In March 2024, a Tesla Cybertruck speeding down Sunset Boulevard slammed head-on into the Beverly Hills Hotel’s iconic entrance sign just before midnight. Passersby winding through the Flats slowed down to watch as Elon Musk’s statue to his own insecurities—the stainless steel embodiment of nuance-free American ego—demolished in front of Hollywood’s unofficial canteen.
Every decade gets the iconography it deserves. At just about the midpoint of the 2020s, ours had arrived, fully formed.
And now the Cybertruck is dead, which is wonderful news. Musk, who’s having a historically bad November, announced late last week that Tesla will be “winding down” production of the Cybertruck around mid-2027, putting an end to the most hated car in America. I was going to call it the most polarizing car in America, but honestly, no one likes this thing. And it’s not entirely due to anti-Elon sentiment: Tesla’s general sales have been relatively steady, going down a bit as Musk went full DOGE mode in 2025 before rebounding in 2026. People like Elon’s cars. They just do not like the Cybertruck.
True, its death has been mourned by some—especially the self-selecting devotees who installed bulletproof glass in their Cybertrucks before shooting them with rifles. These people exist. But mostly, the news has been greeted with a rush of enthusiasm, relief, and, more than anything else, blue-pilled schadenfreude.
Now would be the right moment in the news cycle for an art writer such as myself to make a contrarian argument: that the Cybertruck was secretly a design masterpiece—some kind of neo-Donald Judd breakthrough unleashed ahead of its time.
I am not going to make that argument, because that is not true. Not even close. No one in the future will look back on the Cybertruck as an unheralded art object. It’s The Jetsons for meatheads, a Batmobile for people who secretly root for the Joker. It looks like a birdhouse designed by Zaha Hadid, which I would love to have as a vessel for feeding hungry birds at my (sadly hypothetical) Zaha Hadid house. But I would not want it as a vehicle to park in a driveway. It is a bad car.
And yet, that crashed Cybertruck in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel is seared into my brain, playing on repeat like the most un-subtle Lana Del Rey song ever written. Even beyond that crash, the Cybertruck is the ultimate symbol of this surreal and cruel decade, one that started with a global pandemic and a government suggesting the possibility of a bleach injection as treatment. It’s a decade that wound through four years of a former president denying the lawful election of a current president, only to see that former president return to power. Through it all, we’ve sunk deeper into our collective psychosis—one that’s forced us into rooms with our devices, addicted to social media and artificial intelligence, consuming half-real information and spewing it back out into the world.
