“What do I think? I think it’ll never see the light of day,” says the perplexed gentleman standing next to what I have just explained is the production version of a pickup with first deliveries at the end of the month. Coming in hot, a barman has abandoned his post at a nearby restaurant for which his boss “scolded him a bit” but he doesn’t care because “it’s so beautiful”. He proceeds to polish the car off with a boozy rag and when I let him open the door... the hyperventilation begins.
The Cybertruck is less a vehicle, more an A-list celebrity, hounded wherever it goes. Every move recorded, every morsel of information twisted and reinterpreted until none of it makes sense. It’s a self-fuelling frenzy – every mention sends clicks rocketing, every picture gets social media fuming, or evangelising, but mostly fuming because calling out how dumb it is, or how laughably it’s put together based on phone snaps of a prototype, has become the internet’s favourite game.