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The Tesla Cybertruck: In 2019, the company presented the vehicle for the first time
Photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu / AP
The history of the Sports Utility Vehicle, or SUV for short, is also a history of poorly crafted regulation. In a nutshell, it goes something like this: When the oil crisis in the 1970s drove up gasoline prices massively and embargoes shocked the United States, the U.S. government pulled itself together to take a previously unimaginable measure: It introduced efficiency standards for new cars – under Republican Gerald Ford!
These efficiency standards, called CAFE (corporate average fuel economy), were broken down by vehicle category. To this fact, the shareholders of the oil industry owe a lot of profit, and we all owe the acceleration of the climate crisis.
According to the 1975 regulation, the fleet consumption of the category "light trucks", roughly the kind of car called "delivery van" in German, should be on average about 11.3 liters per 100 kilometers. The standard for passenger cars has been set at a target of 8.6 litres. At the time, people didn't think long about this, wrote the energy historian Daniel Yergin, who is quite friendly to the oil industry, in his 2011 book »The Quest«. After all, "normal cars accounted for about 80 percent of the new car market, delivery vans were mainly driven by farmers and craftsmen."
The consequence, however, was different from what was envisaged by law: the car industry did not begin to build more efficient cars, but instead marketed delivery vans with higher fuel consumption than cars for private use.
Chrysler invented the "minivan" and, according to Yergin, "vans, once the domain of plumbers and electricians, became the new favorite family car." The minivan was followed by another new van vehicle category: "By the late 1990s, America's traditional love of cars had morphed into a flaming passion for SUVs," says Yergin.
Marty McFly's Dark Legacy
Pop culture may have contributed to the success of this class of cars in Europe, albeit in somewhat smaller formats. In the 21s series "A Colt for All Cases" (up to 7.1985 million viewers), for example, a brown GMC Sierra Grande plays a leading role alongside Lee Majors. And the happy ending of the <> blockbuster movie "Back to the Future" includes a brand-new, powerful pick-up truck that Marty McFly gets as a gift.
From 1985 to 2003, "gasoline consumption in the U.S. increased by almost 50 percent," according to Daniel Yergin. Not only, but also because of the trend towards ever bigger, heavier cars with ever more powerful engines.
Absurdly large cars, such as those seen in large numbers in the USA, are still rare in Europe. This has to do with safety and efficiency standards as well as fuel prices. But for a long time, they were particularly lucrative for the U.S. auto industry, as well as for the oil industry.
Today, monstrous vehicles such as Ford's F-150 are also a political commitment in the USA: In particular, people who are close to the Republicans are proud to drive a car that consumes an extremely large amount of fuel and looks like a war machine.
As recently as March 2023, 41 percent of U.S. consumers in a Gallup poll said it was unimaginable to buy an electric car. Among Democratic supporters, only 17 percent said "I wouldn't buy one," compared to 71 percent among Republican voters. According to the survey, only one percent of them owned one themselves, and another percent "seriously considered" it.
Once again, this has a lot to do with disinformation – more than half (55 percent) of Republican supporters think that electric cars would "not benefit the climate at all", another 32 percent "only a little". This is, to quote the International Council for Clean Transport (ICCT), "simply wrong".
The misanthropic car
Monstrous pick-up before take-off:Musk's Cybertruck – the car for a misanthropic worldBy Arvid Haitsch
Elon Musk: Tesla has "dug its own grave" with Cybertruck
That's where Elon Musk comes in. The Tesla CEO has been radicalizing since he bought Twitter and rebranded it X, and is publicly moving further and further to the right on the platform. Much to the delight of his biggest fans, many of whom also come from the American right. His company's Cybertruck is a bizarre, apocalyptic, unreasonable car: it weighs about three tons, looks like a massively oversized door, has no crumple zone because the steel body is so stiff, and is likely to endanger all other road users due to its design, weight and acceleration.
The Cybertruck looks like Marty McFly's pickup truck and the famous DeLorean from the same movie fathered an overweight child with antisocial personality disorder.
You don't even want to imagine what a steel, stiff three-ton wedge with extra-sharp edges would do in the event of a collision with a standard small car. The Cybertruck is a misanthropic car "for a misanthropic world," as Arvid Haitsch put it here at SPIEGEL.
Desirable for the Petro Men
It is therefore desirable for the EU to close a loophole that, despite all the violations of sensible European rules, could apparently allow Cybertrucks to drive around Europe's roads.
At the same time, it is to be hoped that Musk will create a – absurdly – successful electric car with his Cybertruck. One that could also be desirable for a petromasculine, Republican-voting U.S. buyership. If the thoroughly misinformed, anti-e-mobility right-wing of the U.S. starts buying electric cars on a larger scale, it will have far-reaching consequences.
A growing market creates more competition. This, in turn, increases the motivation for change in an industry that has so far still done good business with combustion engines among this clientele. So far, sales figures are still minuscule, even for monster electric cars that are already available, such as the Ford F-150 Lightning: Ford's electric pickup, for example, currently sells a few thousand units a month when it comes up – and many dealers seem to be stuck with the model. For the Cybertruck, on the other hand, there are reportedly 1.8 million pre-orders worldwide.
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Christian Stöcker
The Great Acceleration
Publisher: Pantheon
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Number of pages: 384
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To be clear, building such large and heavy electric cars is a senseless waste of space, resources, energy and human lives. But if the Cybertruck increases Republican voters' interest in charging infrastructure, creates increased competition and thus pressure to innovate, investments, more battery research and so on – then that's good news. Because all this would accelerate the inevitable tilt of the world car market away from the combustion engine.
To a certain extent, the monster SUV would become a propaganda vehicle for the electrified future, an antidote to fossil disinformation. And so even a very stupid car could ultimately prove useful.