Anyone complaining that Tesla's upcoming Cybertruck is ugly is both absolutely correct and completely missing the point.
EV car adoption is already an uphill battle with half of the country armed and ready to defend their gasoline engines from the woke police at all costs. EV pickup truck adoption is that on steroids. You're better off selling "Biden 2024" t-shirts at a Kid Rock concert.
Breaking through this barrier so that pickup truck owners are actually open to going electric will require much more than a Facebook ad of factoids preaching the benefits. People make the decision to buy a pickup truck off pathos as much as logos. Truck owners don't just want something with a high towing capacity; they want something categorically badass.
So what did Tesla do to combat this problem? They designed their electric pickup truck to look more like a tank than a car. You can look at a Prius and say it's woke, but you physically cannot look at a Cybertruck and say it's woke. It looks too threatening, and by doing that, Tesla sucked that entire narrative away from the EV deniers. The first thought everyone has when they see a picture of it is, "That's so ugly." I think the second thought for many people is, "I kind of want to ride in one," and just like that you have them emotionally ripe to the idea.
I don't see the Cybertruck being a massive volume or revenue driver for Tesla. I think it's a bullhorn aimed at Alabama screaming, "EVs are badass too." The design is ugly to the point of it being a feature, not a flaw, because while someone might mistake a Lucid Air for a Polestar 2, freaking nobody is mistaking the Cybertruck for anything but a Cybertruck. Tesla doesn't really need it to be a home run since the Model Y and Model 3 are still far and away the most popular electric vehicles in America. But in a time where the Tesla brand is getting dealt blow after blow by Elon Musk's three-ring circus at Twitter, they do need us all to keep talking about Tesla in a light that reminds us how innovative and occasionally hysterical the brand is, and all this free press on the Cybertruck's ugliness is doing exactly that.
So what if I could build a more attractive pickup truck in Minecraft? The Cybertruck is tactically ugly, and as a fulcrum for changing the narrative around EVs, I think it's playing its role perfectly.
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