The Kids Are Alright, Actually: What the Cybertruck Taught Me About Design

We don’t get many Cybertrucks here. Compliance rules, mostly; the thing barely scrapes past Australian design regs, and even if it didn’t, I can’t picture it navigating a servo forecourt in Cranbourne without clipping a bowser. But the internet has no borders, and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time lately reading Americans describe, in real time, the slow-motion collapse of a $100,000 truck’s reputation. It’s been one of the more entertaining spectator sports of the year.

The thing that got me wasn’t the ugliness, though it is spectacularly ugly, somehow both too big and too small at once, like a fridge that lost a fight with a toaster. It was a comment from someone in the trade who called Musk the worst product manager they’d ever encountered in twenty years of the profession. Not the worst person. The worst product manager. That’s a specific and damning kind of criticism, and it landed harder than any of the Nazi salute jokes, because it’s about competence, not politics.

I work in tech. I’ve sat through enough sprint reviews and roadmap meetings to know what it looks like when someone with money and power overrides an engineering team because they saw something cool in a movie once. The pattern is always the same: a leader falls in love with an aesthetic, demands the team make it real, and nobody in the room has the standing to say “mate, that won’t work in the rain.” Gull-wing doors. A single wiper blade. An air intake that shorts out in a car wash. These aren’t mysterious failures. They’re the entirely predictable result of nobody being allowed to say no.

What I found genuinely funny, and I mean that sincerely, not in the “well actually” way, was the parade of children calling it a dumpster on wheels. Kids are merciless and accurate in equal measure. My own daughter has strong opinions about ugly cars and stronger ones about men who buy them to compensate for something. There’s something clarifying about a seven-year-old looking at a hundred grand of steel and going “that’s a bin.” No focus group could tell you that with as much confidence.

There’s a tension here I don’t want to resolve too neatly. Plenty of famously flawed cars, the Pinto, the Aztek, the Pacer, got remembered fondly once the outrage cooled. Give it twenty years and someone will probably restore a Cybertruck at a car show and get nostalgic about it. I can hold that thought next to the fact that the vehicle is, right now, by most measures, dangerous and badly made. Both things can be true. The internet loves a tidy narrative and this one doesn’t offer one.

What sticks with me isn’t the truck at all. It’s the reminder that competence and confidence are not the same thing, and that having enough money to bulldoze every engineer who raises a concern doesn’t make you right, it just makes the failure bigger and more expensive when it arrives. I’ve seen smaller versions of this in my own industry, a founder or exec convinced their gut is a substitute for testing, and it rarely ends with a viral truck, but it ends somewhere similar: expensive, embarrassing, and entirely avoidable if anyone with the actual expertise had been listened to.

Anyway. My daughter wants to know if we can start a Melbourne chapter of “point and laugh,” should one ever turn up on the Monash. I told her we’d cross that bridge if it happens. I’m not holding my breath.