Kirby Lee via AP
A Tesla Cybertruck on display in Buena Park, California, November 21, 2023
The Cybertruck—or CYBPRFRVKK, according to its illegible branding image, which looks like a white suburban teenager’s first hesitant attempt at tagging the local Red Robin—is due to be released today. It’s the first new Tesla design since 2018, and the company has spent over four years and billions retooling its factories to make it.
It’s anyone’s guess how much of a success or failure the truck will be, though the fact that at time of writing there is, incredibly, still no official information about price or battery capacity doesn’t bode well. But we can conclude that the Cybertruck is just possibly the dumbest vehicle ever produced. Here’s why.
Let’s start with the Cybertruck’s body panels, which are made of stainless steel. That is a nightmare for several reasons. First, it is quite a bit harder than ordinary steel, making it difficult to shape and machine. When Ford experimented with stainless steel in the mid-20th century, they discovered that the metal would eventually break the dies they used to press their door panels. Tesla has had to cut the sheets with lasers and bend them into shape, which is undoubtedly more expensive.
Second, there is cost. The chromium and nickel alloys typically used to make steel stainless—that is, resistant to corrosion—are expensive, at about $11,700 and $18,300 per metric ton, respectively, as compared to about $800 for steel. And while stainless steel is resistant to dents, that also means that if it is dented it is difficult and costly to repair.
Incidentally, automakers have long since developed techniques to combat rust that are roughly equivalent to stainless alloys, like galvanizing the steel (that is, applying a zinc coating) and improved paint. Indeed, stainless steel itself is not entirely rustproof, as anyone with a stainless knife or cutlery has likely discovered. Leave it under a damp surface like a cloth (or leaf, or bird poop) for too long, and it will start to corrode.
Third and perhaps most importantly, stainless steel is much stiffer than the ordinary stuff, which makes it dangerous. Since the 1950s at least, automakers have understood that stiffer cars are more dangerous to people inside and outside the car, because in a crash they deliver energy to other parties rather than absorbing it. In early crash test experiments with more heavily built cars, collisions often did only minor damage to the car but turned the test dummies into paste. Since then, cars have been designed with progressively more sophisticated crumple zones to absorb impact forces. Musk’s boasts of a Cybertruck “exoskeleton,” if true, are a recipe for gruesome carnage.
Instead of stealing a march on the other automakers as Musk did with his other models, delays caused by his stupid design meant the opposite happened.
These problems are why nobody has used stainless steel for car bodies since the DeLorean four decades ago, and they’re almost certainly why the Cybertruck has taken more than four years to come to market. And while the DeLorean car has a cult following (almost entirely because of the Back to the Future films), it was also slow, unreliable, and plagued with quality control problems. That is why it was only produced for three years, sold just 9,000 units, and bankrupted the company producing it.
Elon Musk, incomprehensibly, made all these problems even worse by insisting the Cybertruck use an exceptionally hard variety of stainless steel, while making it thicker than average. The Wall Street Journal reports that this has led to even more major manufacturing challenges, as the material is even more difficult to shape and machine, and has a tendency to spring back into its original shape after being installed. (At least if Cybertruck owners are mangled beyond recognition after their Autopilot system drives them into a semitruck, they might get to hear a Looney Tunes-esque “boing!” in their final moments as all the panels pop into curved shapes at once.)
Why on earth did Musk make this decision? Aside from the rust and dent resistance, apparently the idea is—the white suburban teenager once again springs to mind—to make the Cybertruck bullet- and arrow-proof. On a recent episode of his podcast featuring Musk, Joe Rogan shot a Cybertruck door with a compound bow, leaving only a small dent (though he did not test the window, notably). “Joe Rohan [sic] shatters an arrow on Cybertruck that would easily go through a normal car,” Musk boasted on Twitter.
Thank heavens, all the commuters facing constant raids from massed formations of 13th-century Mongolian horse archers can rest easy. (No word on if the truck is resistant to ballistas, trebuchets, onagers, or mangonels.) Though if you’re actually out in the wilderness, you might not be able to get away from attacking cavalry; a recent video posted on Twitter shows the Cybertruck struggling mightily to get up a small hill that wouldn’t trouble a Subaru Forester.
The problem seems to be a lack of a limited-slip traction system, as wheels can be seen spinning while others are stationary, and extreme torque at idle, making it very easy to spin out in the dirt. (Perhaps Musk will fix these problems with one of his patented upgrade packages costing well into five figures.)
Then there is the Cybertruck’s design, which is both hideous and impractical. It is hard to make curved shapes with stainless steel, so the truck both looks like a low-polygon video game asset from the PlayStation 1 and also has terrible aerodynamics. The large cab and goofy sloped back means the bed is so cramped it can’t even fit an ordinary bicycle. This will likely harm its appeal among the truck-driving public—the vast majority of trucks are used as ordinary commuting vehicles and seldom if ever leave the pavement, of course, but being able to pretend you’re a rugged manual laborer constantly going on outdoor adventures is key to their marketing appeal.
Finally, there is the business stupidity of releasing this truck at this point in time. Back in 2019 when the Cybertruck was first announced, there was no other electric truck on the market—a juicy possibility given that the F-150 has been the best-selling personal vehicle in America for decades. But now there are several such trucks, like the Rivian R1T and F-150 Lightning, and many others will enter the market soon. Instead of stealing a march on the other automakers as Musk did with his other models, delays caused by his stupid design meant the opposite happened.
Moreover, existing manufacturers are having difficulty selling those trucks, at least relative to prior expectations. This could be down to the fact that the median EV buyer is an environmentally conscious liberal uninterested in a four-ton behemoth, while truck buyers tend to be skeptical of electric power. Or it could be that the market for high-end EVs of any kind is getting saturated. Consumers report being interested in EVs, but increasingly turned off by the high prices of both purchase and insurance.
Tesla is far better positioned to address the low-end mass market than any company outside China. But instead of concentrating on improving its notoriously poor build quality, or developing new cheaper models, it wasted four years and billions of dollars on Elon Musk’s adolescent video game fantasy. Meanwhile, China’s BYD looks poised to eat the world’s lunch on cheap EVs. It turns out megalomaniac, conspiracy-brained billionaires are not the key to a zero-carbon transportation future.
