Man Rents Cybertruck, Counts How Many Times He Gets Flipped Off in a Single Day

What happens when you drive a Cybertruck around the nation's capital? You get yelled at, talked down to, and flipped off — a lot.

That was the experience of Saahal Desai for The Atlantic, who concluded after his ordeal that the "Cybertruck is a 7,000-pound Rorschach test." 

Desai rented the polarizing Tesla pickup — which has come to embody everything people hate about its creator Elon Musk — in a "journalistic experiment to understand what it's like behind the wheel of America's most hated car." And not because, as Desai later admits, he thinks it's "kind of a cool" ride. (Debatable.)

After just one day of tooling around Washington, DC, Desai was given the bird at least 17 times. He was called a "motherfucker," a "fucking dork," and a lot more. Seldom did he escape mockery or derision. Diners getting brunch on a sidewalk laughed and jeered as he passed. Someone audibly considered egging his vehicle. This is the Cybertruck Owner's Burden.

"As I idled with the windows down on a street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood," Desai recalled, "a woman glared at me from her front porch: 'Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,' she yelled. 'You drive a Nazi truck.'" 

Then, Desai continued, "she slammed her front door shut, and then opened it again," adding that "I hope someone blows your shit up."

Of course, pulling off this stunt in The District of all places is pretty much asking for negative attention, and isn't necessarily reflective of the average Cybertruck driver experience. "This is, after all," Desai notes, "the radioactive center of DOGE's blast radius." 

That said, nationwide, Tesla — and the Cybertruck especially — have unquestionably been on the receiving end of waves of outrage. The automaker's dealerships have faced angry protests, acts of vandalism, gunfire, and firebombings. Countless random Tesla vehicles on the road have been defaced with spray paint, smeared with feces, pelted with eggs, and had their windshields smashed.

Musk is the reason why. His public image has soured since he threw his weight behind the presidency of Donald Trump, bankrolling his campaign to the tune of nearly $300 million and crescendoing his years-long public descent into far-right circles. 

He has led the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration's cadre of pipsqueak mercenaries tasked with gutting the federal government by slashing expenditures and firing tens of thousands of employees. In response to the rising anti-Musk sentiment, the administration and its security apparatus closed ranks: the FBI launched a brand new task force to crack down on the Tesla vandals, describing the acts as "domestic terrorism." 

As for the Cybertruck, it's a bold, polarizing vehicle even without all that political baggage. It looks weird and is itself a bold middle-finger to common-sense automotive norms. It costs more than a Corvette when Musk initially promised it'd sell for less than $40,000. Fans hyped it as the culmination of Elon's visionary genius. That it's turned out to be an unreliable lemon has only made it riper a punching bag for Musk's critics, and by extension, anyone not a fan of the Trump administration.

Desai did receive some thumbs-ups as he drove through tourist-heavy areas. One person remarked that it was "awesome." A kid screamed "Cybertruck!" But these were few and far between, and by no means redeemed the overall Cybertruck experience.

"The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it's ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy," Desai concluded. "It's that, for most people, the car just isn't worth driving."

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