpful thoughts are banished. Sound good? Great.

Hell yeah! Now we’re ready!

What Is The Cybertruck Like, Really?

I’m going to do something a bit different than I usually do in a review: I’m going to give you my overall, take-away opinion of the car first, and then the rest of the review will be explaining why I came to this conclusion. That means if you’re currently mid-skydive or have a patient bleeding out, you can read the next paragraph or so and get the idea, take care of your business, then come back and read through all the details at your leisure.

So, here’s what I think of the Cybertruck: it’s a wildly impressive machine, technologically, absolutely crammed full of every possible bit of tech and innovation that the designers and engineers could get their hands on. It’s a machine built with a coherent, overarching concept in mind, and I appreciate that a great deal. It’s not boring, which makes it a wonderful outlier in the modern automotive landscape, and it is also possibly the most irritating, annoying, and frustrating vehicle I’ve ever driven. This is largely because of all of the impressive technology in the truck, which desperately needed either an editor or at least someone with a passing familiarity with how human beings work, because there is no evidence that either of those were involved in any part of the Cybertruck’s development.

It’s a machine that, while I can see why it could appeal to some people for some very specific reasons, is simply not a vehicle I would ever actually want to own.

It’s worth mentioning that I only had the Cybertruck for three days, so this was hardly a long-term test. And while I’m sure many of the issues I have with the car I could get used to, over time, none of those issues are things that I should need to get used to, because they simply add no value to the Cybertruck or the experience of living with and using it.

The Cybertruck is sort of like that one friend many of us had growing up who always had the cool shit, but was painfully annoying to actually be around. They may have had a Super Nintendo when everyone else was plodding along with their old NES or Sega Master System, but eventually you’d just reach your limit of tolerance about hanging around with them, and start feeling that uneasy combination of irritation and guilt. Then you’d have to leave.

That’s kind of what the Cybertruck feels like, at least to me.

So much of my time with the Cybertruck was tinged with frustration. It feels like a car designed around the owner showing people in a parking lot all the cool shit the car can do as opposed to being a tool to actually be used. For all of its remarkable capabilities, I mostly just found the Cybertruck to be a chore.

How Does It Feel To Drive?

Honestly? It’s fine. The driving experience isn’t particularly engaging, nor is it unpleasant. It’s fast as hell in a straight line, and the variable-ratio steer-by-wire keeps it nimble, if twitchy, at low speeds, and quite controllable at higher ones. It is bulky and heavy, and you’re never not aware of that as you drive it. You’re quite removed from the feel of the road and the truck, so I’d hardly call it engaging, but you can take one look at this thing and know it’s not a Lotus. That’s fine, that’s not what it’s about.

Aside from being extremely fast when you want it to be, I found the actual process of driving it to be fairly forgettable, which is likely just fine for the target market of this truck, really. This is more of an inward-focused machine than outward, if that makes sense.

The Look

I should note that the particular Cybertruck I rented from Turo had a pretty cool prismatic wrap that would fade between a British Racing Green and Pretentious Merlot Purple, and I think it added a nice element of fun to the look of the Cybertruck, which is normally only available in bare stainless steel. The greenish hue did sometimes have the unfortunate effect of making the truck look an awful lot like a dumpster when seen from the rear, though:

I mean, you have to admit, it is a bit uncanny.

That said, I respect the boldness of the design, and I like that it doesn’t look like anything else on the road. That’s a very big deal, and the Cybertruck deserves praise for that alone. I’m not exactly sure how much I actually like the design, but I do like that there does seem to be one underlying design theme guiding everything, and that seems to be a sharp-angled, triangular theme. When I looked at details like the shape of the large exterior side-view mirrors:

… the unashamed triangular theme of them, along with all of the other triangular elements on the Cybertruck, reminded me of something I was quite fond of as a child: John Christopher’s Tripods series of books.

These books were about an alien invasion of Earth, and the aliens were tripodal, roughly triangular-shaped beings who used a pyramidical/triangular theme in all of their architecture and design. The Boy Scout’s official magazine, Boys Life, serialized the books in comic form, and you can picture the Cybertruck fitting in perfectly with the architecture of the aliens’ city. Look, there’s even a car-like vehicle in the panel below that looks like it could be the sporty coupé version of the Cybertruck:

Maybe that’s the appeal of the look of the Cybertruck: it’s something unworldly, and un-human, even. I don’t mean this in a bad way, either, it’s just how the thing feels.

It definitely has presence; it’s not something you can really ignore. This is from both its considerable scale and bulk, and the overall design. It’s not friendly, it’s not especially inviting, it’s not even rugged or tough-looking, at least not in a conventional way. It feels more like a brutalist office building, something meant to sternly remind you that it represents strength and determination and progress, the sort of progress that has no respect for the past, no sympathy for nostalgia, and just looks into the future, unblinking and broodingly eager.

For some people, this is an image they wish to convey, and for those people, there really is no better vehicle available. In fact, I think buying a Cybertruck just for its looks is one of the few reasons that actually makes genuine sense. Car buying never has, and never will be rational, and buying a car because of the way it simply makes you feel has been a valid reason to buy a particular car for well over a century. For some people, the Cybertruck will be the only vehicle capable of accomplishing that. I’m just not one of those people, but that hardly matters, right?

The Interior

The Cybertruck has a fairly roomy interior, and it’s comfortable enough. It also has all of the charm and warmth of a cold-storage warehouse, just without all the glitz. It’s just not that pleasant of a space to be in. Part of the appeal of a truck is that its cab should be a refuge, a place where you can escape rain and cold and sleet, and feel relaxed and, yes, even cozy. Have you ever been in the cab of an old truck out in the middle of nowhere in the rain? That’s its own special and specific kind of cozy, and I’m not convinced the Cybertruck is capable of providing that specific sensation, even if it is, of course, perfectly viable shelter.

That said, it is fairly roomy, and the floors are nice and flat and covered in sensible rubber instead of ridiculous carpet, and that’s something I’m very pleased to see. Carpet is kind of ridiculous in cars, if we’re honest.

This center section in the front footwell with its low walls and rubbery grip strips is a nice touch as well, as it is a good spot to plop down a big sack or purse or a mysteriously wet paper bag.

Also on the plus side is the rear seat, which has room underneath it for storage, and the seat bottom folds up so you can use the rear floor area for cargo, if desired.

Headroom at the back is a bit compromised by the steep rake of the roofline, but it’s not awful; I put the tallest person I have easy access to, my son, in the back seat so you can get an idea of the scale.

Also, that Pac-Man backpack is a real 1980s relic, so give it the respect it deserves.

The interior packaging generally isn’t bad, but there are some issues; the extreme rake of the windshield means that there is a vast, unbroken plain ahead of the dashboard, receding far off into the distance.

If you have something on that dash, like that little valet ticket there, good luck grabbing it unless you have had gibbon arms transplanted onto your shoulders:

Since we’re talking about the interior, we may as well address the visibility in the Cybertruck, since seeing out of a truck is, generally, a big plus. Overall, it’s not great.

The rear-view mirror in the Cybertruck is, charitably, a joke. The mirror is about the size of the one that came on an MGA,  just far less useful. It does almost nothing. With the tonneau cover up, as it almost always seems to be on these, it does literally nothing save for reflect the rear window, whose view is obscured by the cover. With the tonneau open, it shows the view out of the vestigial slit that the rear window is, which is barely adequate.

Tesla wants you to use the center screen for seeing what’s behind you, a solution that is garbage. It’s garbage for multiple reasons.

First, there’s the fact that it’s in a location that fights decades of muscle memory when it comes to where your eyes instinctively dart to see what’s behind you. No one thinks to look at the lower center of the dashboard for the rear view. And, if you do, it’s another narrow window in an already-cluttered screen.

On top of that is the fact that it’s a screen at all, not a mirror, and for people like me who once had great eyes and then made the slow-burn mistake of getting old and now wear glasses to do things like read but not drive, this setup is terrible.

It’s not just the Cybertruck here; I’ve noted this before and even had an expert in vision and optics explain why, but essentially it boils down to the fact that looking into a mirror is the same as looking into the distance – you look into it, not at it – while looking at a screen is like looking at something close, and, if you use glasses for reading or seeing close things, will be blurry.

This issue comes up again with the Cybertruck in other contexts, but we’ll cover that soon enough.

Then there’s just the quality of the rear-view camera, which isn’t great in low-light conditions, or when dealing with the high-contrast between car/street lights and the surrounding dark:

Look at that; you can’t see shit around the glare of the lights. The rearward visibility of the Cybertruck is just lousy, though some of that is compensated for by the 3D-rendered scene of what the truck perceives around itself, which is impressive, but not really a substitute.

Utility And Cargo Room

I know the Cybertruck is a truck, it’s right there in the name, a cybernetic truck, but in reality it’s more of a very specific kind of truck, something closer to, of all things, a Lincoln Blackwood.

I say this because, like the Blackwood, the Cybertruck is an expensive, double-cab truck with a bed that’s usually treated more like a gigantic trunk. It’s also a truck that relies heavily on its distinctive look and the perceived status that comes with that. Granted, the Blackwood was much more conventional and kind of a failure, but I think there’s still some similarities there.

I bring this up mostly to note that the Cybertruck is the sort of truck that will not generally get used for traditional, dirty-gritty truck stuff. I think it could be used for many of these things with varying degrees of success, but most people who drop $100,000 on these are probably not eager to fill them full of gravel or manure or turkey offal or whatever.

The bed size is a bit smaller than my old single-cab F-150, but that’s to be expected from a double-cab truck and overall, the bed is a pretty good size.

The biggest issues with the bed have to do with loading and unloading it; the sides are just too damn high to make loading from anywhere but the rear viable – and that’s not even addressing the fact that all of the edges and surfaces you’re likely to be leaning against while trying to load in heavy sheets of MDF or big sacks of concrete or whatever are all sharp edges and pokey corners. Did the designers try to load cumbersome things into this bed, from multiple angles, like what happens in the real world? And if so, are there places we can send flowers and cards wishing them a speedy recovery from all their lacerations?

Also, I’d be wary of loading this with materials like gravel for fear of getting grit or pebbles in the track of the rolltop-desk-like tonneau cover. I haven’t seen any issues like this firsthand, and I could be projecting, but that track is definitely big and open enough to admit some pebbles, and that sounds like a recipe for expensive trouble.

To open the tailgate or tonneau from the rear, you need to use these little buttons, which is okay for the tonneau, but annoying for the tailgate. I kept wanting to feel for a handle in the middle somewhere, only to find smooth metal and a small protrusion for the rear camera. The buttons are not illuminated at night, so they can be hard to find in the dark, being black-on-black-on-black.

This is a bit surprising, because the bed illumination is actually fantastic, and one of the best features about the truck, really. Also, that box looks like it’s hovering, doesn’t it?

You know how on most pickup trucks, the rear bumper acts as a step? The Cybertruck’s bumper is just too short and at just the wrong angle to actually work for this purpose, which feels like a big oversight. It also lacks any sort of grip surface on the top, so any moisture will make that bumper really slick.

The frunk isn’t particularly big, but it’s usable, and I’m glad it exists. It’s nothing like the Ford F-150 Lightning’s huge front locker thing, but it does make a decent place to sit, which is nice.

The Things That Make The Cybertruck An Ass-Pain

Okay, we may as well just get into this, because it’s a big deal and I can only put it off for so long. What’s interesting about the aspects of the Cybertruck that I found the most annoying is that they all stem from pretty much the same fundamentally flawed idea: the idea that if you have the technology to do something in a new way, you should.

Note that I said “new” and not “better.” The Cybertruck feels like it had some sort of mandate that as much of the “legacy” truck experience should be flung out the window, a relic of a dark and crude past. The problem with this way of thinking is that it’s arrogant and stupid. Many of the solutions that exist on mainstream trucks are there because of over a century of slow refinement and development, development that has been shaped by how actual human truck owners work with and interact with their trucks. Tesla is ignoring this for reasons that are, frankly, insipid, and the results are a truck that is laborious to deal with.

I’ll give some examples here – and, for many of these, my criticisms aren’t limited to the Cybertruck – there’s lots of new cars that make similar terrible decisions, and my criticisms apply to them, too (Rivian, Cadillac, Volvo, you name it), but the Cybertruck definitely embraces all of these miserable design choices, and incorporates all of them deeply into its design. Here’s some of the ones that tormented me the most.

The Turn Signals

A great example of the sort of idiotic, throw-out-the-old-ways thinking can be seen in the turn signal controls, which eliminate the traditional stalk you have all built up years of muscle memory using and replaced it with these two stupid, flat, sorta-haptic buttons. The picture of them is blurry likely because I was shaking with rage over how miserable these fucking things are.

There is zero benefit to having your turn signals controlled by little flat buttons on the wheel. None. Even if you manage to untrain your body and brain from the graceful flick of the lever with your pinky as your hand rests cavalierly on the wheel that the stalk setup offered, what advantage are you getting with the buttons? Nothing. There’s no reason to do this. It never feels right, they’re hard to cancel if you hit the wrong one by mistake, and the only purpose they seem to serve is making a normal, forgettable drive into a frustrating exercise in dealing with some jackass’ dumb idea. Which reminds me…

The Whole Damn Steering Wheel Sucks

Why is the steering wheel this shape? It’s not like there’s any instruments behind it that a round wheel would be blocking – there’s nothing there! The wheel always feels awkward and a bit uncomfortable, and you can’t let the wheel slide through your fingers after you make a turn, because there’s damn corners on this wheel to deal with, which is an absolutely nonsensical thing to type, but here we are.

Again, there’s no advantage to shaping the steering wheel like this. The steer-by wire system does seem to vary the steering ratio by speed – at low speeds, the steering is incredibly direct, which does lend a nice bit of nimbleness and agility to this seemingly cumbersome beast, at the expense of the truck feeling very twitchy at low speeds.

This settles down at higher speeds, and the steering is always precise, so that’s nice, but it would all be a hell of a lot better with a round wheel that was actually comfortable to hold and use instead of this squished idiot’s collar of a wheel.

The Door Handles Are Ridiculous

You know how on most trucks you just grab the door handle, and with the same motion, push a thing or squeeze a thing as you pull and the door just opens? It’s pretty much a one-step kind of thing, and your hand only needs to go to one place. Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for Tesla, who managed to turn opening a door into a two- or three-step process that I never failed to find annoying.

On the Cybertruck, to open a door, first you need to either have the Tesla app on your phone so it unlocks the door or you can use the key card and hold it flat against the B-pillar, which should unlock the door. Then, you move your hand down a few inches to push that little rectangular button with the small white rectangle of light on it, which then partially opens the door, and you complete the process by sliding your hand into the gap created by the door popping open a bit, and pull it open the rest of the way by the inside of the doorjamb.

So, compared to every other truck you’ve ever gotten into, this at least doubles the necessary steps, and could triple them. And, like everything else we’ve been discussing, this new way of opening a damn door adds nothing to the experience of getting inside a truck. Door handles were a solved problem. This only adds many layers of complication and complexity and ends up doing the same thing: opening the door.

What’s wrong with a simple mechanical door handle? They could have made them look cool. How can anyone defend this? What are you getting out of it? Is this cooler? If so, why? What the hell is cool about this? The fact that it’ll be expensive as hell to fix if it breaks? I’m at a loss here.

The Whole All-Touch Screen Everything Is Bullshit

Remember when I was saying that if you wear glasses to read, it’s hard to see the rear-view display? Well that also goes for, oh, every fucking control on the car. That’s because every single control (save for a few things you can map to the steering wheel buttons) is accessed via a touch screen interface that feels more like it was designed for a laptop or tablet than a dashboard. The Cybertruck is one of the only cars I’ve ever driven where I’ve felt that the on-dash instruments are actively competing for my attention with the view out the windshield.

And, I promise this issue just isn’t me: other people currently alive have also chosen to grow old and get worse vision, and they have issues with Tesla’s design, too.

The layout and design of this screen baffles me. Why is crucial information like battery state of charge so damn small? I guess the speed is big enough, but if you’re not actually navigating somewhere, why does the map need to be 50% of the damn screen? So I can see all the potential for real estate development by the banks of that creek? And the 3D visualization of what the truck sees is certainly impressive – really impressive, if you think about how much awareness of its surroundings this inanimate machine has. But does it need to always take up that much real estate?

You can’t do anything by feel on the Cybertruck. Every interaction with the screen requires visual attention and careful finger-aiming and the text is often tiny and hard to read. And, again, it’s for no good reason.

Take the HVAC controls, especially the directing of airflow. On cars with UXes not designed by sadists, you can just physically grab a vent and move it wherever you want the air to blow. It’s completely tactile and instantaneous, and that’s what you want. Because when it’s hot as hell and you blast the AC you may want to point it at your face or crotch and then a few minutes later when you’ve had enough, you want to redirect it away from you.

None of this is modal; you do it whenever, in a moment. But Tesla’s setup – like Rivian’s and every other company with touchscreen-based HVAC controls – isn’t like this. As you can see on the rear screen there – the front is the same idea – you have to direct those wispy wraiths that represent airflow to get it where you want it to blow, and it takes your visual focus and attention and you can’t do it while you’re trying to drive and I just have no idea who the fuck wanted this. Look at the image on that screen – it’s a representation of exactly what you would be looking at, in reality, right in front of you. That’s just madness.

Again, no benefit is gained. This does nothing better than physical vent vanes do, but adds complexity of software, a display, motors to move the airflow ducts, all for what? A nifty animation of airflow? Fuck that.

Even The Cool Stuff Isn’t Really All That Cool When You Actually Use It

The Cybertruck certainly has a lot of tech that seems cool – like how you can play actual video games on the front or rear seat screens. I had my kid with me on a little roadtrip we took in the truck, and we were eager to try it out. We even brought along a controller to use. Unfortunately, the process of trying to pair the controller via Bluetooth never worked, frustratingly, so I got a USB cable to try it wired, which is an option, too.

And it did eventually work! Except the only USB port that actually supports a wired controller is in the glovebox, and Otto wanted to play in the back seat, like many kids would want to do. Sure, there’s two USB ports under the rear screen, but they’re power only, for some reason.

The cable was long enough to reach in the back, but why is it like that in the first place? If you could only have one port work for a controller, wouldn’t you want it to be one of the ones under that rear screen? Also, when charging, we got the option to play a game while charging, which is a great idea – except the game resets whenever any door is opened. Why? What if someone wants to play a game while someone else gets out to use the bathroom?

But the bigger issue here is that, fundamentally, all of this is kind of stupid. Sure, it’s cool you can play stuff on the car, but most people interested in playing video games already have systems like a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck or something where they can just take it in the car and play it wherever and whenever they want.

The game system is cool, but fundamentally unneeded, even for people who want to play video games in the car. And then there’s the fact that by building the game system into the car, you’re stuck with it. Game technology changes rapidly; why would you want to be stuck with what’s in the car? And would you need to buy more copies of games you want to play just for the car? And could you even transfer your progress from your usual game to the car for a road trip? I think most people would just want their own handheld console or phone or whatever.

Okay Here’s Something I Liked To Break Up All The Bitching

The sun visors are secured to the upper part of the windshield via magnets instead of fussy plastic clips. This is so much better! The magnet setup works great, easily the best visor clip solution I’ve ever seen. Fantastic job, Tesla!

Full Self-Driving (FSD) Thoughts

I was excited to try out the latest version of Tesla’s Level 2 driver-assist system, known as Full Self Driving (FSD), even though it requires constant supervision. It may be doing most of the task of driving, but the human must always remain in control. And I do have to give Tesla credit for making a system that does seem to take that seriously; there’s a camera watching where your eyes and perceived attention are focused, as well as sensors in the steering wheel to make sure your eyes are on the road and your hands are on the wheel.

Should you lapse even for what seems like quite a short period of time, you get scolded:

This is how Level 2 should be done. And, at the same time, doing Level 2 right also means one questions what the hell the point of Level 2 is, anyway. Personally, I don’t get it; I find the act of supervising and almost-driving-but-not-driving to be almost more work than just, you know, driving the damn car by myself. It’s sort of frustrating, because you feel like you should be able to look out the side window or check your phone or whatever, but you can’t.

And, it’s for your own benefit that you can’t; in one of my uses of FSD, the system attempted to drive right into a car in front of me in a parking lot, and another time it wanted to swerve into a lane with oncoming traffic. Because the system forces vigilance, I was able to easily take over, and it was a good reminder that unsupervised self-driving still isn’t quite there yet.

And then, conversely, the Cybertruck’s FSD software drove me nearly all of the way from Charlotte to Chapel Hill with no real interventions, and technically, that’s wildly impressive. FSD is extremely impressive, and I’m happy to admit that. I’m also happy to admit that I don’t understand the appeal.

During the 2+ hour trip I used FSD for nearly exclusively, I didn’t really find it any more relaxing than just driving. What I did notice was that I had no idea where I was going. I was focused on supervising the basic mechanics of driving, making sure the Cybertruck wouldn’t try to cybersmash some parked car or drive over a curb or whatever, but I did not have to focus on directions.

As a result, the sensation was a lot like when you find yourself driving a route you drive on a regular basis, kind of on autopilot yourself, driving but not really thinking about where you are or where you’re going.

I found FSD removed me from the experience of traveling more than driving. I still had to be ready to drive, but I was more numbed to my surroundings, and I don’t think I want that. I’d rather just drive and interact with the environment I’m in, learn a little about where I am and where I’m going. Sure, in slow stop-and-go traffic or a really long, boring stretch of highway this could be nice, but normal driving? I’d rather just use the controls that are already in front of me to jus drive the damn car.

Final Thoughts

So, what is the Cybertruck, really? I think you could pretty much sum it up like this:

The Cybertruck is an awful lot of very specific ideas and concepts about this idea of what a futuristic electric truck could be like, without any amount of reflection or consideration about if any of these ideas or concepts are things that people actually want. It’s obvious that this is an incredibly technologically advanced vehicle – possibly one of the most advanced that has ever been mass-produced – but it’s also a really powerful reminder of just how little that actually matters when it comes to making a truly great car or truck.

Almost none of the incredible advancements in the Cybertruck make it better at being a truck. If anything, almost all of the “innovations” of the Cybertruck I found to be frustrating or annoying, and just added up to make using the Cybertruck unpleasant and arduous. Needlessly.

The Cybertruck is striking and iconoclastic and like nothing else on the road, and that will make it appealing to some people, and that’s absolutely fine. Cars are not rational, as I said, and never will be, and that’s why I love them.

For me, though, the Cybertruck feels like an exercise in technological insecurity; it brazenly spits in the face of tradition because it wants the attention, it wants to be better, bigger, more important, more capable, everything. And those goals are fine, but the Cybertruck doesn’t really manage to hit them. The Cybertruck will be an important entry in the history of the automobile, but I have zero interest in owning one.

I’m skeptical that they will age well, too: the build quality wasn’t terrible, but there are some known issues, and the tech that seems so incredible now will be at best amusing and at worst embarrassing in probably well under ten years’ time.

If you love the Cybertruck, none of the nearly 6,000 words I just belched out will matter one bit, and if that’s you, and you have a Cybertruck, I wish you nothing but joy for you and your truck. For everyone else, I think you can safely save your $60 to $100,000 dollars and find something where you can open the doors in one step and blow A/C on your face without going into a menu on a touchscreen.