QOTD -- The Musk-y Smell Of The Cybertruck

 

"... The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in a version of Freejack in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.  [snip]

"What I can tell you is this: I saw my first Cybertruck stop at a red light near the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan on Sunday, and this car sucked in a way that had strangers on the sidewalk making Oh brother faces at each other. I could not have been better prepared to encounter this vehicle, and yet I was not prepared at all. It is one thing to have an image in your mind that roughly corresponds to 'Albert Pyun's Homercar: 2049' and quite another to watch that actual vehicle turn, seemingly on drunken tiptoe, onto Columbus Avenue. It is an experience that everyone should have, I think. The stupid, tacky future that our culture's reigning mediocrities are making every day can feel abstract and almost poignant when encountered through a screen—a thing that no one but them wants, and which does not work very well, trying and failing to seem like progress. It is much more useful, I think, to see how ridiculous—how gaudy and cheap and patently unwantable—that future looks trying to navigate the world in which everyone else is trying to live." (our emphasis) -- part of David Roth's review in The Defector of the ghastly Cybertruck produced by one of "our culture's reigning mediocrities," Elon Musk.  To think, this is the same mastermind whose Space X is providing rockets for space exploration...

(Photo: It does have that dumpster appeal / via Rob DenBleyker, Twitter/X)