On the primary Sunday of spring, surrounded by row homes and magnolia bushes, I got here to a horrifying realization: My mother was proper. I had been flipped off at the very least 17 occasions, referred to as a “motherfucker” (in each English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A lady in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and stated, “You need to be ashamed of your self.” All of this as a result of I used to be driving a Tesla Cybertruck.
I had advised my mother about my plan to lease this factor and drive it round Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to grasp what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated automotive. “Wow. Watch out,” she texted again immediately. Each of us had learn the tales of Cybertrucks presumably being set on fireplace, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in each method possible. Individuals have focused the automotive—and Tesla as an entire—to protest Elon Musk’s position in Donald Trump’s administration. However out of sheer masochism, or stupidity, I nonetheless went forward and spent a day driving one. As I idled with the home windows down on a avenue within the Mount Nice neighborhood, a lady glared at me from her entrance porch: “Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,” she yelled. “You drive a Nazi truck.” She slammed her entrance door shut, after which opened it once more. “I hope somebody blows your shit up.”
Earlier that day, my first cease was the guts of the resistance: the Dupont Circle farmers’ market. The folks there needed to see the natural asparagus and lion’s-mane mushrooms. What they didn’t wish to see was a stainless-steel, supposedly bulletproof Cybertruck. Each pink mild created new moments for mockery. “You fucker!” yelled a bicyclist as he pedaled previous me on P Avenue. The diners consuming brunch on the sidewalk close by laughed and cheered. Then got here the following stoplight: A lady consuming exterior at Le Ache Quotidien gave me the center finger for a stable 20 seconds, all with out interrupting her dialog.
The anger is comprehensible. That is, in any case, the radioactive middle of DOGE’s blast radius. On the identical block the place I used to be yelled at in Mount Nice, I noticed a hand-drawn signal in a single window: CFPB, it learn, within an enormous pink coronary heart; and at one level, I tailed behind a black Tesla Mannequin Y with the bumper sticker Anti Elon Tesla Membership. However the Cybertruck stands out on America’s roads about as a lot as LeBron James in a kindergarten classroom. Regardless of the place you reside, the automotive is an almost 7,000-pound Rorschach take a look at: It has turn into the defining image of the second Trump time period. In case you hate Trump and Musk, it’s a big MAGA hat, Pepe the Frog on wheels, or the “Swasticar.” In case you love Trump and Musk, the Cybertruck is, nicely, an enormous MAGA hat. On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel referred to as Tesla vandalism “home terrorism” as he introduced a Tesla activity pressure to research such acts. Alex Jones has trolled Tesla protesters from the again of his personal Cybertruck, bullhorn in hand. Child Rock has a Cybertruck with a customized Dukes of Hazzard paint job; the far-right podcaster Tim Pool owns one and says he’ll purchase one other “as a result of it’ll personal the libs”; and Kanye West has three. Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter was gifted one by the president, and one other by Musk.
Once I parked the automotive for lunch in Takoma Park, the place I help federal staff indicators have been staked into the grass, I heard two ladies whispering at a close-by desk: “Ought to we egg it?” (On this economic system?) Time and again, as pedestrians and drivers alike glared at me, I needed to remind myself: It’s only a automotive. And it’s type of a cool one, too. It will probably apparently outrace a Porsche 911, whereas concurrently towing a Porsche 911. Or it could actually energy a home for as much as three days. My day within the Cybertruck wasn’t extraordinarily hard-core, however the eight onboard cameras made metropolis driving extra bearable than I used to be anticipating. No matter what you do with it, the automotive is emissions-free. “The underlying expertise of the Cybertruck is superb,” Loren McDonald, an EV analyst on the agency Paren, advised me. And the outside undersells simply how ridiculous it’s. Simply earlier than I returned the automotive on Monday morning, I took an impromptu Zoom assembly from the enormous in-car touchscreen. It has a single windshield wiper that’s so lengthy—greater than 5 ft—that Musk has in contrast it to a “katana.”
After 10 hours of near-constant hazing, I navigated to an underground parking zone to recharge the truck (and my battered self-image). Somebody had positioned a sticker simply beneath the Tesla brand: Elon Musk is a parasite, it learn. Nonetheless, even in D.C., I received a good variety of thumbs-ups as my Cybertruck zoomed by within the areas most frequented by vacationers. Close to the Nationwide Mall, a person in a pink bandana and shorts yelled, “That’s superior!” and cheered. Maybe it was an try at MAGA solidarity, or possibly not. Plenty of folks simply appeared to suppose it appeared cool. One man in his 20s, carrying a make cash, not buddies hoodie, frantically took out his cellphone to movie me making a left flip. Even within the bluest neighborhoods of D.C.—close to a restaurant named Marx Cafe and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mural—youngsters couldn’t get sufficient of the Cybertruck. One woman in Takoma Park noticed me and began screaming, “Cybertruck! Cybertruck!” Later, a boy noticed the automotive and frantically rode his scooter to attempt to get a greater look. Simply earlier than sundown, I used to be struggling to vary lanes close to George Washington College when two teenagers stopped to stare at me from the sidewalk. I used to be anxiously checking instructions on my cellphone and clearly had no concept the place to go. “Have to be an Uber,” one stated to the opposite.
By 9 p.m., I’d had sufficient. I valeted at my resort, with its “Tibetan Bowl Sound Therapeutic” courses, and received a nervous look from the attendant. I can’t blame anybody who sees the automotive as the stainless steel embodiment of the fashionable proper. This week, a county sheriff in Ohio stood in entrance of a inexperienced Cybertruck and derided Tesla vandals as “little fats those that dwell of their mother’s basement and put on their mother’s pajamas.” However it’s also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has turn into probably the most partisan automotive in existence—extra so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any type of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an immediately meme-able and really bizarre automotive, may have helped America fall in love with EVs. As a substitute, it’s doing the other. The revolt in opposition to Tesla is just not slowing down, and in some instances persons are outright eliminating their vehicles. Is it actually a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?
Then once more, Republicans aren’t shopping for the Cybertruck en masse. It’s too costly and too bizarre. Shopping for any Tesla could be a technique to personal the libs, however the correct has proved maddeningly immune to going electrical. “Your common MAGA Trump supporter isn’t going to go purchase a Tesla,” McDonald, the EV analyst, stated. Earlier than the automotive shipped in November 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would promote 250,000 a 12 months. He hasn’t even bought one-fifth of that in whole—and gross sales are falling. (Neither Tesla or Musk responded to a request for remark.)
Musk made loads of different guarantees that haven’t actually panned out: The Cybertruck was imagined to debut at lower than $40,000. The most cost effective mannequin at present accessible is double that. The automobile, Musk stated, can be “actually robust, not faux robust.” As a substitute, its stainless-steel facet panels have fallen off as a result of Tesla used the fallacious glue—and that was simply the newest of the automotive’s eight remembers. The Cybertruck was supposed to have the ability to haul “close to infinite mass” and “serve briefly as a ship.” Simply this month alone, one Cybertruck’s rear finish snapped off in a take a look at of its towing energy, and one other sank off the coast of Los Angeles whereas attempting to dump a Jet Ski from the mattress.
The Cybertruck, in that sense, is an ideal metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a foul behavior of promising one factor and delivering one other. X was imagined to be the “every little thing app”; now it’s a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an try and make the federal government extra nimble and tech-savvy. As a substitute, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Safety checks. Up to now, Musk has solely continued to get richer and extra highly effective whereas the remainder of us have needed to take care of the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The catastrophe of the Cybertruck is just not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most individuals, the automotive simply isn’t price driving.