> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.

People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.

Not universally. Your tech office and online spaces may have disliked it, but I also saw a lot of excitement and positivity about it, both online and IRL.

From my memory, a lot of the excitement was directed at what the design was trying to achieve: a structural body made from easy to make pressed steel panels. This was meant to enable a much cheaper car while also removing the bottlenecks plagueing Tesla's production lines at the time

None of this materialized. The truck that ended up in production was a traditional body construction, but with unpainted steel panels so it looks like the truck Musk presented. It ended up with all the drawbacks of a steel body, while being expensive and hard to manufacture

I agree that this was part of it - I referred to this twice in my original post.

Once the structural body concept failed (has it ever been adequately explained why they failed?) it would have made sense to either drop the Cybertruck altogether, or pivot to a more traditional design. But ego prevailed, sadly.

IMO the big missed opportunity was a follow the model 3 with a 'model 2' - a smaller, cheaper car - probably in the VW Golf / BMW 1-series class.

> Musk was still the darling of the left

I can assure you he was not.

I know this isn't Reddit, but I'm chuckling at your username :)

Agreed. When it was first announced, I was kind of interested. I laughed at imagining it as a screenshot from an N64 game.

But it didn't live up to the selling points, it is very expensive, has design issues that weren't necessary for the aesthetic, and the company's owner turned out to be a really horrible person contributing meaningfully to changes in my country that are dangerous.

The Cybertruck announcement was a couple years after the Thai Rescue Divers "pedo" incident, which was the tipping point for many people (including on the left) to realize he wasn't actually the Tony Stark character he pretended to be and actually a pretty shitty person.

This was well into the Tesla flamethrower/short shorts/funding secured/etc period of Tesla meme stockification. And pushing Dogecoin/crypto.

He certainly definitely wasn't the "darling of the left" by then. But you are correct that his image was significantly less tarnished by political meddling and later obsession with "woke/trans/culture war of the day stuff.

He was* the darling of the emerging meme stock day trader/gambler/WSB crowd which in broad strokes tends to anti-correlate with the "left".

Yes - fair point. His image was on the move, but not full MAGA crazy. Maybe ketamine was in his orbit already.

This is rewriting of history. It was ridiculed even by the reddit shitlibs that hung on to Papa Elon's every word. Breaking the glass twice was a meme.

No he was not. Progressive left noticed who he is first, long before that point.

And positive first reactions to that car came only from Musk fans bubble. I was seeing people calling it ugly from basically a day 1.