Every morning on the way to preschool, my daughter Julia and I drive past a Tesla dealership. Late last year, the sporty red and white electric sedans that once lined the lot were replaced by a convoy of gunmetal Cybertrucks. It looked like the dealership had been seized in a military coup. Julia calls them “diamond-shaped cars” and, sensing my disdain, wryly insists they are beautiful and she loves them.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk debuted plans for the Cybertruck in 2019; after a series of delays, they began hitting roadways in late 2023. For my part, the Cybertrucks alighted upon my consciousness only when, like giant pixelated mushrooms, they began turning up everywhere—the university parking deck, the carpool line, a particularly absurd-looking two-car accident—forcing me to google “Matte black triangle car what is it.” The Cybertruck, which looks like the vehicular love child of a SWAT truck and the Mars rover, seems to have been designed less with a purpose and more with an ideology. The New York Times’s Joseph Bernstein called it “a culture war on wheels.” What’s going on with this thing?
Product design forms public desire. It teaches us what we’re allowed to want. As the well-worn Steve Jobs maxim goes, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. This cultivation of consumer desire goes beyond mere marketing. The new product—so different as to be unthinkable until its creation, yet so legible that ordinary people imagine its seamless incorporation into their lives—opens within us new categories of desire. It creates a permission structure whereby we can justify the necessity of something that, six months ago, we never even knew how to want.
What does the Cybertruck want us to want? Survival, for one thing. Forget fly balls and errant shopping carts. The Cybertruck is built to protect drivers from America’s favorite projectile: bullets. At a 2023 event celebrating the car’s release, Musk regaled Cybertruck owners with the news that their new vehicles could withstand rounds of buckshot and tommy-gun fire (which was the first time I’ve heard anyone mention tommy guns since Jim Carrey’s 1994 comedy The Mask). “[With] the other trucks, the bullets go through both sides,” Musk mused. Not so with the Cybertruck. “If Al Capone showed up with a tommy gun and emptied the entire magazine into the car door, you would still be alive.” (That’s two tommy-gun references, for those keeping score at home.) During a podcast interview with Musk, Joe Rogan aimed a crossbow at a Cybertruck and shot an armor-piercing arrow at the driver’s side door. The arrow bounced off the car and broke, leaving nothing more than a marble-sized dent on the car’s exterior.
“You just never know,” Musk mused. “The apocalypse could come along at any moment. And here at Tesla, we have the finest in apocalypse technology.” Musk is invoking apocalypse in its conventional sense—some sienna-hued dystopian future of smoldering fires and broken concrete in which the rich have already booked their seats on the first SpaceX flight out of here. (Tesla’s website boasts that the Cybertruck is “built for any planet.” Cool, bro.) Looking to survive the end of the world? We’ve got just the car for you.
Theologians and biblical scholars mean something different by “apocalypse.” From the Greek, apocalypse means revelation. It’s not the end of the world but the knock at the door—the interruption. The visitor has arrived to tell us things we cannot unknow, not so much about what’s to come but what already is. The apocalyptic unveils reality, and in doing so it brings us face to face with the truth about ourselves.
Musk is right: the Cybertruck is the apocalypse machine. What’s disturbing isn’t Musk’s vision of the future. It’s his read on the present, which is basically accurate. America is a nation of guns, and instead of deciding that we’d prefer not to live with the simmering terror that comes with the knowledge that ringing the wrong doorbell, cutting the wrong person off in traffic, or going anywhere to do anything at all are decisions that could lead to being murdered, we choose instead to build stronger doors and harder cars. The Cybertruck is the ideal vehicle for a society in which kindergartners practice lockdown drills, survivalism companies sell bulletproof children’s backpacks, and parents protest classroom cell-phone bans because how else are they supposed to get ahold of their kids if a school shooting happens? A nation of guns forces every individual to become the guarantor of her own survival. In a world like this, security is the greatest good and collective concern extends, at maximum, to the boundaries of the family and no further—a reality for which the automobile is the perfect metaphor. Get in, lock the doors, roll up the windows, and drive through whatever torrent of bullets or arrows or flames this hard, angry world might unleash.
I’m no survivalist, but I’ve read enough Octavia Butler to have serious doubts about the capacity of any machine so fussy and self-consciously aggressive to outwit the end of the world. Futuristic vibes aside, the Cybertruck isn’t designed for the future. It’s a mirror of the present. That’s what makes it so ugly.
