Cybertruck

About

Cybertruck is an electric truck vehicle manufactured by Elon Musk's automotive and energy company Tesla, Inc. After the truck was unveiled in late November 2019, memes about the vehicle's angular design widely circulated on Reddit and Twitter.

History

On November 21st, 2019, Musk unveiled the Cybertruck^[1] at the Tesla Design Studio in Los Angeles, California, announcing that the base model of the vehicle with be $39,900. During the event, Musk invited chief of design Franz von Holzhhausen to throw a steel ball at the truck's window as a durability test. As the ball made contact with the window, it smashed, leading Musk to say "we'll fix it in post." That evening, The Verge uploaded a video highlighting notable clips from the presentation, which gathered more than 1.2 million views in nine hours.

Also during the presentation, Grimes appeared as a hologram to introduce Musk and the Cybertruck (shown below).

Reception

On YouTube

On November 22nd, YouTuber Marques Brownlee uploaded a video giving his first impressions of the Cybertruck, along with footage test driving the vehicle (shown below). That day, the video accumulated more than 494,000 views.

Related Memes

Following the vehicle's unveiling, users began posting jokes comparing the design of the vehicle to other vehicles, characters and video game graphics (shown below). A Twitter Events^[2] page titled "Everything people think the new Tesla Cybertruck looks like" was subsequently created.

That day, various Redditors flooded the front page with memes posted to r/memes^[4] (shown below, left), r/dankmemes,^[6] r/gaming^[3] (shown below, right) and r/facepalm.^[7] Redditor JakeAgiusYT posted to r/pewdiepiesubmissions^[5] an image of the truck with the caption "Tesla needs a new graphics card" which gained over 2,600 points (97% upvoted) in a day (shown below, center).

Meanwhile, Ebaumsworld^[8] published a collection of Cybertruck memes titled "20 Best Tesla Cybertruck Memes That'll Make You Want To Upgrade Your Graphics Card." The same day, Memebase^[10] published a Cybertruck meme listicle.

Various Failures

On March 3rd, 2024, when Twitter user and Tesla owner @chiarelloERISA wrote that he had experienced a "catastrophic failure" with the steering and brakes of his Cybertruck while his wife and toddler were in the car, and that service was not open. He still insisted he "loved" his Tesla (screenshot of tweet shown below).^[6]

On April 19th, 2024, all 3,878 Cybertrucks were recalled after a TikToker reported that the paneling had come loose their dash and trapped the car's accelerator.

Search Interest

External References