If a car can embody the age that created it, the Tesla Cybertruck is, fittingly, a culture war on wheels.
When Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, unveiled it at a presentation in Los Angeles five years ago, he seemed to know this hulking wedge of stainless steel would be polarizing.
“It’s not going to be for everyone,” he said at the time.
Since the electric behemoth started rolling off the Tesla factory floor last November, its hard-edged geometric form has indeed proved to be a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. And more than any other Tesla, the Cybertruck seems to represent Mr. Musk himself — an extremely online attention seeker loved by some and loathed by others.
Lately it has become a sport among the vehicle’s detractors to spot Cybertruck owners parking improperly and driving aggressively — and to generalize about the type of people who would identify themselves with such a conspicuous machine.
A microgenre of online videos has also sprung up, showing Cybertrucks immobilized by sand, water and snow. The posts are often accompanied by commentary laden with Schadenfreude.
In May, a news site in Nantucket, Mass., got in on the act, shaming a Cybertruck driver for encroaching on a crosswalk on the affluent island and getting stuck while doing some off-roading on a beach.
The scrutiny has left some Cybertruck owners feeling a little embattled. “At first, I didn’t care — but now it’s starting to get annoying,” one driver wrote in a Cybertruck drivers’ forum in a thread titled “Cybertruck brings the haters.”
Richard Zhang, a Cybertruck owner from Pittsburgh, said the vast majority of the interactions he has about his truck have been positive. But the negative ones are really, really negative.
“They are so filled with rage that they have lost all sense of human decency and respect,” Mr. Zhang, 30, said of the critics he has encountered.
Drew Magary, a writer for the San Francisco news site SFGate, recently took a Cybertruck out for a spin and hammered home some stereotypes about the vehicle’s fans in a satirical column.
“I fit the customer profile for one to a T,” Mr. Magary wrote. “I am tall. I am white. I am loud. I don’t really have many friends where I live. Most important, I desperately want people to think I’m cool.”
Consumers have long expressed their personalities and lifestyles through their cars — think of the midlife crisis Corvette. But for many years there has not been an automobile — or any consumer product, really — that has provoked such strong reactions, that has carried so much loaded cultural meaning.
It all starts with Mr. Musk.
