Elon Musk Wanted the Cybertruck to Look Like "the Future." But It Reminds Us of One Particular Past. [View all]

[marble falls]

Elon Musk Wanted the Cybertruck to Look Like “the Future.” But It Reminds Us of One Particular Past.

The story of the Casspir, which patrolled townships in South Africa when the Tesla CEO was a boy.


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/tesla-cybertruck-protests-vandalism-elon-musk.html

?crop=1560%2C1040%2Cx0%2Cy0&width=1280

-snip-

Decades later, the Tesla Cybertruck, lately a prime target for protesters demonstrating their dislike of CEO Elon Musk, blurs the boundaries between the battlefield and the public street. When Tesla released the Cybertruck in 2023, its dramatic style polarized the public. Popular theories abounded about its unusual look. Many speculated that its inspiration had come from spaceships of science fiction. In discussing the car’s aesthetic early on, Musk referenced cyberpunk and Blade Runner, a film that features sleek metallic vehicles, though with rounded silhouettes designed for aerodynamic speed. He’s also used the phrase “The future should look like the future”—a reference, his biographer Walter Isaacson said, to a question his son Saxon asked him once: “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?”

-snip

The Cybertruck capitalizes on these fears. Its marketing, for example, explicitly taps into the current apocalyptic visions pervading both right- and left-wing political imaginaries—from climate disaster to nuclear, civil, and class warfare. Heralded as being “built for any planet,” it showcases a Bioweapon Defense Mode and a “built-in hospital grade HEPA filter” that “helps provide protection from 99.97% of airborne particles.” One third-party Tesla modification company, aimed at civilian and government clients, sells Cybertruck upgrades so it can run on jet fuel, diesel, biodiesel, and electricity.

The idea that a Cybertruck could become an artillery vehicle is not just hypothetical. Unsanctioned by Tesla, various users, ranging from a YouTuber to Chechen forces fighting for Russia in Ukraine, have modified a Cybertruck by mounting machine guns to its bed, turning it into a lightly armored weaponized machine. Government forces, such as the police in Southern California and Dubai, are using the Cybertruck as part of their fleets—although in those cases its usage is symbolic and not for patrol duties. (Irvine’s vehicle will be part of its DARE program, for example.)
Popular in News & Politics

-snip-

Whether or not Musk or the Cybertruck’s designers made a conscious decision to draw inspiration from the Casspir, the Cybertruck can be understood as part of this darker history of science-fictional, militarized vehicles, used in civilian life, that make a show of their own impenetrability—one captured, for example, by 12-year-old Irvin in apartheid South Africa. More broadly, these historical linkages force us to rethink and seriously question the militarization of our public spaces and culture and the attempts to normalize and monetize them. Whether through Casspirs or the Cybertruck, apartheid’s militarized, cultural, and psychological legacy roams our streets.