It was with no small amount of excitement (and maybe a bit of jealousy, since I work for a car website that would have love access) that I saw Hagerty’s Jason Cammisa-helmed exclusive review of the Tesla Cybertruck posted to YouTube. Even before watching it, I knew it would be chock full of insight and humor, and that it’d be produced to a level that would shame many television productions. Even more importantly, I knew it would do deservedly huge numbers. So why are some people online so upset about this review?
I’ve directed, produced, written and even poorly attempted to host more than a hundred car films and TV episodes over the years. Doing so has given me the opportunity to work alongside the most talented people in the industry and, in my mind, the best to ever do it is/was Chris Harris. No one balances insight, the ability to communicate, and the ability to drive for camera like Chris does. He picked up the mantle from Jeremy Clarkson, who added a dose of entertainment and theater that many earlier reviews lacked.
But right now there is no one better than Jason Cammisa, and there are no shows better produced and more entertaining than the ones he does for Hagerty. It doesn’t even really matter what the car is. Cammisa will make you care about the Subaru XT. You may prefer Throttle House or SavageGeese or whatever, but the production quality is unique.
I produced videos for Hagerty as well, for about a year (some occasionally fun stuff produced at a fractional budget and none remotely as good as what Cammisa was making), and got a little insight into the level of care he and producer/director Anthony Esposito put into everything. It was as impressive as it was enviable. Cammisa once told me and another host, as we were prepping for a show, that he read three books before each episode he shot. The results should surprise no one.
Is this Cybertruck review the biggest, best, most dynamic thing Cammisa has ever done? Maybe not, but compare it to the one from the only other outlet that got it, and I think it’s better:
So what’s with all the hate online?
People On Reddit, Forums And Twitter Think Something Was Missing
Here’s just a sampling of what you’ll find on the r/cars Subreddit this morning:
And here’s some from Bob Is The Oil Guy:
You’re probably noticing a trend here. This is an “ad” and there’s very little substance to it, people allege. And to be sure, you’re going to get this kind of response from folks when you produce effusive content, even if the vehicle is great. But nonetheless, the criticism isn’t just coming from Jim-Bob the EV-hater down the street. The advertising-ish nature part I’ve heard privately from other journalists (who, it’s worth noting, did not get access) as well, but I think that’s extremely wrongheaded as a criticism. I can’t imagine Hagerty and Jason have anything financially to gain from Tesla, which is a company that barely advertises and doesn’t need to pay anyone for good coverage. Also, for all the glowing references to the truck, Cammisa rightly refers to Musk as a man-child and includes critiques no ad would dare. It’s only advertising-ish in the sense that it’s positive and, sure, Hagerty will make a large amount of money from YouTube advertising (though possibly not enough to cover the cost of doing it).
LO, and I cannot stress this enough, L. https://t.co/HDAfJAXXqK
— Matt "Stick to Cars" Farah (@TheSmokingTire) December 1, 2023
Also, there is a ton of substance in the piece. As many other positive comments point out, the density of information here is extremely high, and the way that it’s communicated is amusing, straightforward, and easy to understand. By the nature of the fast-moving, tightly scripted show Cammisa doesn’t always take time to put an asterisk on everything (though he often does in the subtitles, as he does when referencing steer-by-wire) and it’s unreasonable to expect him to, frankly.
The more accurate critique is that this isn’t particularly “exclusive” (two other people had the vehicle) and it isn’t really a “review.”
no one has actually reviewed the Cybertruck yet. several have driven it, none have *reviewed* it https://t.co/HlI9Qdsq6X
— Kyle Cheromcha (@cheromcha) December 1, 2023
Kyle, who is the EIC of The /DRIVE, isn’t wrong, depending upon how you look at it, though I don’t know any EIC with any modicum of sense who would turn down this opportunity, even with whatever conditions were attached. We drove out to do a story on just looking at the thing. I don’t know what the conditions were, if there were any, but we’d have been happy to have the early drive of the vehicle under most circumstances. So far, the crew has admitted to being time-restricted.
Sure, you have to get a full 21 minutes into the video before there’s actually a section literally called “dynamic review” and that is a fractionally small part of the whole video. In that “review” section he mentions that the drive-by-wire steering is “pretty disorienting at first in parking lots” and he points out that you don’t have a rear-view mirror because of the Tonneau cover, though I’m not sure I heard a real judgment on that other than pointing out it’s a disadvantage relative to a regular truck. Honestly, maybe the karting section is where you get the best of a traditional “review.”
A big reason for this, I suspect, is something not dropped into the video until about 21 minutes in. This is a “prototype” Cybertruck and, for various good reasons, there’s a danger in giving too much of an impression to a prototype from any manufacturer (the degree to which this is a pure prototype and a pre-production car like the ones normally reviewed on launches, isn’t clear), let alone one owned by Elon Musk. Plus, Cammisa seems to genuinely be impressed by the truck.
This is also the trap of online media and, especially, a world in which YouTube is the dominant and most ingested form of car reviewership. As an online creator, there’s a great pressure to call things “exclusive” and you have to call them a “review” every chance you get. Is anyone going to Google “Tesla Cybertruck Amusing And Highly Educational Video That Contains Partial Impressions But Mostly Does An Extremely Good Job Of Placing The Vehicle In Historical Context”?
Nah. We all know that Cammisa can do a real review as good as anyone else and this, definitely, is not a full review. There’s a reason why some folks aren’t entirey satisfied with the piece, and that’s because of Cammisa’s well respected car-critiquing skill. If there’s any error here on Cammisa’s part it’s in calling it a review, but the context of this truck is important, and context is what Cammisa is trying to provide.
Also, making videos is hard and it seems like Cammisa and crew had limited time to put this together.
The Challenges Of Making A Car Film
Here’s a little explanation of how hard filming with a vehicle as new as the Tesla Cybertruck is:
JUST SO YOU UNDERSTAND THERE’S NOTHING DEVIOUS GOING ON, YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW THIS FILMING BUSINESS WORKS. WHEN YOU FILM A CAR REVIEW, THE REVIEWER IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. BEHIND THE LENS IS A FILM CREW, AND ONLY A DAY’S WORTH OF LIGHT TO SHOOT THE EIGHT MINUTE FILM. THIS MEANS WE HAVE TO PREPARE IN ADVANCE A TREATMENT – A ROUGH DRAFT OF A SCRIPT SO THAT THE DIRECTOR AND FILM CREW CAN GET TO WORK RIGHT AWAY, KNOWING WHAT SHOTS THEY WILL NEED TO CAPTURE. IT WILL CONTAIN THE FACTS ABOUT A CAR, AND WHAT WE THINK OF ITS LOOKS AND SO ON, BUT HOW WELL THE CAR ACTUALLY DRIVES IS ADDED ON THE DAY. IF WE’VE DRIVEN IT AHEAD OF FILMING, AS WE DO WITH MOST CARS, WE WILL ALSO HAVE AN IDEA HOW IT FEELS TO DRIVE. BUT, AND THIS IS CRUCIAL, AS WE UNCOVER FRESH INFORMATION ABOUT A CAR WHILST FILMING IT, IT IS ENTIRELY NORMAL FOR THE TREATMENT TO BE MODIFIED AS THE DAY UNFOLDS.
Oh, wait, that isn’t from the review of this Tesla, this is Top Gear super producer Andy Wilman responding to a lawsuit over the infamous Top Gear review of the Tesla Roadster from 2011 that led to an unsuccessful Tesla lawsuit where the carmaker complained the show committed libel and malicious falsehoods. This is a key moment in history and I think, in many ways, it accelerated Elon Musk’s creeping paranoia about the media and desire for control over every aspect of his company and its image.
Musk and Tesla were famously mad that the necessity of film production saw Top Gear, to some degree, cutting corners to tell a story. The whole fiasco was annoying and laid bare the reality that most of these videos are as much entertainment as they are journalism.
If you watch Jason’s podcast he covers a lot of this and talks about the difficulty in getting this episode together so quickly.
His co-host on the podcast, the delightful Derek Tam-Scott, points out that the timeline of this was very compressed compared to what the crew normally does. According to Cammisa, they had days to set it up, a day and 3/4 to film, and it rained, cutting into the shooting time. Also, they were shooting on some of the shortest shooting days of the year. It was tight.
“Typically, and I don’t know if I want to admit this publicly, but typically an “Icons” episode is 4-8 weeks of pre-production planning, and that includes writing scripts and research and whatever blah blah blah… logistics. And you know typically, we have 12, 13, 14 vehicles in the show. Plus support vehicles. And then it’s four days of filming, four and half days of filming, to get the shots exactly the way we want it. And then it’s 4-8 weeks in post.”
I appreciate the clarity here, though, when someone on a podcast with their name on it says “I don’t know if I want to admit this” they aren’t confessing, they’re bragging.
This is the challenge of access. Any time you agree to review a car on someone else’s terms you are, in some small or large way, making a sacrifice. The Autopian regularly reviews cars on press launches. In a past life, I worked with the pre-production crews responsible for route planning and setup for these press launches and these are controlled environments with hand-picked pre-production cars. If there’s a part of a route that’s bad for the specific vehicle you can assume it’s not going to be on the map.
David and I were recently chided by a PR person from an automaker (I’ll let you guess) because that person was mad that we went a little out of the norm of a typical car drive and berated the automaker for a bad technical decision. [Ed Note: I stand by it. If you make a dumb technical decision and I call it out, don’t come complaining to me. Go to your purchasing folks or engineers. -DT]. Implicit in the complaint, I felt, was the idea that it wasn’t worth inviting us on the drives anymore, which is a risk that does exist.
It doesn’t mean anyone is being dishonest. It doesn’t mean you can’t trust these reviews. It just means there are limits to what you can discover in these circumstances and why most car outlets do a second review after a limited first drive. To get the fullest review you need to do like Consumer Reports and buy a car, independently test it, and live with it for a while.
Ultimately, Elon Musk gave the truck to three people: Cammisa, Marques Brownlee, and Top Gear. What’s interesting to me is that Brownlee, who is great but has the least journalistic background of the three, arguably did more of a review than the other two. It’s also amusing that, after all this time, Musk also endowed a car to Top Gear.
Cammisa Vs. DeMuro And The Art Of Entertaining
I remember when Doug DeMuro came to write for Jalopnik. It was one of his first (his first?) media gigs and at one point he asked if he could put his YouTube videos from his channel in the stories. This was a fine arrangement for me as, at the time, Jalopnik barely had a YouTube or video presence. Obviously, Doug was smarter than all of us and managed to grow his channel rapidly and eventually flip that success until multiple other ventures. He’s extremely talented so he’d have been successful regardless, but it surely helped.
It was in this nascent period of online car films that we saw the rise of MotorTrend‘s team (including Cammisa), /Drive with Harris and Farah, and freelancers like Jason Fenske and Doug DeMuro. The former group, influenced by TV, produced something more like TV. The latter produced videos that were more like podcasts.
I think it’s pretty clear with Doug that who you see in his videos who is he is. There’s very little artifice and it’s why, as he told me, adding production value to his personal videos doesn’t seem to result in any more viewership. You aren’t watching a character, you’re watching Doug, and Doug is weird in a way that flashy camera tricks and jokes won’t help. The best way to experience Doug if you like Doug (and many, many people do, including us of course) is simply to watch him as he is.
The Jason Cammisa you see in these “ICONS” videos isn’t even the same Cammisa you see on his podcast and not, necessarily, even the Cammisa you experience in real life (at least in my limited experience). The Jason Cammisa in this context is a character, and it’s the job of this character to be a big, happy, ornery man-child who knows everything about cars and takes glee in surprising the audience and tweaking driver Randy Pobst. It’s a schtick and it’s a very good one.
To varying degrees, all the true professionals I’ve worked with in this business are playing a character, and Cammisa is nothing if not a professional. The reason why we love the Clarkson/Hammond/May Top Gear is not that they were faithfully themselves, but because they were acting, even if only amplifying their true characteristics. Clarkson may be a big buffoon, Hammond may be a rural sweetheart, and May is definitely a nerd, but those traits were heightened as necessary for those specific episodes and conditions. Again, there’s nothing wrong or dishonest about this. It’s entertainment. Why anyone would expect anything less from a film wherein a dude blasts a refrigerator with a sledgehammer and drives an LM002 confounds me.
Additionally, Hagerty itself has a schtick. Its schtick is to be pro-car and pro-driving, much as we are here at The Autopian, and the company has the resources and reach, on YouTube and elsewhere, to get the access it needs to get to do these films. This doesn’t mean that Cammisa is restricted from being critical, it just means that Hagerty has an overall editorial direction and even Cammisa is, so far as I know, influenced by it. Watch his podcast (on the Hagerty podcast network) and you’ll see him saying plenty of critical things about the truck.
The Cybertruck Is Like No Other Vehicle And Tesla Is No Other Car Company
It’s worth watching the whole podcast because Tam-Scott is a useful counterbalance to Cammisa, and he asks some probing questions. Cammisa early on acknowledges that most people have already decided that they love or hate the thing, which is undoubtedly true.
Cammisa’s main point in the podcast undergirds his main point in his review:
“The Cybertruck advances the art of the truck far more than the Model S advanced the art of the automobile,” he says when pressed by Tam-Scott on why this is such a big deal. [Ed Note: This seems like a hell of a take, given that the Rivian R1T exists, and that the Model S was the first high-range mainstream EV in the history of earth. -DT].
In that context, his video serves a real purpose. Cammisa is, as he makes clear in his podcast, trying to cut through all the preconceived notions of the truck that he has and that others have in order to explain why it’s so revolutionary and why it took so long to produce.
Explaining all of this in a way that didn’t feel like advertising for Tesla is a difficult chore, and the irony of all of this is it’s Tesla itself that made it so difficult. Elon Musk has made so many promises about so many things and sewn so much distrust in the world that to like or dislike one of his vehicles sometimes feels like choosing a side instead of buying a product.
It’s because of this, actually, that the media-averse Musk needs the media. He needs Cammisa. He needs Top Gear. Sure, a million people plunked down $100 to reserve a Cybertruck, but for all the wild success of Tesla it still requires new customers and it still needs many of those reservations to eventually be turned into real purchases.
Musk and team are just a little smarter about this now than they were in 2011. They picked their outlets (why the hell didn’t MotorTrend, a publication that fawns over Musk, get a truck) and they clearly inundated those outlets with access to the truck and engineers. I don’t think Tesla picked these three and gave this level of access because they knew they’d get soft-balled.
I suspect the company knew what it had was quite good, at least in prototype form, and understood that it would require someone from the outside to explain that fully. I don’t see Tesla ever doing a traditional press launch because, frankly, the company doesn’t do anything traditional. That’s Tesla’s schtick.
So, instead, we get Cammisa as the messenger. That’s a fundamentally difficult position to be in and, with all the inherent limitations, I think he did an admirable job. The truck is fascinating! You’re all talking about it. Hell, if you’ve gotten this far, you’re reading a review of a review.
Will the Cybertruck replace regular trucks? No idea, and this video isn’t going to answer that question. Nor will it fill in many of the blanks for regular consumers. It’s going to take time to find out how this truck performs in the real world, and it’s really on you for thinking a highly produced car film on an insurance company’s YouTube Channel is the real world.
I quite enjoyed the review for what it was. Yeah, he rhapsodized over the potential for the Cybertruck’s engineering to cross-pollinate, and he omitted discussing Elon Musk’s personal issues except as they directly applied to the Cybertruck. At the same time, he acknowledged that the styling of the vehicle was not only divisive, but limited the overall utility of the thing, and all but said on video that it was effectively a better car than it was a truck. He also pointedly didn’t try to do trucklike things with it. He also said flat out that people would buy this as a status symbol, not a work truck. In my view, his thesis was, “This is a pretty wild technology demonstrator. Enjoy it if you can afford it.”
I’m glad he omitted Musk’s “personal issues”. I just want to know about the truck. Despite its horrendous looks, and questionable utility, there is some impressive stuff underneath. There is a lot to look past, but I’m trying to be more open-minded.
Agreed. Regardless of Musk, Tesla has some extremely talented engineers. I’m not in the market for a Cybertruck, but if some of its technology can improve transportation as a whole, I’m all for it.
The main problem as always (as you talked to) is Musk. Because he feels the need to be the face of his companies still, supporting the brand feels like tacit support of the man…child… cunt. Sucks, I like some of what Tesla does though not nearly enough to want one. But they really need a better leader.
As much as I personally dislike Musk, his cult of personality is the reason Tesla has been so successful.
If he stepped down tomorrow the stock price would plummet and they’d have to compete on the quality of their products.
Yeah I suppose they’re stuck with him really. I think the majority of Tesla drivers just like the product and aren’t super tuned into Musk, but that has nothing to do with the stock price. Even if the products are good (and by most accounts they’re ahead of where they were a few years ago), tanking the stock won’t help their prospects. Just gotta sell more carbon credits!
I said this in another post but I will say it again. If you look at someone like Elon Musk it is easy to try to think of him as some great inventor but really he is much more like someone like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. Both men were deeply flawed people, and neither were nearly as good of inventors as our collective take on history want us to believe, but what they were both really good at were assembling a top notch team of highly talented inventors and innovators at the right time and place and giving them just enough good “starter” ideas and letting them innovate. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car and Edison didn’t invent the light bulb but they both put together great companies (General Electric and Ford) which continue to innovate to this day. And, both were kicked to the curb when their personality, quarks and stubbornness led them to cause their respective companies more harm than good.
Time will tell how history remembers the man-child Musk, but I think history will look at Tesla as the company that brought us the first really practical electric car.
Tesla absolutely changed the perception of EVs. And yeah Musk is definitely a Steve Jobs type; wants a final product a certain way, and has some ridiculous smart people figure it out. There’s value in that type of personality, as the success of the iPhone and Tesla cars have shown.
I guess I struggle to compare Musk to Ford/Edison because we obviously didn’t experience the growth of those companies real-time; to me in the future, it seems easy to separate Ford from his brand. I just don’t believe that Ford had half the cult of personality of Musk, and the connection there seems unassailable. I look forward to seeing how it all pans out. I believe Tesla is strong enough to stand on its own, I just also agree that the stock would take a huge hit because the stock market is bullshit and illogical.
Obviously I wasn’t alive when Ford and Edison were alive and at the height of their power. However, if you read about the “War of the Currents” or about Ford’s resistance to the development of the Model A, you can see how both Edison’s and Ford’s oversized ego’s led them to almost destroy their respective companies. Edison refused to even review the pros of AC current and Ford fought his son Edsel on everything from the sliding gear 3 speed transmission to the whole concept of what a “modern” car was. This is not even considering their personality “quirks” like Fords raving antisemitism or Edison’s megalomania. Edison was a huge celebrity at the time, regularly partying with the biggest movers and shakers of the time like JP Morgan and Andrew Carnige while Ford had pretty much a “Bat Phone” to the white house and was regularly called in by the biggest and most powerful men on the planet whenever the country was at war or needed something big, innovative or hard built was their first call as shown by landing and executing the biggest military contracts of both world wars. And while I can’t exactly speak to a “personality cult” both men were the technology heros of their day.
Ehh his persona got the company off the ground but similar things have been said about other splashy automotive CEOs and most of them have managed to continue beyond those characters.
Tesla’s valuation as the most valuable automaker on the planet, dispite producing a fraction of the vehicle of the top 5 manufacturers is entirely due to Elon.
I’m not saying they’d be finished without him, but they’d be worth a fraction of what they are now.
I think Musk’s approach is a product of how informal everything has become in business, for better or worse. Everyone is trying to create this illusion of connection by sharing every stupid thing that pops into their heads online. People are so plugged into this crap, that they are no longer buying products. They are subscribing to the CEO’s personal religion. What used to be a carefully developed set of company values that was officially published and reinforced is now whatever a company exec wants to rant about on any given day. Instead of going by official product roadmaps that are based on real leadtimes, we get outrageous statements of mind-blowing tech that is coming out tomorrow to grab attention and BS reservations while the people tasked with making it actually work scramble and miss ridiculous dates. Instead of tech that has huge safety impact being proven out prior to hitting the streets, some half-assed beta version is thrown out to followers foaming at the mouth, begging to test it on their children. Instead of designing something that is fully developed and truly manufacturable, a CEO can air their dirty laundry, bitching about how difficult it will be to manufacture like they are bragging. It’s f*ing exhausting, but lots of people seem to love it. I guess I am just falling out of touch, lamenting the loss of professionalism; hopefully not… if you read this far, we’re officially friends.
Oh I absolutely loathe corporations trying to act like my friend. Kindly go fudge yourself and stop this obvious farce. I do wonder if the trend is also partly because people started to really see how evil giant corporations are? I can’t speak for people in the past, but in my mind companies came across as cleaner and nicer. People had pensions. If you weren’t a complete idiot, that job you landed could easily be kept for life. You can raise a family on it!
Now people see how bullshit that all is, especially from a giant faceless corp. Smaller companies come in, take to this newfangled “social media”, and boom they get loyalty the traditional corps would (and have!) kill for.
Also, we’re officially friends?? Hold on I gotta call my mom; does anyone have a ouija board?
Honestly, the only parts of Cammisa’s videos that I hate are the over-editing bits that are too much, and randy pobst character, which is forced, cringe, and I also don’t like the fella itself. So with that, I liked the video, which wasn’t a review, as said by OP, but an introduction into what IS the cybertruck, its space in the industry, how it looks to the past to go into the future, etc etc. I also don’t think it was an ad, Jason is in an ev kinda period, if you watch/hear the Carmudgeon ep about the new Rimac, or the Lucid Sapphire, you will understand better his pov. Everyone is built of tons of experiences and to be able to show it in a 30-min video is just impossible.
I think that its a shame that Elon has become so toxic that we can’t look at the individual elements about this rolling monstrosity that are noteworthy. I don’t normally watch these reviews as I prefer to make up my own mind. However, given the release being so small, and the unlikely potential that I will be riding in or driving a Cybertruck in the next couple of years, I am left, like most, to base my opinions on what I see.
When the S first came out I was blown away, it was beautiful, fast and sold EV’s to be from overgrown golf carts and playthings for celebrities and the uber rich to something more aspirational for people who work really really hard and are successful. Something that could be really attainable in the now ancient world of GM’s early 20th century “Car for every purse and purchase” In that world, we started with a Chevrolet when you first left home and started working, then when you built success you moved up to an Oldsmobile or Pontiac, then when you got more success and became a bank manager, a teacher or other professional you moved up to a Buick or LaSalle. Then, finally after a lifetime of hard work and success, maybe, just maybe you got your Cadillac. The Model S for me was that dream was my Grandfather dream of owning a Cadillac (which after a lifetime of toil, my “Greatest Generation”, WWII veteran Grandfather finally came true).
Unfortunately, Musk has become such an A-Hole and devisive figure that these days, even though I can afford a Tesla (abet a 3 or Y), I can’t bare the thought of associated with his products publicly. In fact, last year I was looking for a good replacement for my Stinger GT2 and seriously looked at a Model 3 Performance after renting one in Los Angeles but after much research, I went in a different direction despite loving the Tesla, not just because of Musk (The insurance issues, lack of sensors other then cameras and other Tesla specific issues were just deal killers). And now, I look to Porsche, Kia, Rivian and Hyundai make some amazing EV performance sleds that I would way rather aspire to.
As far as the “Review”. I think it allowed me to really see past Elon and the other obvious nonsense that have kept me from even wanting to look beneath the surface of the truck because I just couldn’t get past him or the worthless pieces of engineering that has stolen 99% of the press. Things like:
and honestly much more.
However, I do really apricate the review because I knew very little about the real world and amazing engineering, most specifically the steering by wire and the 800v/48V architecture.
Do I have a problem with this video? absolutely not. why, because the people who want one will buy one just because of what it is. People who hate Elon wouldn’t have bought one regardless and honestly, Tesla will more than likely will take the steer by wire, 48v/800v architecture, new battery cells and all the other amazing tech they have built into this thing and build 2 more cars.
First they will build the Model “2” just like how they took the technology they used by making the impractable and expensive to build Model X and used it to basically “print money” making the Model Y.
Then they will most likely turn around and build a new conventional truck and print money with that.
Is this a boondoggle by the “Man Child” Musk? Absolutely but guess what. X will go bankrupt, so will the Boring Company and he will make some kind of “Face Saving” gesture as the Tesla board boots him to the curb. at the end of the day they are a business and need to make money.
I was one of the vast majority that looked at him like Tony Stark… we were wrong. But hey.
I don’t think there was ever a point where the majority of humanity thought of Musk as some kind of heroic figure. At least in my immediate circle I’m pretty sure the sequence was
“who?” -> “oh, that dude with the electric cars that don’t make any money” -> “oh that clown who keeps making an ass of himself”
Naw it was just people on the internet and especially reddit.
It turns out he’s Justin Hammer without the appeal of Sam Rockwell.
I’ve never been sure about all of what “truck utility” really means. I know there are legit complaints that the bed has the high sloped sides that could frustrate getting things into/out-of the bed from the sides — and long-distance towing is problematic (as with any other EV truck currently available). Are those the main things? Otherwise, what else are the truck utility issues? It seems to have some pretty good utility to helps make up for some shortcomings. It has a bigger bed than most trucks that can fit in an average garage. It has 110 and 220 outlets for tools. It has configurable attach points aplenty. It won’t get easily damaged by on-site impacts that would disfigure most other trucks.
My biggest takeaway from the video is kinda a “the worst person you know just made a good point” vibe. In a few years Tesla will come out with a RAV4 sized CUV and it will do all the things really well. It’ll be super affordable, have great range, and be able to put down a Nurburgring time that punches above its class.
Tesla will print money with it.
Musk’s praises will continue to be sung and it will encourage him to continue acting like a shit human.
Look the last thing I want to do is encourage this jerk. That’s why there isn’t a Tesla in my driveway. I refused to buy one of his cars despite my fantastic “test drive” renting one in California. Despite my absolute hate of the interior, I loved how the Tesla drove, but I wouldn’t support him.
However, I do think that at the end of the day Tesla is a business, accountable to shareholders and the end of the day he won’t be around long if he hurts their cash flow. He can make them make all the boutique passion projects he wants but as soon as the BYD/ Chinese onslaught happens in Europe/North America, the board will need to act.
The deciding factor on Musk will be if they make that small car before or after his toxic words and decisions cost them enough money to force them to act.
The truth is, our society like a good train wreck, we don’t like to admit it but its the reasons there is always a “Crazy Train” or Figure 8 race at every NASCAR event. People want to see the crashes. Musk was an interesting figure when he was making electric cars cool or spaceships that actually gave us hope for the future but that time is gone. Now most people look at him just to see if the next dumb thing out of his mouth will be the thing that brings him down. Ya there are still his fanbase out there that think he is the next big genius like newton and they will always think so no matter what anything says. Just like other devisive leaders like Trump or so many others that came before them.
At least for me, he is more like Edison or Henry Ford, deeply flawed men who had a great talent for bringing talented innovators together and fostering in them the kind of once in a generation innovation that leads to the creation of great corporations. And lets face it, Ford didn’t create the car and Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. They brought together the right people at the right time to create those things and their companies, both still around today (General Electric and Ford) have long out lived their founders antisemitism, bigotry, prejudice and other character flaws.
To get rid of Musk we need to let him and Tesla know that we won’t tolerate his beliefs. But we can still support what tesla has done without him and support the innovators at Tesla
Nuanced, pretty well-balanced, and you expressed the vast majority of my reaction to the video better than I could have.
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If anything, my main takeaway was that if Tesla ever made a more normal looking version of this vehicle it would be pretty damn impressive.
If the Cybertruck looked normal it would be a Rivian with some pros and cons.
Part of the reason the Cybertruck is such a wild swing is that the rest of Tesla’s cars are just kinda generic sleek vehicles, vaguely high-end but not particularly flashy. If they’d made this “normal” looking, it’d probably be more boring than Rivian’s modern design. That’d probably work in their favor more than the wedge though.
I’m as much of a cybertruck hater as you can be, but I actually enjoyed this review quite a bit (and had sort of been wanting to talk about it after seeing it).
It definitely felt overly…nice (?) at times, but I thought it did a good job of pointing out some of the impressive engineering in the vehicle. It does seem that some of the impressive things pointed out probably could at least use some additional context…but I don’t think that’s a deal breaker.
Also, as a piece of journalism…content…whatever you want to call it…I found it entertaining.
My main beef with the review (which still was very fun to watch) is that he tried to do a Jedi mind trick to gloss over the potential pitfall of Steer By Wire.
Jason, in the video starting at 15:05 –
The end of that paragraph though is the kicker.
This is the Jedi mind trick. Either he’s sweeping it under the rug, or he actually needs to get out more. Not only have I heard of throttle by wire failures, I have personally experienced it. Not only that, but I’ve personally experienced and also had a friend experience steering sensor failures in our vehicles. Thankfully ones with minimal assist so the car isn’t trying to yeet itself off the road, but it’s an expensive out-of-warranty fix (for most people) and one that, if the system was entirely by wire, could potentially make the vehicle undrivable until fixed.
Throttle by wire isn’t a huge deal if it fails while driving. The car will just slow down/limp/whatever, but it will still drive well enough to get out of everyone’s way so you can safely deal with it. Brakes or steering going wacky will ruin EVERYONE’S day, not just yours.
In the YT tech community, this is now known as the “Linus Sebastian Defense”. Yeah, you’ve got limited time, but you have to make sure at least your basics are accurate. If not, you may need to re-shoot a segment to make sure it’s correct. You can’t correct EVERYTHING with asterisks. There’s a whole other thing in there about setting unrealistic deadlines, but Hagerty doesn’t have a long history of that, so that part is less applicable.
Plus, these aren’t built to anything like aircraft specs nor are they going to undergo the maintenance and inspection schedules. Pilots who operate them are far more highly trained (not that it probably matters much in a road car with failed steering controls), there are two of them, they have ground control to help out in a problem or at least track their trajectory, there will be more time to solve a problem provided the failure of controls doesn’t do something drastic without input, and there are far fewer maneuvers and things to avoid in the air. It’s a typically dumb Teslastan comparison to excuse yet another cheap-ass engineering solution. There is no meaningful advantage to SBW beyond the OEM saving some engineering costs and some BS things like disconcerting feeling variable steering ratio that almost nobody likes and absolutely nobody needs—that’s WTF power assist was created for. Safety issues of a steering column have long been solved to the point where the driver’s seat is traditionally the safest one in the vehicle. On top of that, this is a damn EV which is beholden to near as many of the packaging compromises of a ICE vehicle. To add, I hate every electronic throttle I have driven, even in my “great driver’s car” GR86, though it’s not so much an inherent technological problem as much as a programming one, which seems to be universal, as the strange species known as the programmer seems to invariably choose the least useful settings, choices, and interfaces in as many scenarios as possible. I don’t know if it’s different brain wiring, passive-aggressive FU to the world, or plain incompetence in and refusal to observe how people use things in the field.
The MAX is not a fly by wire aircraft. The Airbus A32X series is not the Boeing 737 series. They use a mechanical system with power boosted systems. The Boeing 777 and 787 are the only 2 Boeings that are Fly by Wire.
Now being a pilot I do prefer flying Boeings as they are more “Pilot’s” jets but in fact the Fly by wire system in Airbus’ are actually safer in many ways especially for less trained pilots which is why many Asian airlines which are notorious for lax real world “hand flying’ planes.
The Fly By Wire systems in Airbus operate on different “Laws” or modes like the CyberTruck. So when flying in normal LAW the computer treats things very smooth and gentle but when in an emergency situation you different “Laws” which give you more and more control of the aircraft, much like changing ratios in a parking lot vs on a race track or off road course.
The benefits of this system was made clear with US Air 1549 the “Miracle on the Hudson” when Captain “Sully” landed his Airbus A320 on the Hudson River in 2009. The plane’s fly by wire system switched to “abnormal law” and assisted him to perform a feat that without that guidance in all likelihood would never happened. In fact in just a few years before that crash Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 was highjacked and ran out of fuel and the pilot tried to land that plane, a Boeing 767 without fly by wire, and ended up killing most of the passengers.
There is very little to worry about with a steer by wire system assuming it is done right. I tend to trust Toyota\Lexus to do it better, but if they did it right, I should be just the next logical evaluation in passenger car systems. Just like “throttle by wire”
And Asiana 214, a 777 with fly-by-wire, crashed on approach because the pilot derped. In a way, that may be more apropos because the general public is… not good at driving.
As a pilot, you received far FAR more initial training to get your certification, and you have to go through periodic recertification AND you have to get your type rating(s). The latter two, the general public is not required to do, and the former is in some cases nearly literally handed out from a cereal box. Frankly, we SHOULD have some form of type rating for drivers, because then you can figure out who REALLY should not have a Hellcat, Mustang, or Altima.
You are probably right that eventually fully by-wire systems will be dominant, but we’ve got a long way to go until we get there, and your typical Uncle Yee-Haw driver should not have the system because there are not enough synapses connected to make sure things don’t go sideways (literally AND figuratively) under GOOD circumstances, much less when there’s something wrong.
I agree with you 100%. I think it is nuts that someone who is 16 and has been driving for 5 minutes could legally get behind the wheel of their dad’s 800hp hellcat. But the way I see it, just like on an A320, the adoption of a throttle or steering by wire can actually help inexperienced driver. Said helcat comes with multiple keys, one of those keys limits horsepower and driving dynamics to make the car less powerful and in essence safer. These systems can effectively make a supercar drive like said Altima until a “type rating” could be achieved. When I bought my GR Supra it came with a day at a race track. Perhaps manufactures could sell cars “limited” in their performance and could only offer greater performance in either geo-locked areas such as race tracks or autobahns or unlock them when you are “type rated” for them.
I know America is the “LAND OF THE FREE” and all but I do object the idea that freedom is there to allow all of us to act as stupid and irresponsible as we want. This has caused more problems then just about anything IMO. Freedom is great but when that freedom limits the freedom of others to simply live their life in safety, i.e. the freedom to drive my kids safely to school without some idiot in a 900hp stainless steel battering ram doing 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds just to show off plowing into my normal sized, powered and weighted car I don’t think freedom should be universal.
To quote the great Toby Ziegler from the West Wing “Americans know a grade A hosing when they see it, and it usually starts with America is about freedom”
Freedom is great, but it can’t be universal, it has to be tempered with the freedom of everyone else.
Freedom comes with responsibility. A very difficult concept for some people who live here.
Weirdly, one of the major causes of the MAX crashes was a lack of redundancy. Boeing programmed the system to read from a single angle of attack sensor. When the single sensor gave an incorrect reading, you got a perfectly operable jet flying itself into terrain.
One of the post-crash updates to MCAS was adding the redundancy that should have been there in the first place. Now it reads from multiple AOA sensors and if there is a large disagreement between the sensors, MCAS will do nothing.
https://theaircurrent.com/aircraft-development/mcas-may-not-have-been-needed-on-the-737-max-at-all/
Edit: Forgot to add, you are correct that throttle by wire systems can fail. As the oldest official Smart Fortwos in America approach 16 years of age, some owners complain about nothing happening when they hit the gas at a green light, or the car seemingly losing power on the highway. Some of these folks are learning that their throttle pedals are working intermittently. Thankfully, it’s still pretty rare and a cheap fix. But it’s happened enough that I’ve remembered the symptoms.
Edit 2: To be clear, I’m not saying that car throttle by wire is similar to throttle by wire in a jet. Just agreeing that, occasionally, throttle by wire can act up in a car. 🙂
I will say this. Since I have flown throttle by wire jet aircraft as well as throttle by wire cars, I don’t think there can be any comparison. Jet engines don’t have the same kind of throttle response. Jets don’t spool up quickly, when we switched to throttle by wire, it actually improved throttle response by a huge margin. Older passenger jets with a mechanical connection would hang badly. I remember 20 years ago I was on final approach in an OLD mad dog (MD-80) in a bad thunder storm, we hit a micro burst and we had to execute a go around. I was the flying pilot while the captain was handling the radio and other tasks. I called for power and he hit the throttles. The few seconds that the engines took to spool up were the longest seconds in my life. Fast forward to a few years ago, I was POC (Pilot in command) of a new 787 Dreamliner with a modern throttle by wire engine control system. We were given bad instructions by ATC coming into LAX and had to execute another go around. We hit the go around button and the computers gave it go around power, even though the 787 actually had less of a power to weight ration the 787 spooled up WAY faster and was WAY less nerve wracking.
When you compare this to cars, I think the throttle response in my 23 Supra is smooth fast and responsive in both sport and normal modes and is every bit as responsive as in my 97 Supra.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t saying throttle by wire in a car is comparable to a jet, just agreeing that throttle by wire can fail in a car. Maybe I should have been clearer with that!
It sounds like this is less a critique of the video and more a frustration that Jason Cammisa hasn’t agreed to a two hour debate with you on steering by wire. You know as you type them that Jason is aware of all these issues and simply just doesn’t weigh them as heavily as you do.
Oh no, there’s more to it than that. Like praising the safety of the CyberTruck’s construction before actual official crash tests have been performed, glossing over the usability of the bed on a truck (kinda important), etc.
Tesla Cybertruck First ImpressionsTesla Cybertruck Test DriveDriving The New CybertruckExclusive Look At The New CybertruckWe Drove The Cybertruck, You Won’t Believe What Happened NextWhat I Did In My Summer Holidays With A Cybertruck [Gone Wrong] [Gone Sexual]Doctors Hate Him Because Of This One Simple Truck
Just a few options that don’t imply an unbiased opinion as much as “review” potentially does.
Man, once you edit a post, the bullet points really don’t want to work anymore. Sad.
But makes for a heckuva headline too.
Heh, the ultimate clickbait headline. I don’t know if the internet is ready for that one yet.
I’m honestly getting annoyed at the existence of this vehicle. Not because it does anything directly to me, but its man-child vibes are bringing all the other man-children out of the woodworks, and people can’t stop whining about something that literally doesn’t impact their lives unless they go and dump $60k on it. Grow the hell up, people
I wait for, “I just bought this 6 year old Cybertruck off F*book, will it drive 600 miles home?” (-;
Yep
We are long past the days of a small get-me-home kit which included basic hand tools, a condensor, maybe ballast resistor, and always a matchbook because you dropped the emory cloth in that rain-filled ditch last time.
We are well past my comfort zone—but, honestly, we hardly need the kit anymore. And that’s a good thing.
People are mad because they didn’t get what Tesla promised. It’s like what the dealers would do. Pinstriping, rustproofing, etc… for more $$$.
What people wanted was the RANGE for towing. Instead, they got 48V steer-by-wire.
That’s why Cammisa’s video feels like an AD because it’s like trying to sell us something else.
We were in for the promised range, but they’re selling us something else. Like politicians giving us non-answers.
I think Musk said it himself – GFY!
What Tesla has done is perfected the art of getting the base excited about settling for less.
Lesser specs, check. More money, check. But it looks like the future!
As a shareholder, I am concerned this is not a good long term strategy. There was a time Tesla was truly innovative but they seem to be resting on their laurels and going for hype. Where is my FSD? Too hard , let’s make distraction, I mean futuristic truck.
Halo and reputation only works for so long before you are judged by your product fit to market needs. Looking at you BMW 3 Series…
I don’t think it helps now that the lines between an unveiling, a preview drive, and an actual review drive seem blurrier than they once were. It used to be pretty obvious in the rags in print, but now their websites are geared more toward being consumer research and maximizing SEO therein.
I can think of two sort of examples here on this site in the last month or so where comments questioned the intent of the piece: articles on a facelifted Nissan have gotten called out for being paid shill pieces when it was just a news story, and the Tacoma preview drive where it seemed redundant after the unveil in Hawaii back in May.
It’s of course always been there but I think people are quicker to look for it given paid/influencer type advertising can happen in more subtle ways now. I don’t think a lot of people’s minds were going to be changed either way on the CT but I also see the concern that some type of uncritical or soft review for a less controversial brand or product could happen more down the line. Admittedly I may be more likely to watch the video in question because of this coverage; I’ve never been a big consumer of car videos, at least new cars – more things like pure entertainment like RCR.
This is the first Jason / Hagerty video I could not finish. Felt like a hype piece for the Instagram set, not anything of entertainment or product substance.
As for the CT and Tesla, if you like them you should get one. The video probably did not turn any haters to buyers
However, I am disappointed that this could have been so much more.
“The Cybertruck Is Like No Other Vehicle And Tesla Is No Other Car Company”
No.
Take away the gimmicky stainless panels and this is mid compared to the electric pickups already on the market. The slight standouts in cargo capacity and towing are areas where I understand manufacturers get a decent amount of leeway to claim what they want. Even the bullet resistance could likely be better achieved with traditional panels and an aramid layer.
Here is where Cammisa (whose videos I do enjoy) puts Tesla when he is not getting clickbait exclusives. Not “no other car company”, but Saab:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY-xA2w7JHQ
Haters gon hate, and hating is a team sport. Camisa was tried and found guilty of being insufficiently critical to an enemy of the tribe. Tread lightly lest you get a similar treatment.
To all the people saying that the CT won’t ever do any real work, I say this isn’t any different from any other electric truck nor any other premium regular truck. Most Jeeps never go to Moab either.
The reaction to his video is just more tribalism.
I was going to second your opinion, but then I realized the irony.
Hey Matt/The Autopians,
Once you get the opportunity to review one and want to compare it to something, you can have full access to The Beige Unicorn. As the best generation of F-150 and the last of the old school trucks, it would be a perfect benchmark of how trucky a truck can be. You have my contact info.
“Will the Cybertruck replace regular trucks? No idea, ”
This I can answer for you. No, it will not. It is far too deeply compromised for style over substance. Trucks need to be able to do jobs, even if many people chose not to do jobs with them. There are still hundreds of thousands of new trucks purchased every year to actually do truck things, and this toy of rich man children can’t do those things properly.
Tesla should have spent a few bucks mocking up a slide-in service body for the bed.
That would be ADORABLE!
With a stainless steel step stool so you could reach it.
OBVI!
Thanks for breaking this down. I’m surprised you didn’t bring the “it’s also a business” As an NFL fan, you constantly see it between the fans and the teams. In the car world, there is also a crossover between the “hobby” world (what it is to readers) and the business world (what it is to content producers). Sure, they all have their own approach as content producers, but they have to eat in order to continue doing more. To eat, they need to walk the line between getting cars from manufacturers AND getting enough people to watch/read/listen. That is not advertising! That’s simply the system, like it or not, it’s a byproduct of the free enterprise economy and the American dream.
I think one of the reasons I was disappointed with this review as an automotive engineer is that he didn’t do usual due diligence about the facts of this car.
Tesla isn’t the first to do 48v architecture and same with the Steer by wire and to say they were the only ones who ‘had the bxxls to do so’ is silly.
Also he didn’t focus as much on the truck things such a range/price that matters more for the average truck buyer vs 0-60.
Price/range changed drastically and an honest comparison with the Ford, Rivian, GM would have made it clear that the specs at the end of the day ain’t the usual Tesla game changer.
IMO none of the new car reviews made today are truthful. That’s why there’s a decline in car shows. It’s simply because the cars are provided by the manufacturer, especially the early production ones. Manufacturers want a positive review or no review. If a journalist complains about and gives legitimate review instead of an ad they will not give him any new cars to review so he will be out of the loop. Like you wrote here, exclusivety and being first is everything and how can you do that if they don’t let you test their cars. That’s why I don’t watch new car reviews at all, they just feel dishonest.
Just gotta wait for someone like Mr. Regular to get his hands on one to hear an honest review.
I love RCR but Brian isn’t objective at all. He’s a JDM stan and says ridiculously positive things about every Japanese car he’s given and is extremely critical of cars that he has a preconceived notion about, like his Camaro SS 1LE review. I do think Roman is pretty objective, and I’ll still watch everything RCR posts religiously because they’re amazing videos, but Brian ain’t objective at all.
I was gonna say, yeah, I’d love to hear his take on a CT, but I doubt he’ll be unbiased.
I was mildly disappointed in his recent review of an E-350 because I was waiting so long for him to do an E-series and he spent most of the review talking about work trucks and philosophy…and basically no time talking about the handling, visibility, etc.
Plus he is so negative about Triton engines and I wish I knew if my (good) personal experiences were an exception or what.
Still, the Renaldi & Kline bit at the end made it worth it in a different way.
My favorite reviewers are from Revzilla’s CommonTread. It’s motorcycles, but their reviews always seem fair, honest, and they are well written with editorial quality that feels on par with they heyday of automotive magazines.
I think the major difference there is that CommonTread is just a side part of Revzilla’s business, so they don’t need to keep manufacturers happy to stay in business. Also, motorcycles being primarily toys in North America means consumers treat them very different than cars, so that probably has a lot to do with it.
Ehhh, I wouldn’t go THAT far. There’s plenty of reviewers who are willing to risk losing access to give an honest take, and plenty of decent PR contacts who realize that’s part of our jobs to do so. Yes, they do schmooze us and give us the best possible versions of said cars whenever possible. But like, I’m not reviewing the pimiento cheese when I file copy. If a car sucks, it sucks.
The better press contacts take the honest feedback to heart, readjust their messaging and (I’d imagine, since this is what I did in tech marketing) meet back with the technical side to see how to best address any solid complaints. The bad ones? Whatever, I don’t mind angering those guys. That isn’t a role for the thin skinned.
I will say that I empathize a LOT with anyone looking at the Cybertruck early-access takes with suspicion. This is a company with one of the most thin-skinned guys on earth as its primary figurehead! Even if he’s now sharing a lot of the duties of running the company with steadier hands, he’s still the face of the company who announces new models and company plans in public presentations. The natural assumption is that these outlets were hand-picked for a reason, even though I have no reason to doubt any of these guys’ takes and generally consider them to be pretty honest folks. A highly controlled media preview will likely have the best possible builds of the truck they have on hand to minimize the chance of being Roadster’d. (“Roadster” is a verb now.) I do like that there are more behind-the-scenes looks into the early review/media event process (like this one from Matt) that state those very things, and disclaimers put on some outlets’ coverage when a review was done as part of a wine-and-dine event.
If cooler heads at Tesla are really changing course on media access, it’s going to take a while for them to get the general public to trust those takes, even when they invite well-respected outlets that fall firmly outside the usual circle of Elon stans who’d do anything to get access. I think that’s a move in the right direction for the company to be more open to working with the critical press, but like…it’s going to take time, and frankly, they brought this mistrust upon themselves.
Thanks for the industry insight, Stef. Being completely uninterested in new cars*, I have no idea what the reality is in there.
*being a poor, after I mistook a bloated & becreased Toyota for a BMW years back, I completely lost my will to care about new stuff. I didn’t read about it at the old site, and only do here solely because these authors entertain me. I read about the CT as Elon’s ego, not a car
The idea of having enough money or even just a stable source of income to even buy another beater is so far flung from reality for me right now that yeah, I get it. Most of my new-car reading is admittedly for entertainment.
I don’t think car reviews have anything at all to do with car show participation, it’s way more likely that it’s a marketing bang for the buck issue. There isn’t much point in lugging all that crap around anymore.
Tbh, my biggest problem with the video was a family problem. My husband is the biggest Cammisa fanboy on earth, so he went from being a generalized Cybertruck hater with me to now being kinda nice about it almost instantly. I didn’t bother to memorize details about the stupid thing and then he goes and rattles off stats about it and how is my lazy ass supposed to win an argument that way? I don’t *want* to have to devote brain cells to the stupid truck just so I can argue properly, those brain cells are already working at max capacity with Italian Car Bullshit.
COTD
“[…] to like or dislike one of his vehicles sometimes feels like choosing a side instead of buying a product”
That explains so much, not only on Tesla, cars in general or even consumer products, but our society today. Every schmuck with a phone has an opinion broadcaster now, and it all coalesced into this binary thing where, if you like one part of an argument, you’re liable for it all.
I can’t stand Musk and his acolytes. Tesla as a company is overhyped and overvalued. But that doesn’t mean I can’t like the Cybertruck. Doesn’t mean I like what it (sort of) stands for, or even that I think it is practical or even a good idea. But I like it DESPITE Tesla.
BTW, I am writing this after battling for an hour with a stained “stainless” steel cook top. This thing isn’t going to be practical, I bet it either goes out of production, or they’ll launch a version made of fiberglass or carbon fiber or kevlar or whatever soon after it goes on sale.
Marketing and media people don’t seem to get that there is such a thing as “overproduced” and cringe. This video was both. But that is what gets views these days.
Fawning over consumer products no matter where from, has gotten very tiresome.
Cammisa has an engineering background if not a degree (3 years towards a degree in college, if I remember/heard right), and that’s a large part of where he’s coming from and what he’s impressed by. I can see he’s genuinely wowed by engineering achievements like the repeatability of the acceleration runs down to a pretty low battery, 48V architecture, steering by wire with road feedback, side impact safety without crash bars, the nimble driving experience, stiffness of the body, etc. As a fellow enginerd myself, I totally get his excitement, and his Hagerty video definitely showed me that the Cybertruck isn’t just a half-assed styling/image project.
Would the typical driver notice that there has been new engineering achievements compared to other Teslas? Not really, so I get why people who don’t really care about the engineering say it sounds like PR.
Though I’m another Elon hater, I’ve always had some respect toward Tesla products, even if I haven’t wanted to buy one, and probably won’t ever because Elon (maybe he’ll step down at some point?). He knows to hire smart people (see Huibert and SuperFastMatt) and let them do their thing. I’ll say something positive/unpopular about the styling: I’ve always like the side profile view of the Stealth Fighter (F-117 Nighthawk), and I like the Lo-Res car that Demuro drove when it was at the Petersen, as well as the Lotus Esprit, so I actually kind of like the appearance, if not the sharp edges (cuts in arm, tears in jacket mentioned), which I think they still can address if they really want to. I also like that they downsided it 5% from the initial prototype.
As someone who did a lot of off roading for fieldwork in pickups as an environmental scientist, I can see this being good for the type of work I did. I drove old Rangers, an old F-350, and Canyons. Ground clearance and angles weren’t limiting factors in not getting stuck, just traction in mud, snow, and ice on steep trails (and I have stories about getting stuck. . .). The power outlets in the back are great (can leave the generator at the office for drive up locations), and I appreciate the tonneau cover. Plenty of in cabin space to keep sample coolers from freezing, and you wouldn’t have to idle the truck all day. It’s also nice that it can be low on the air suspension, making it easier to get in the bed. My cargo would be things like survey equipment, pumps, tubing, shovels, wash buckets (with water I don’t want to freeze in the winter), gear and sample coolers, generators, batteries, etc. I don’t know how others use their work trucks, but I see no issues with the CT.
Cool: it’s good to hear someone who has a reasoned use-case that doesn’t come off at all as a -stan. Thanks for taking the time to express why it fits your case.
Other than Savage Geese, the YouTube car review ecosystem is essentially a PR wing of major car manufacturers.
Usually they have the good sense to keep it slightly less than up-your-ass-obvious, but on this one Cammisa goes into full PR blowjob mode so hard it makes me hack up a little barf.
Mark and Jack will 100% tell it like it is and give their honest opinion. I think the video that best shows this is the CX-90 video.
Our friend Hardigree just spent an entire blog endeavoring to complicate that reactionary take, and i think his insights were really interesting. Did you read what he wrote? I find the whole ‘These guys are all a bunch of shills on payroll of Corp X’ extraordinarily tiresome. I see it in Car and Driver every month, and most other places. And i’m a bona fide big corporation hating Marxist, so i’m not naive to the ways in which capital corrupts all. But, man, cut these journos some slack. One of the many, many things i love about the Autopian is how they often pull back the curtain a little so we can all see how the sausage gets made, to mix my metaphors. I have little doubt that the folks who get paid to write about cars are just hard-working car lovers doing their best. It is interesting to talk about the details of the many oddities of an entire journalism industry that relies completely on a small number of large OEMs for its very existence, as Hardigree just did. Calling them all a bunch of PR slinging liars on the the take from Big Car is not a particularly interesting or enlightening thought.
My comment specifically refers to YouTube “content creators”, not this site.
I’m a massive consumer of car stuff on YouTube, but I can’t fool myself into thinking it’s not just PR.
That episode got more and more “off” as it went on. I was similtaneously looking at Citroens for sale in my sector, but Derek’s expressions of what ?….. incredulity, WTF and muttering about megalomaniacality, made me slouch less and pay a little bit of attention. But off, you know?
The truck. I can’t like it. I mostly walk and ride. Two things that will get you there with minimal nest fouling. It’s antithetical to meat bags, mostly, but seems to be an impractical show car that you could buy with the requisite money and psychopathy.
These Jasons. I like em’, multiple personnas and all. And Derek and Doug. We’re saturated with media, well I am, and yet I cancelled Crunchyroll for YTPremium ( maintaining the the doctrine of displacement) because of carmudgeon/savagegeese/perun/sabine/ et. al. amuse, illumidate, wtf you want really, as well as a good book,……overall, net, whatever.
The Matt’s too. And the commenteristas. Very, very good and more irrefutable proof that most people are smarter than me. I know my place.