Cybertruck Impressions

The cyber-truck recently dropped at our local mall and drew a crowd, and after having just finished this video by MKBHD, I’m left with some negative thoughts that I wanted to get down.

I just want to preface this by saying I’m not a blind Tesla hater. I cold-emailed them back in 2018 begging them to hire me as an intern, fanboying over Elon and SpaceX and electric cars. I watched the cybertruck and model y viewing live with my tesla coworkers like it was some exciting sporting event. Even now, I continuously pester my partner about buying a tesla, a vain attempt at convincing her we need a new car.

I actually really respect the innovative unprecendented take on vehicles that the cybertruck takes, it’s some of the other decisions that I don’t really agree with as a designer of technology.

The first thing is that it tries to digitize everything. From the steer-by-wire meaning steering wheel input is translated digitally into axle movements rather than traditional power steering which is still a mechanical system at its core, assisted by a supplemental power system. Simple but important systems are even digitized - door handles become buttons to be pressed, rear-view mirrors become cameras and displays. And the simple fact is that these software systems are not going to be as reliable as the physical systems they replaced.

When you look through a mirror, the laws of physics that govern how light photons bounce off the mirror will never randomly have a bug that causes light to refract unexpectedly. Mechanical door systems don’t rely on some battery or software to push the door open. In my perspective, software systems have dozens of failure domains that mechanical systems lack, and in my experience writing software, perhaps the biggest of them all is humans write software, and humans are incredibly good at making mistakes. The only difference is that when I make a human mistake at my storage software job, the worst is a few thousand GPUs worth of training is set back a few minutes, or the ads shown are facebook are a little less relevant. But when a human mistake occurs in software that is powering safety systems in a car, human lives are put at elevated risk.

To be honest, I’m not sure how much software my 2022 Honda CRV relies on for driving (the speedometer is digital, as is the fuel display, climate control) compared to the cybertruck, and how much redudancy goes towards the systems in the cybertruck. But it just feels like the cybertruck took a lot of unnecessary liberties to digitize systems that could have been kept mechanical, and digital systems are much less reliable.

The other concern I have are about its deviations from the typical car. All teslas already have one pedal driving, where instead of pressing on the brake pedal to brake, you just need to lift the foot off the accelerator to automatically trigger the regenerative braking and cause the car to slow down, to the point where the brake pedal is practically useless in normal scenarios. This fundamental change already takes time to get used to opposed to traditional cars (arguably, this makes tesla users less practiced with using the brake pedal, which can be detrimental in split second scenarios).

But the cybertruck takes this a step further, by making the truck wheel turn much more than normal car wheels given the same turn of the steering wheel. It’s like borrowing your friend’s computer, and discovering that their mouse sensitivity is two times more sensitive than what you’re used to. It would definitely need getting used to, and as mentioned above, we are getting used to commandeering a multi-ton object driving at 80mph speeds, not getting used to clicking on youtube videos and file documents. The fact that steering wheel turn to car wheel turn ratio is not standardized amongst car manufacturers seems incredibly short-sighted to me.

In my opinion, the needless proliferation of software systems and drastic deviations from driving norms altogether makes the cybertruck a pretty dangerous driving experience. Especially if I had to drive multiple cars on a daily basis, I would not feel comfortable adding cybertruck to the rotation. Even if it was my only car, I’ve rented plenty of cars during vacations and trips, and I feel like having cybertruck driving habits would definitely make me more accident prone in rentals.

Perhaps I am wrong about these feelings, since driving a car is much easier than playing a video game, where the margins for error are much higher, but I guess we won’t know until more data comes out and cybertrucks driven more broadly.