Elon Musk talks a lot of shit. As the world is seemingly just discovering, he’s more of a marketer than the Tony Stark-like genius he was originally positioned as when he rose to fame.
It makes sense that, when it came time to promote the midlife crisis on wheels, a.k.a. the Swasticar, a.k.a. the Cybertruck, Musk desperately tried to market it as a tough and rugged badass machine. He claimed that it was capable of surviving anything you throw at it, even at one point calling it “apocalypse-proof.”
Actual doomsday peppers and survivalists beg to differ.
The Cybertruck Isn’t the Right Car for the Apocalypse
As The Guardian reports, the survivalist community views Cybertruck as more of a hazard than your go-to zombie apocalypse/Mad Max-style war wagon. Despite Musk’s claims of maximum durability, the truck’s steel-clad frame belies the fact that it is woefully ill-equipped to survive the harsh outdoors, even in a pre-apocalyptic setting.
Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive journalist Dan Neil, after a few days of test driving it off-road, surmised that the Cybertruck is “definitely an on-road car.” That’s his emphasis, not mine.
The Cybertruck hasn’t been for sale for too long, yet it’s already racked up an incredible number of recalls, most of them because parts of it just fall off or stop working. If the Cybertruck were rugged and hardcore and built to withstand the apocalypse, then why is it breaking down after going through a car wash?
Then there’s all the tech the Cybertrucks are loaded with. As a professional prepper, Daisy Luther explained to The Guardian that the more electronics a vehicle has, the more likely it is to become a paperweight when the grid goes down. “I can do small repairs on something mechanical, but I can’t do anything that requires a computer flash or a satellite upgrade because I don’t have the equipment.”
This slab of vehicular mediocrity does not appear to have been built by people who understand how SUVs are designed and constructed. The Cybertruck is outdoorsy cosplay designed by tech geeks with fascist leanings. Its political associations aren’t helping.
The Guardian spoke to a hobbyist prepper and a NASA engineer named Arthur Bradley, who stated it plainly. He admits that it probably can withstand some small arms fire, but it raises the question of why people would be shooting at a Cybertruck to begin with. “Are people shooting at me because they think I’m an idiot or a bad guy, or don’t support me supporting this company?”
On top of all this, it’s a little weird that a billionaire who is gleefully ripping apart the federal government actively used imagery and language of the postapocalypse to sell a truck. It almost feels like he’s hoping, and maybe even banking on, his work within the federal government to eventually intertwine with the general public’s need for a post-apocalyptic murder vehicle.
For as much as Elon appears to have tried to sell both the disease and the remedy, it seems like no one is buying, save for a relative handful of other Gen Xers having similar conservative-branded midlife crises as Elon. The general public has so shunned the Cybertruck that Tesla has $800 million worth of them sitting around dealerships that they cannot unload. Now, the doomsday prepper community, the only other demographic Elon seems to be targeting, also doesn’t want it.
So, if the Cybertruck is not going to be the EV truck of the Common Man or the doomsday proper fighting against The Man in the post-apocalyptic wastes of America, then who will be driving this thing in the future? Well, seeing as one of the few reliable purchasers of Cybertrucks in America nowadays is police departments, it seems more like the Cybertruck will be the premier vehicle driven by the ruthless rulers of the post-apocalypse rather than the Common Man heroes.
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