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One week after its reveal, I’m not sure there’s much left to be said about Tesla’s first foray into the truck world. The specs are obviously impressive, and the design has mixed reviews with the predictable players taking their predictable positions. I hadn’t planned on talking much about Cybertruck in my weekly newsletter column since, at this point, literally everyone with something to say about it has done just that. But something has been bothering me about the discussion.
I don’t like the divide the Cybertruck’s design is creating, and I don’t blame Elon Musk or Tesla. I blame the part of the Tesla fan base that is responding very poorly to criticism of a product that was expected to draw that very same criticism.
On one end, there’s the steady Tesla crowd ready to buy anything the company produces that their budget can afford. On the other end, there’s the average consumer who is paying attention to what’s going on in the green car movement and imagining how one of the latest electric cars would fit their life and style. After all, the decision to buy a car has numerous factors (literally) driving it, and an electric car has even more factors built-in thanks to the fact that the industry is still new. For example, home charging isn’t an option for a lot of people, and filling up is already a chore when it takes 5 minutes, much less 30+ minutes at a Supercharger. There would need to be several reasons for the average consumer (read: someone that’s not part of the Tesla fan base or electric car crowd) to make the decision to buy one.
That being said, if someone doesn’t like Cybertruck’s design, they’re not going to want to buy it unless there’s literally no other vehicle that meets their needs and wants with a more appealing design. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with their opinion. It doesn’t mean they’re a boring person that’s part of a dying culture that will cease to exist in 50 years. It doesn’t mean Tesla will fail at their mission because its radical truck design doesn’t appeal to people that aren’t into radical truck designs. It just means that they don’t like it. Frankly, I don’t like it, either. I also didn’t expect to like it. I also expected to maybe like it but not want to ever buy it.
The Cybertruck isn’t just about thinking “outside the box” by creating a truck that looks like an odd box. It has a design that says something about the personality of the owner, and unlike a lot of conventional car designs, its message is overwhelming and distracting. If that’s your personality, great. If it’s not, great. Pushing this idea that if you don’t like the Cybertruck, or rather, you don’t like dystopian science fiction from the 80s and 90s, there’s something wrong with you… It’s feeding into a stereotype about electric cars that is annoying if not outright rude, dismissive, and very unhelpful for the green car movement.
Actually, what it starts to do is remind people (like me) of this long-term dystopian vision that they really really really don’t want that tech people are always pushing for as “cool” or “the unavoidable future.” Elon Musk might watch Blade Runner and love the designs it inspires, but I watch that movie and shudder to think of such an awful world to exist in. It’s one thing to like the artistic side of science fiction, but there are big glaring warnings about the worlds it represents. In Total Recall, for example, many like the whole Mars colonization thing it’s based on, but the back story is this company using mind control and manipulation while causing God-awful deformities in the people living there. Instead of focusing on that part, we wear shirts with “Get Your Ass to Mars” as a rallying cry for a mission to the red planet.
The inspiration to live on other worlds is something I love. What I don’t love is pushing the whole movie as the ideal future. That’s what I see in Cybertruck. I like it as a cool, movie-inspired design that will appeal to people who really like that style. I don’t like it as a representation of a full-on future that I have to like or I’m an idiot or a hater. In my opinion, throwing those types of stones at people who don’t like Cybertruck’s design feeds into the notion that if you’re not on board with the dystopian world it was inspired by, you have no place in the world’s future.
I like the Victorian touches of the mid-century A-frame I’m building, and the micro-controller watering and monitoring system I’m working on that will help with my gardening fuse the traditional with the new. I still don’t see a place for an angular, military-style truck in my driveway. It’s not my thing, and I really hope it stays as just a thing that some people like and not representative of a future that will dismantle my farm dreams in favor of robots vs. humans defending their right to live. Sheesh.
That’s one perspective the (typed) shouting matches about Cybertruck push. Another one is full of eye rolls and comments about Kool-Aid drinking. I honestly thought the point of the design was probably that Musk finally had the opportunity to do a vehicle that he knew would have a small market appeal but did it anyway because he just wanted to do it. He’d already done conventionally in the Model S, 3, and Y, pushed the limits a bit with the X and Semi, and was working on a sports car masterpiece with the next-gen Roadster.
I didn’t think that Cybertruck was supposed to upend Ford’s or Chevy’s or Toyota’s hold on pickups, so when that argument started making the rounds and doubters shouted down… I was surprised. If there’s one way to be seen as a “Tesla bro” or not be taken seriously by the very consumers you’re trying to win over, that’s it. Also, 250k people putting down $100 on a truck that they don’t have to fork over the full cash to buy for at least another couple of years doesn’t prove that the design is a mainstream hit, either. It’s an encouraging sign for sure, but not as encouraging as the 350k Model 3 reservations in that same one-week timeframe that required $1,000 to make.
In summary, the Cybertruck might win people over in the mainstream, and it might not. The specs combined with the gas savings might pull in commercial customers and start a new movement in that direction on a design level. It also might not. Tesla could just revise its design a bit while keeping the specs and appeal to a much broader base (which I’m hoping for), but it still might not.
Perhaps yelling at people that don’t like it that they’re dumb and have no taste might win them over eventually. It also might not. Being obnoxious about the Cybertruck to people on the fence about electric cars might cull a new consumer base.
But again, it might not.
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
TESLARATI Premium Membership
$19.99 USDImpressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
SpaceX achieves incredible milestone with Starlink program
Tesla is opening Cybercab rides to a select few
