You, Cybertruck, are not just repulsive; you are comical. It’s not your fault that you’re not really a truck. But if your operating system is listening, I have to tell you: You are the dumbest vehicle ever engineered.
Your sleek, commercial kitchen-shaped exterior, which is called a “cantrail,” can’t even stay on: It peels off your body at high speeds when the glue holding it together malfunctions. It lives up to its name, because, in so many ways, this car just can’t.
You and the other 46,906 Cybertrucks manufactured since 2023 have been ordered off American highways for immediate repair. You are a road hazard, a danger to other drivers.
In ordinary circumstances, we would just laugh at you. And I do laugh when I think about the head of the FBI driving to work each morning in a custom-wrapped Cybertruck barely held together by inadequate glue.
At perhaps any other time in U.S. history, you’d have fallen into obscurity as the not-truck you are, a silly thing promoted by an eccentric billionaire crypto bro with a predilection for ketamine. But that billionaire car dealer is currently running around the White House gutting federal agencies and throwing out Hitler salutes. Now every white supremacist or men’s rights advocate with a crypto exchange key wants a Cybertruck in their driveway. You’ve become a symbol, the dead end where bad men drive deeper into dysfunction, shallow masculinity and toxic American disposability.
You are the carpool that ferries toxic waste from around the world into Texas to be glued together with shiny materials and stamped “American Made.”
But to anyone with a job that requires a functioning truck, the Cybertruck is a monstrosity. It cannot haul, lift, climb or build. At its core, it simply does not truck. Most egregiously, it voids the deeper truck experience, severing the vital connections that bond truck-driving humans: wood hauls, fishing and camping trips. Mudding, modding, racing. Cruising in a clean Chevy to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” in the tape deck.
You are the carpool that ferries toxic waste from around the world into Texas to be glued together with shiny materials and stamped “American Made.”
At its best, a truck celebrates work-life balance. It is the vehicle of skilled labor. That’s what drives so many truck owners: building and strengthening communities, creating legacies, forging connections. That’s why we spend hours tinkering with that long-bed four-wheel-drive in the backyard. A little more oil, one more crank, one last job before an adventure down the back roads, where perhaps this time you’ll go farther than before.
The Cybertruck, because of that billionaire’s politics, is a clearly identifiable symbol of a more infantile masculinity and a badge of fascist imperialism, less a truck than an elaborate performance of a truck that gets stuck in snow and stranded on hillsides, trapped in mud, greeted by raised middle fingers and sprayed with graffiti across the country.
“Motherfucker,” I say to its silver rear bumper. I want to flip it off, to toss cockroach poison at it. This metallic lump of excrement needs to be flushed. As many already have: In Las Vegas and Kansas City, Tesla dealerships have been vandalized and Cybertrucks burned, even though the White House has decreed that flushing a Tesla is an act of domestic terrorism.
Outside my hometown, Albuquerque, where the city ends and modular suburban homes climb the hill toward the Santa Fe National Forest, there’s a Tesla sales lot, filled with a fleet of the angular silver Nazi Wagons.
There is a painful irony here: That lot sits on Tamaya, on sovereign land with its own sovereign business practices. New Mexico state law prohibits direct car sales from manufacturers, so those trucks would be illegal to sell if the shop was across the street. But this is America 2025, and inventive tribes have learned to leverage money and law. So Santa Ana Pueblo approved its own car sales law, and Tamaya Enterprises, its business arm, arranged a lease with the company. This also happened in Nambé, where a tribe just outside Santa Fe and Los Alamos has a similar deal. Cybertrucks are sold on tribal land, but they are not in spaces that Native people, or any real truck people, go. They are simply taking our space.
My Indigenous upbringing taught me to give back to this land, which belongs to my ancestors. That value is real and spiritual for me; I remember where I came from. But these cyber-things are made of rare minerals extracted from the land. They give nothing back, only take.
I want a truck for the memories it creates, cold mornings gripping a warm burrito in the tiny back seat on the way to a worksite with my uncles. On those rides I learned how to talk, what to do, where to save my money and how not to spend it. We drove off to build things, creating a legacy, relishing the excitement when my aunt took us to town, piled into a bench seater, shuffling our ankles whenever she shifted gears.
Cybertrucks are sold on tribal land, but they are not in spaces that Native people, or any real truck people, go. They are simply taking our space.
When I first met my niece, Nevaeh, she was huddled warmly in her pink car seat in the wide backseat of my uncle’s old extended cab truck. It was a bit roomier than the tiny utility seat I sat on when I was her age.
Recently, at the Sunday truck meetup at Robinson Park along old Route 66 in downtown Albuquerque, where our grandparents once parked, I walked her in her stroller to take in the colors and sounds of classic rides. These trucks are an inheritance for people; they are works of art. Nevaeh, now 9 months old, grins when I seat her behind a white leather steering wheel in a finely crafted truck assembled 50 years earlier. “That’s something you’ve never seen before!” Marco, the truck’s owner, says, smiling at Nevaeh’s focus as a smooth bass drops on the radio.
When we leave and I return her to the car seat, I tell her that she can have her own truck one day to drive and haul things and bond with people she loves. Nevaeh growls happily in reply and nestles down, buckled safely in the backseat of the truck that will take her home. We drive past the classic car meetup and that lot where the cyber-things sit on Native Land, back onto the bumpy clay rez roads that rock her to sleep.
This article appeared in the May 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The car that just can’t.”
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
