“Does it still have that new spaceship smell?”
That was the quip from Dave Boone, walking past the GeekWire office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood last week as Javier Luraschi pulled up in his new Tesla Cybertruck to take me for a ride.
We may not have launched into space in this version of an Elon Musk vehicle, but Luraschi’s angular, stainless steel monster of an electric truck did launch plenty of stares and double-takes as we drove around the city.
Luraschi is a tech veteran who now heads up Hal9, a 3-year-old AI-enhanced data analytics startup that is being incubated at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle.
He’d been waiting more than 3 1/2 years since hitting the “buy” button on the Cybertruck website and putting down a $100 reservation for a truck that was supposed to cost $40,000 when first announced. Now, with a price tag of $100,000, Luraschi had his truck — and all that comes with owning such a head-turner.
“I’ve never had a product where it gets this many reactions from people,” Luraschi said. “I feel like the first reaction is, ‘I don’t like this.’ The next few seconds it’s, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad.’ It’s pretty obvious that people don’t know what to think of it. It’s just many emotions at the same time.”
An introvert’s contradiction
During a 10-minute drive from Fremont out to Golden Gardens Park in Ballard, it was tough to tell who was more distracted — Luraschi as he spotted and tried to react to people staring at his Cybertruck from passing cars, or the people in those passing cars, shooting images or video from the passenger or driver’s seat.
A self-professed introvert, Luraschi was quickly learning that he was driving the wrong vehicle to maintain such a personality. He said he’s not a car guy, he’s a tech guy. But now, he had to be both.
‘It looks like a weird pixelated car, like something glitched out in the rendering.’
— River Belle
“I don’t like getting stared at,” he says at one point, followed a few moments later by, “I do love the reactions of people.”
Each time we parked the truck to mingle with people who might get a kick out of seeing one in the wild, it was like turning on a bright porch light on a buggy summer evening. But Luraschi was hardly bugged.
“Come on over, guys!” Luraschi said as a couple young people pulled up to get a closer look — and photo — of the Cybertruck.
“I saw you guys driving, I was like, ‘No way! I had not seen one,'” said Conrad Puff-Carter of Seattle, who was cruising around in his 1997 Honda Civic hatchback with River Belle, also of Seattle. “I think it’s cool! I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Puff-Carter immediately asked Luraschi how much he paid, and his wide-eyed reaction to the price was to point at his Civic and say, “You want to know how much I got that for? Zero! The neighbors were moving.”
Belle took a little longer to warm up to the steel-grey Cybertruck, with its large black wheels and dramatically shaped front and rear ends.
“It looks like a weird pixelated car, like something glitched out in the rendering,” Belle said. “It sticks out like a sore thumb — in a cool way,” she said as she sat in the truck, before adding, “It’s growing on me.”
Beaming, Luraschi couldn’t help but come across as a Tesla ambassador of sorts, encouraging people to have a closer look and sit inside. He happily posed Puff-Carter and Belle in front of the truck to take their picture.
His desire to know whether people rated it a thumbs up or thumbs down seemed very much in line with his tech career, constantly collecting and analyzing data.
“I love trying new products,” Luraschi said. “To be the first one, it’s at times uncomfortable when people look at you and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s a lot of attention.’ But, you know, you get to try it first, right?”
In another parking lot on our drive, we chatted with Collin Mason, a chef who just moved back to Seattle from New York City. He was headed to band practice when the Cybertruck distracted him.
“The look is so different than anything I’ve seen that I almost don’t like it. But I also like it a lot,” Mason said. “It looks like it came out of a LEGO set or a Batman movie. I’ve never seen somebody go this far with design, as far as really ignoring what’s been done with cars.”
Even with muddy boots on, Mason was offered a seat behind the wheel of the day-old, very clean truck. And Luraschi, whose previous car was an electric Nissan Leaf, was quickly drawn to Mason’s own BMW CE O4, a zippy little “urban mobility scooter,” as the two discussed how fast it could go.
‘Computer on wheels’
When Luraschi offered me the chance to drive the Cybertruck, I couldn’t resist. Not because I hadn’t previously driven a newish electric vehicle — such as Ford’s F-150 Lightning, or Porsche’s Taycan — but because I wanted to feel the charge of being stared at by everybody else on the road. And it worked.
Because the vehicle is in the early stages of mass production and delivery, they’re just not a common sight on roads right now, especially in Seattle. But there are plenty of videos online making fun of driving predicaments or showing off the truck from pointy head to pointy toe.
I liked waving at people standing on the sidewalk pointing, or just shrugging my shoulders at people driving by laughing. I could imagine how quickly the photo or video they shot landed in a text thread or got posted on social media — “Finally saw one of these weird things!”
‘The look is so different than anything I’ve seen that I almost don’t like it. But I also like it a lot.’
— Collin Mason
Driving the Cybertruck didn’t feel much like driving a truck or an electric car. It felt too big and long to be the latter — EVs typically have a more environmentally friendly footprint. And it didn’t really feel like a truck because of how comfortable and futuristic it is — would I really throw a load of lumber and concrete in this thing?
Luraschi himself said he was driving a “computer on wheels” and said he liked the Cybertuck on the unpaved roads where his co-founder brother lives in Monroe, Wash. And he wanted an electric vehicle capable of pulling (don’t tell his wife) the sailboat he wants next.
I loved the acceleration of the truck, like most EVs, and the ability to raise the suspension several inches from sport mode to off road with the push of touchscreen button was definitely cool.
I had trouble figuring out to how get the doors open at first. I couldn’t find my turn signals. The generative braking is a bit tough to get used to. A Seattle pothole felt just as jarring as when I hit one in my Jeep. And during a steady rain, I could only imagine that if the single, giant windshield wiper ever broke or wore out, it would cost an arm and a leg to replace.
It was hard not feel like I was driving a blinking “ELON MADE ME” billboard down the road, more so than I feel about Tesla’s other very ubiquitous models. Luraschi is diplomatic in how he feels about the often polarizing tech personality.
“I do believe that the products that Tesla is creating, or SpaceX, are amazing,” he said. “I don’t believe that Tesla means Elon and SpaceX means Elon. Obviously he’s fundamentally a great force in those companies. But the credit for Cybertruck also goes to the Tesla team. I think he’s a pretty great engineer and product person; we all have our deficiencies and qualities.”
I decided to give the last word to my parents the next morning during a Facetime call, when I told them about my story assignment the previous day. They hadn’t heard of or seen a Cybertruck until I texted them a couple photos.
They taught me how to drive, and they’ve owned probably 40 (gas-powered) cars over the years. As they head toward their mid and later 80s, they’re likely on their last two Honda vehicles.
I asked what they thought of the Cybertruck.
“It looks like a prototype,” my mom said.
I asked my dad if he’d ever want one.
“No.”
