We would never be so crass or short-sighted as to call Elon Musk’s boxy automotive boondoggle the Cybertruck a completely meritless vehicle; few conveyances in human history, for instance, have been better carriers for a full-body vinyl wrap of Goku from Dragonball Z. Still, it’s starting to seem like a truck whose main aesthetic function was to literally put your “At least one kid has gone no-contact” personality out on Main Street for all to see may have hit the limits of its utility, as The New York Times reports that Tesla is winding down production on Musk’s beloved Rhombus Of Doom.
And while we’re sure there are many genuine automotive industry-adjacent reasons for Musk—who announced the move on Friday, stating that the company would instead be focusing production on its driverless Cybercab model—to back away from a vehicle that sold like crap, generated terrible headlines, and faced mass recalls, it’s really hard not to view the timing of the announcement as a reflection of this week’s political reality. Love it, or have the natural human aesthetic reaction to it, but the Cybertruck was, by its very nature, a statement: A full-throated, road-filling, eye-searing endorsement of Musk’s whole “Not actually touching you!” approach to right-wing intolerance—which got a pretty massive and public rebuke during Tuesday’s elections, when the $474 million he reportedly poured into races across the country resulted in little more than a series of very public defeats.
Again, it’s all kind of difficult to disentangle this from the fact that Tesla is also, well, a car company—this is presumably the reason the people running Honda don’t run around making their odious, Anakin-posting personalities inextricable with their brand. But investors, at least, seemed to be happy that Musk’s company was giving up on the “I, Personally, Love Elon Muskmobile;” Tesla’s stock reportedly rose 5 percent after Musk’s Friday announcement.
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