For truck's sake

For Truck’s Sake

I’m sure you’d all love to know where I stand on the Great Tesla Debate. Do I own a Cybertruck? Would I ever? Does Elon Musk amaze and inspire me? Do I detest his living guts? Do I care so little about the Great Tesla Debate that all I can think about right now is the fact that detest + Tesla = detesla?

You’ll never know. Sorry! I just can’t find it in myself to volunteer yet another opinion on the subject. Not after this past week, when I’ve been crushed, simply crushed, by them. If you missed it, we published a photo essay about what it’s like to be the owner of a Cybertruck in 2025, and it’d take the Jaws of Life to prise me out of the wreckage that is the internet’s reaction to it. (Thus exhausts my attempt at automotive wordplay. Detesla!)

But the piece itself, I can speak to. One of our brilliant site directors, Zoë Schiffer, did it, with photos by Michelle Groskopf, and it’s sort of like the movie Jaws: best understood not as horror but as comedy. Reading it, I bark-laughed several times. The carefully careless tone. The 8-year-old interviewee. The fact that multiple Cybertruck owners—was Mrs. Claus one of Musk’s sperm mommies?—deliver presents to children. Just hilarious, I say. All of it.

Offended at my flippancy? Please. I look for inspiration wherever I can get it, and this piece inspires me. I’m so inspired, in fact, I might just take a walk down the block. There’s a Cybertruck parked outside a house. In Berkeley! Land of libs! I wonder if the owner has strong opinions.

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Finding Antifa

Antifa seems to be among the most enduring bogeymen of the past decade. Ask any member of the MAGA world and they’ll tell you the loosely defined movement is to blame for it all, from vandalism and murder to protests both peaceful and not. 

Nothing crystallizes the impact of antifa fearmongering more than what happened in Forks, Washington, in June of 2020. That year, WIRED contributor Lauren Smiley expertly recounted the events that prompted locals—concerned about a supposed antifa invasion—to barricade an innocent family in the wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a gripping tale: perfectly emblematic of our times and supplemented with recordings of the 911 calls from that chaotic day. Given the intensifying rhetoric coming out of the second Trump administration, do you think we may see more incidents like this? Let me know in an email or comment below the article.

WIRED readers more than made up for Jason’s lack of opinion about Cybertrucks. Comments on the essay abound. One reader pointed out that despite all the comments and all the hype, American consumers still prefer Ford and Dodge pickups. “I give Musk credit for understanding manufacturing very well,” they said. “but his problem is that he doesn't understand people.” In response, another reader noted that, actually, Musk has not mastered manufacturing either, “considering that multiple trim parts on Cybertrucks have been coming off … Musk also doesn't understand ergonomics and usability. People have died [allegedly because they] could not find the emergency door release.”

Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line.