People take pictures of the newly unveiled all-electric battery-powered Tesla’s Cybertruck with … [+]
It was a reveal so awkward it might have even helped if the Tesla Cybertruck would have blown a tire as it rolled onstage. Gasps, guffaws, broken windows and endless online consternation followed the glitchy rollout, with opinion clearly divided over its radical exterior design – but not the performance numbers.
Now, the pre-orders are stacking up, passing 200,000 in a scant five days, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In that short time, the online yelling matches about the truck have generated just the right amount of free publicity for the Cybertruck – as in untold metric tons of it. I think the head of Tesla’s PR department (that would be: Elon) sleeps just fine at night. How many of those refundable $100 deposits are going to stick until production remains to be seen, and the number will likely continue to rise of course.
Reconsideration
Following the big event last Thursday, I’ve had several truck-owning friends go from fits of laughter to reluctant re-consideration to slapping down a Benjamin to get in line. Several, as in, many. There are still some who pledge they wouldn’t be caught dead in the thing, but begrudgingly admit the utility factor and tech is appealing, as is not dropping $135 to fill up on gas. Twice a month. Or more.
Then I chatted with another friend, a long-time Intel employee and driver of a large crew-cab pickup, who said he put down a deposit and reminded me of an old axiom about change, and how difficult it can be: “Sometimes breaking things is the only way to move forward,” he said.
And that’s what the Tesla Cybertruck does, in ways even the Tesla cars didn’t, and really haven’t.
Guffaw all you want at the Cybertruck’s look, but in 2021, if Tesla survives, you’re likely going to start seeing these on the road and they are going to draw a crowd everywhere they go. Know any stock $40,000 trucks that can do that?
Blade Runner And The Breaking Of Things
I was wrong when I said that the Cybertruck doesn’t look like anything out of a Ridley Scott movie. Musk had said he was inspired by the setting and vehicles in 1982’s Blade Runner, and I couldn’t think of ever seeing a ”truck” in the film (despite numerous viewings), so I rewatched the seminal sci-fi classic over the weekend with an eye out for it, and sure enough, there it was, right at 31:05 in that haunting tunnel shot, and again at 31:30. Except it wasn’t a truck, it’s a police car (and not the now iconic Spinner flying police car). Here’s a better view of it at a Peterson Automotive Museum display showing many vehicles designed by futurist Syd Mead, who designed it.
It’s important to understand the influence of Blade Runner and how closely it ties to Musk and the Cybertruck, on more than just a design level. Like any good showman, Musk could have just taken a convenient Mead design cue from the movie and then shrewdly queued up the reveal to coincide with Blade Runner’s “date” of November 2019. But I think it goes deeper than that.
In time, Blade Runner was hailed as a dystopian – and possibly prescient – masterpiece hatched at the wrong time. A dark, murderous, slowly-paced movie filled with big ideas and a deeply discouraging future, it was released two years into the Reagan Revolution, as the economy was brightening from it’s 1970s malaise and just five years after the happiness of the Star Wars sci-fi hypernova (Empire came out in 1983).
It tested poorly with pre-release audiences, so much so that the studio ordered a happy-ending recut that also included an unenthusiastic explanatory voice-over by Harrison Ford. Even then, it did not do well at the box office. But for many people, and I suspect a young Elon Musk among them, it struck a chord. It’s a movie that gets under your skin, and asks some huge questions: What kind of a future will result from continued environmental abuse and degradation? What are the dark sides of advancing technologies? What does it mean to be “human,” and even beyond that, an ethical human? Pretty deep stuff for cinema, which has a proven ability to ask tough questions.
Blade Runner, in many ways, changed (or broke) the thinking about what science fiction movies could be, or even should be, especially in the Scott-supervised Director’s Cuts and Final Cuts issued decades later. Beautiful, brutal, contemplative and at times frenetic, it was rejected and forgotten by most people upon release, only to keep bubbling up in conversation over the decades until its genius was almost universally recognized. And in that regard, we may be seeing the same thing with Tesla Cybertruck: An initially shocking, off-putting idea that seems so far from convention it’s almost laughable – until you take a much closer look at the ideas that drive the design.
While many corporate mission statements seems like soulless hyperbole about serving the customer or happy workers or what have you, Tesla’s is quite succinct: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” That one phrase embodies a lot of ideas and actions, including ending the petroleum era, recognizing the value of Earth’s environment, utilizing technology in a positive way and creating a net positive difference in the world through your company.
Musk is no saint – worker treatment has been a sore point – but he has demonstrated through his various corporate pursuits that he doesn’t want to live in the dark days of Blade Runner’s 2019 at any future date, and an electric truck is a major part of that plan. Vehicles must become more symbiotic with the environment, and pumping pollutants into the air while operating ever more of them likely isn’t going to work out well long-term. Yet we we all still need and want to travel, work and have fun with vehicles. What if they never needed liquid fuels? What if they could charge up with solar power? These ideas may seem common sense now, but that has not always been that case and still isn’t in many quarters, but it is at the core of the Tesla’s mission.
In many ways, Tesla’s success so far has roiled the auto industry, or at least shocked it into change and recognition of the many advantages – including the financial, technological and environmental metrics – of turning away from fossil fuels. Now comes the Cybertruck, a more pure embodiment of that mission statement, and a much more stark and precise realization of Musk’s desire to break convention than his cars ever could.
It sounds like people are beginning to buy into the idea, as long as you can camp in the back of it and charge up all your stuff.
