I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart, cool alpha male

I got to drive a Tesla Cybertruck for a day this spring. You jealous? You should be, because Elon Musk ’s Boy Scout project is the kind of virile, powerful spacetruck that should be owned and driven only by our largest, wealthiest, whitest men. The kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes. The kind of men who talk big about colonizing Mars as if it’s a realistic scenario. The kind of men who are training artificial intelligence to not only take your job but also steal your wife. Real can-do American men.

I am one such man. That’s why SFGATE asked me, someone who knows precious little about how cars actually work, to test-drive a Cybertruck. I fit the customer profile for one to a T. I am tall. I am white. I am loud. I don’t really have many friends where I live. Most important, I desperately want people to think I’m cool. You can see my thirst from the f—king moon, so why not drive an equally conspicuous truck?

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary inspects the Tesla Cybertruck he rented prior to driving it, on Thursday, May 9, 2024.

So I opened up a Turo account ( Turo is like Airbnb but for cars) and found a brand spanking new Cybertruck to rent for $500 a day, or roughly $850 once all taxes and fees had been included. While I was standing next to my rental Cybertruck, a woman on the street — a self-proclaimed medium named Free — walked up and started touching the car like it was a pregnant woman’s belly. Free cried out, “Goddamn! This s—t seems like plastic!” Whether the spirits told her this was unclear, but she was deeply unimpressed.

That’s because the exterior of the Cybertruck is ugly. You might have deduced this merely from looking at pictures of Elon’s beloved car online, but I assure you that seeing the truck in person won’t change your mind. This car is all hard angles and even harder steel, with exterior panels that are often off in alignment. It’s a loud car, which is by design. Anyone who buys a Cybertruck, or any journalist who rents one as a stunt, is doing so for the attention. That included the gentleman who rented it to me, who once worked for Tesla and was surprised (and seemingly displeased) that the people taking his car out for a joyride worked for the press. He suspected we were going to say mean s—t about Elon, and he was right. Elon Musk is a penis.

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary drives past San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts in the Tesla Cybertruck he rented, on Thursday, May 9, 2024.

But I do commend Musk for at least trying to make a car that stands out on the road when both safety regulations and manufacturing efficiency have conspired to make so many new cars look exactly the same . The Cybertruck doesn’t look like anything else out there, which is why your average new-money bro wants to plunk down $60,000 (at the minimum) for one. They’re paying to be noticed, and they don’t care what flavor of attention they might receive.

I got attention. So much attention — and in a wide variety of flavors! Children stopped and pointed. Strangers gave me the finger. Tourists at the Dana Bower Rest Area just across the Golden Gate Bridge swarmed the truck and asked to take pictures with it. Another motorist pulled up alongside me and said, “I just had to stop to laugh at you.” This car is a celebrity, which makes you a celebrity merely by driving it. That’s for better and for worse, with little in between the two poles.

Tourists gather to take photos as SFGATE columnist Drew Magary drives a Tesla Cybertruck through the Golden Gate Overlook parking lot, on Thursday, May 9, 2024.

Tourists take photos of a Cybertruck in Sausalito, Calif., May 9, 2024.

The car also emitted a lot of weird noises: alarms going off for reasons I couldn’t discern.

As for the interior, the Cybertruck is as barren as most other Tesla interiors. I got a big-ass touchscreen, a fighter pilot steering wheel and little more. Tactile pleasures were nonexistent. No buttons. No switches. I felt like I was driving around in an unfurnished apartment. But the truck did have a pleasing strip of white leather trim bordering the interior, which gave me the impression that somewhere, deep inside Tesla headquarters, a person with legitimately good taste fought a battle and actually won it. Also, the gas and brake pedals had a brilliant chrome finish to them, and the seats were both roomy and comfortable, which is a big deal for large men such as myself. This was a far more attractive ride on the inside than out, which was good because I was afraid that the driver’s seat would be covered in iron spikes. It was not. It was a normal seat, and I felt at home sitting in it.

Then I turned the truck on and was instantly escorted back to Elon’s technocarnival of suck.

Almost every control on the Cybertruck is virtual, doors included. To unlock the truck, you have to either tap your key card (like the one you’d get for a hotel room) on a sensor next to the door or use the Tesla app. You can also use that app to control the height of the truck, but you cannot make the truck hop, which I found disappointing. Five bucks to the first dude who installs custom hydraulics on this bad boy.

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Actually, you can use your phone to control a lot of things inside the Cybertruck, which is an obvious conflict of interest if you happen to be busy driving it. Your phone can operate the tailgate, along with the tonneau cover, a retractable roof that looks like a baggage claim conveyor belt and shields the flatbed from inclement weather. Making the tonneau go back and forth is super fun, unless you’re standing in the flatbed and accidentally push the button that closes it (guilty). The flatbed, while I was not hastily evacuating it, was perfectly spacious, should you require it for doing actual pickup stuff (you won’t).

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary jots down some notes from the cab of the Tesla Cybertruck he rented, on Thursday, May 9, 2024.

The catch is that the tonneau, when down, fully blocks the rearview mirror. I had to consult a rearview camera display that shows up on the touchscreen to see behind me. This is not intuitive.

Then again, little about the Cybertruck’s controls is intuitive. There is no physical gearshift. Instead, you swipe up or down on the touchscreen to shift into drive or reverse. There are no stalks protruding from the steering column to control the wipers or turn signals. Instead, you push a button to signal (this is standard in other Tesla models but took me some getting used to), and you consult the touchscreen to activate the wipers — or “wiper,” I should say, given that the windshield is cleared by one giant wiper instead of two normal ones. Once I turned the giant wiper sword on, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. Desperate for an answer, I had to pull over to the side of the road and ask the car’s voice control to stop it. The truck’s autopilot controls were disabled, likely because Tesla is having a few issues with that particular feature ( people die while using it ).

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary drives a Tesla Cybertruck around San Francisco, on May 9, 2024. Charles Russo & Lance Yamamoto/SFGATE SFGATE columnist Drew Magary drives a Tesla Cybertruck around San Francisco, on May 9, 2024. Charles Russo & Lance Yamamoto/SFGATE I also couldn’t figure out how to turn the car off. Turns out it does this of its own accord. You know how Apple will occasionally confuse the world by doing away with standard features like a headphone jack? OK, well imagine a car built entirely out of that kind of gimmick. You get a big truck, a big screen and not much else. Any problem you have with the truck’s controls is strictly because you’re a n00b. Only our shrewdest, most waterlogged minds can master such a visionary piece of machinery. As for that screen, it’s an 18.5-inch monitor, with a matching 9-inch monitor in the back for passengers. A small game controller is tucked inside the console, but I didn’t learn how to use it. This is because I was busy learning how to do a bunch of other, more important s—t with the touchscreen first. Touchscreens are now standard in all new cars, and many of them are needlessly wonky, to the point of being hazardous. The Cybertruck is no different. It took me a solid 45 minutes to figure out how to turn on the air-conditioned seats. Once I did, though, I got a satisfyingly cool breeze right up my asscrack. The air conditioning in this car does not f—k around. Again, I find this important.

Drew Magary tries to get out of a Cybertruck in San Francisco, May 9, 2024.

Also, you honk the horn by pushing it upward, which is stupid. But at least Elon didn’t attempt to reinvent the car horn sound by swapping in a Grimes sample for it. My expectations of this car going in were low, and it amazingly surpassed, like, four of them. Not bad!

Then I had to drive the stupid thing. Given how clumsy the Cybertruck looks on the outside, you’d figure that task would be a real bitch. This also proves to be untrue. It didn’t drive big. It handled like a standard car, if not better than most. The pickup when I hit the gas was, as promised , thrilling. While the accelerator was a bit overly sensitive, I was still able to maneuver the car with relative ease, through busy downtown traffic, across the Golden Gate Bridge and even inside a parking garage. I usually can’t navigate any parking garage in California without having a nervous breakdown, so imagine my surprise when the Cybertruck made that experience painless rather than even more harrowing.

Charging the car, however, is another matter. Due to its massive curb weight (3.5 tons), refilling the Cybertruck’s battery took forever. When I had to charge an Audi e-tron a couple of years ago , the battery was back to 80% full in the time it took me to go to the bathroom and come back. A mere 10 minutes. With the Cybertruck, I could have taken a dozen pisses and still been waiting.

Oh, and the gas pedal might stick and get you killed . You might have heard about that little design flaw as well, although I had no such issues on my test drive. Again, this is because I am a very smart, important and cool person. The Cybertruck works only for alphas, and that’s me all over. Once any alpha learns this car, they’ll feel at home within it. If you are not an alpha and the truck doesn’t sit well with your snowflakey constitution ... well, best of luck getting around Tesla’s no-resale policy . Perhaps you could rent it out on Turo to make back your down payment. Either way, you are not ready for the spotlight.

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary is photographed inside the Tesla Cybertruck he rented, on Thursday, May 9, 2024.

I had my fair share of “oh God, everyone is looking at me” moments with the Cybertruck. I was able to parallel park it quite easily, but I had to do it near a crowded intersection. When I blocked traffic to weasel my way into a spot along the street, every horn behind me immediately piped up in anger. Because who feels bad about being an asshole to a white guy in a Cybertruck? No one. Perhaps you’ll have a smooth ride in yours, but the road rage you’ll inspire in your fellow motorists will be swift and merciless. I drove by the Palace of Fine Arts multiple times for the sake of our photo team. By sheer coincidence, the landmark was being used right then for a film shoot. They halted that shoot after they saw me pass by over and over, because whoever was in charge of security thought I was a paparazzo stalking the set. I think I would’ve chosen a more discreet ride had that been the case. Regardless, driving a Cybertruck means accepting that people will assume things about you, most of them unkind. But again, discretion isn’t this car’s job. This is a loud and lonely car for loud and lonely people. And while I enjoyed driving my Cybertruck, I hope I’m never loud and lonely enough to want to buy one.

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Drew Magary is a columnist for SFGATE and a co-founder of Defector. His new book, "The Night the Lights Went Out," is available right now.