Cybertruck vs. Corolla
When I was in high school I went to a teen poetry slam at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. Everyone from drama club was going, but I had to come up with another Witness kid to bring with me if my parents were going to let me go, so I called up a childhood friend of mine, who agreed to come and then invited BOTH our moms to join us. My two main memories from the night are trying to escape my mom’s grip long enough to briefly meet up with some friends from my school by the theater’s massive staircase, and the slam champion’s victory speech. After thanking some friends and teachers, he left the audience with a piece of advice: “Get a Toyota Corolla—those things last forever!”
Maybe it was the bravado of having opinions on car makes so soon after getting a license that made the line stick with me. It’s pretty generic advice—plenty of people have and will continue to sing the praises of the humble but sturdy Corolla—but it impressed me at the time. I was, after all, still borrowing my mom’s Dodge Caravan to drive to school on days I missed the bus, and I wasn’t even allowed to attend a poetry slam without her. I would have loved the freedom a beat-up used Corolla could offer.
This was the first thing I thought of when I read that a Tesla Cybertruck had gotten in its first road accident in Palo Alto over the holidays. The other car? A Toyota Corolla. A Toyota Corolla driven by a 17-year-old, in fact. In photos from the scene you can see the Corolla’s crumpled exterior across the road from the Cybertruck’s unscathed matte angles.
As plenty of people before me have noted, the Corolla was designed to crumple like that, and so were most other cars on the road right now. The car is supposed absorb the impact of a crash so it isn’t passed along to its fragile-bodied driver. It’s the Cybertruck’s unflinching exterior that’s dangerous to its own driver, transferring all the impact to the sack of bones inside, which in crash test videos can be seen getting shaken around like an ice cube in a martini glass.
As Elon intones over one YouTube compilation of crash test videos, the Cybertruck promise is that “If you’re ever in an argument with another car, you will win.” It’s not a surprising promise from someone who we’ve seen throw billions down the drain for a chance to win every online argument, but it is alarming to hear a car manufacturer to describe a car crash as a sparing match that must by design have a winner and losers.
I don’t know if the reveal of the first Toyota Corolla in 1966 had the theatrical flair of a Tesla shareholders meeting, but the car was wildly popular pretty much out of the gate. By 1974, it was the best-selling car in the world, and it remains the best-selling car of all time. Presumably it became the signature car of middle-class midwest teenagers by sheer ubiquity. It was safe and reliable to entrust your teen with it—or entrust it with your teen, depending on how you want to look at it. In 2022, the Corolla was once again the best selling car globally, but the best selling car in the U.S. was the Chevy Silverado. Trucks, including the Ford F-150, had been dominating the top spots in American car sales for a while, so you can see where Musk got the inspiration for a Tesla truck targeted to the U.S. market. Musk fans were excited. The tuck in the holiday accident was suspected to be one of the very first pre-orders finally delivered to eager customers who had been waiting as long as five years to get their car.
But the vehicle was doomed from the start, when Musk immediately broke the Cybertruck’s window in an early demonstration to prove how unbreakable the windows were. And I have to assume the owner of this particular vehicle had also happened upon some of the damning crash-test footage during the years he spent awaiting delivery. And he had surely also had seen photos of the truck and silenced his internal voice when it begged the question, “But in what sense is this thing a ‘truck’?” The bed looks barely large enough to transport a bike, so it’s hard to imagine a construction worker loading the Cybertruck up with 2x4s bound for the job site.
It’s a stupid vehicle, but there’s plenty of consumer confidence in Tesla to buoy hopes for it. In 2023, the bestselling car in the U.S. was a Tesla for the first time—the Y series. If you’ve been following the self-drive fatalities, or the cold weather battery failures, or you saw that scene in Leave the World Behind, you might find that a little worrisome.
I can’t imagine a worried parent handing over the keys to their Tesla, warning their teen not to let the battery get too cold, and to absolutely never be tempted to try the self-driving feature, and to always remember to charge the car whenever they park. I CAN imagine more affluent adults ignoring all the evidence stacked against the Cybertruck and continuing to place orders. Maybe we should be on the lookout for these drivers as they age. The first fender bender that makes their kids question whether they should take away their parents’s driver’s license could be deadly in a vehicle so unforgiving—Dad’s reflexes slow a little and he accidentally totals a teenager’s Corolla in the parking lot outside Target. There’s a metaphor here for the boomers who have destroyed the earth and economy for the youth, but I won’t force it.
A few days ago, early Cybertruck customers started complaining online that their vehicles are already rusting in the rain, so at least they won’t last as long as the average Corolla, and how many accidents are they likely to cause in the short time they’re on the road? The youth may survive. In the Palo Alto crash, after all, only the driver of the Cybertruck was injured. I won’t force that metaphor either.
Recommendations
Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees on Netflix, a show I saw twice live (including the taping) and continue to be astonished by. Some reviews claim it doesn’t translate well to streaming, which isn’t entirely untrue, but I think a big part of the disconnect is that it’s billed as a stand-up special. It was primarily performed live as a one-woman show, and viewers should go in expecting theater.
Stephen Sanchez’s debut album Angel Face, which I bought on vinyl also immediately after hearing it for the first time.
Binchtopia, a podcast that’s helping me get through my current everyone-on-the-internet-is-wrong-about-everything attack. I’ve only listened to a handful of episodes so far, but they haven’t been wrong once!
Another Mariz Kreizman essay, this time on tech billionaires’ attempts to “disrupt” books.