A Unique Unveiling

On November 21st, Elon Musk finally unveiled the long-teased and eagerly anticipated Cybertruck. The unveiling was livestreamed with great fanfare, featuring Elon and his team introducing all the different features of this truck that looks quite unlike any other truck you may have seen before.

…And with the unique design came the ridiculing on the internet. “Finally every kid will be able to draw a realistic truck” noted one commentator on Youtube. Others compared the design of the truck to everything from the Pokemon Polygon to the original video game version of Lara Croft’s breasts.

But not everyone poked fun. Some hailed the design as taken straight from a sci-fi film, which indeed was probably where a lot of the inspiration for the design came from.

The ridicule was then made worse when one of Elon’s team threw a metal ball at the car’s windows to prove how durable and shatterproof they were. Instead the ball cracked the glass at its impact point. So they did it again with the second window, sure it wouldn’t happen again. But it did.

This made for a somewhat awkward rest of the presentation, with Elon standing in front of his brand new Cybertruck with cracked windows trying to continue selling the thing as if nothing had happened.

“We can fix that in post” Musk joked, as he tried to move past the incident. He later tweeted his team doing the exact same thing in a test behind closed doors, showing the windows doing what they were supposed to and repelling the metal ball effortlessly. It was clearly a humbling experience.

The Inspiration

Musk told Vox journalist Kara Swisher in an interview last year that the car would be “a really futuristic-like cyberpunk, ‘Blade Runner’ pickup truck”. Thus the name, and I would imagine, the appreciation for the Cyberpunk genre.

Apparently the appreciation is mutual. Blade Runner’s art director Syd Mead apparently told Business Insider that the Cybertruck was “stylistically breathtaking”, for which Musk was later thanked him for on twitter.

Musk also stated that part of the influence for the design was taken from the Lotus Esprit S1 car, which turned into a submarine for James Bond in The Spy That Loved Me.

Sci-fi and Cyberpunk fans felt that the car was reminiscent to many classic sci-fi films such as Total Recall, Back to the Future, and Blade Runner of course.

Cyberpunk 2077 Rumors

A fan posted the picture below to Reddit of what that may look like, and as you can see, it fits right in.

In fact, Screenrant made the connection immediately. “[Elon Musk] unveiled [the truck] with a name which suggests the inventor is very, very hyped for CD Projekt Red’s next game. Luckily, it may not be too late in the development cycle of Cyberpunk 2077 for the game to add in Cybertruck as some sort of additional promotional content, should they choose to do so. After all, Musk is undeniably practically begging for it with that font choice.”

How close are the fonts? Well, you be the judge. Below is the Cybetruck font.

And this is the Cyberpunk 2077 font.

…Screenrant may have a point.

Why this all matters

I discovered Cyberpunk in January 2018, but I have always loved the Cyberpunk genre–I just never knew it. With my favorite movie of all time being The Matrix, and then feeling enraptured by films such as Ghost in the Shell, Minority Report, I, Robot, or Blade Runner 2049, it’s always been a genre that was an interest of mine. However, for a long time this genre was rather niche. Despite the Matrix trilogy bringing the genre out of the shadows for a brief period, it wasn’t enough to keep it mainstream, and thus it fell back out of the limelight until 2017 and 2018 which was considered by some to be a re-birth of the genre. This was a result of Blade Runner 2049 and Ghost in the Shell coming out the same year, followed soon thereafter by Ready Player One, a Steven Spielberg film. We also saw Upgrade, and TV series like Altered Carbon and Black Mirror coming out around the same time, and it was this combination that finally helped Cyberpunk stay in the mainstream spotlight to some extent.

The Cybertruck is proof Cyberpunk is becoming mainstream

Now, with Cyberpunk 2077, I am convinced that Cyberpunk is experiencing a rebirth of the genre. People are becoming more excited than ever about Cyberpunk, and the Cybertruck–a competitor to the Ford F-150 in the car industry, of all places–is one of the many places that Cyberpunk is becoming relevant. With the rising use of drones and the increasing ability of autonomous robots, I believe that Cyberpunk will continue becoming more popular, not less, and the Cybertruck is clear proof of this. Its home was in the books, movies, and tv series, but it is now expanding into delivery drones for Amazon, Mules and Bomb Squad Robots for the military, and now trucks in the car industry.

Cyberpunk is now.