We wondered if my brother had come all the way back to Troy just to drive a cybertruck. He was out from Australia at Christmas and wanted to drive one then, but Noodles joked that he was not allowed to park a cybertruck in the driveway. Cool engineering aside, there was the problem of Elon. Cybertrucks had become the desktop icon for our grim meathook future. As a sibling, it was my job to be a jerk about it.*
Instead my brother, who has a Tesla, rented a Tesla to see how the battery did in the Siberian cold. Tesla owners love to tell you what % the battery is at, what % it was at for each leg of a journey, and how long it took to charge at whatever stopping-off point. There’s no equivalent conversation around combustion engines: you pay for petrol, it smells, you know it’s bad, you’d rather not think about it.
One of the mindfucks about growing up is that the same person you once kicked in the shins in a fight over the Commodore 64 now has a serious job as an engineering consultant. The same kid who dutch-ovened you. Ludicrously, the child who managed to make his Easter eggs last until August each year has now squirreled away enough hard dollars to fly his family around the world to Troy—no one’s tourist destination—to have a white Christmas with the cousins all together.
*
It was minus-16 Fahrenheit wind chill in upstate New York when Noodles asked my brother, T, “and the charge will hold okay even this cold?”
T showed him the app, which showed the battery. It was fine!
That night, the car was suddenly in critical condition in the driveway, shutting down all but its core operations as it succumbed to hypothermia. T yanked my Christmas lights and two prancing LED deer out of the ancient power socket on our porch, and hauled an extension cord over to the Tesla. The second he plugged it into our rickety Victorian house, the entire first floor went dark.
“Our wires are fabric-lined!” I heard myself yelling. “We have horsehair lath! The house wasn’t made for Teslas!” It really wasn’t; the old fireplaces have a grate in front of them from the days when the tentacles of a coal furnace in the basement would creep up through the floorboards to heat the place. The original dirtiest energy.
T ran the car off the house for 45 minutes—enough charge to get to a nearby charger station, where he spent another 40 minutes secreting enough juice to get to a further-afield supercharger. “Worked great!” he said.
He and my freezing sister-in-law had gotten back to the house at midnight, she wearing two beanies.
The next day I trailed him out to the airport to return the car to the Turo guy, who seemingly lived in the airport’s multistory carpark, feeding and watering his rental EVs like a lone Morlock. Among the charging vehicles: a cybertruck.
“Go look,” I encouraged my brother, while keeping my seatbelt buckled, extending the generous offer of being willing to wait in a warm car.
“You have to come see this,” T texted a few minutes later, and I begrudgingly got out of the car into the frigid air. It was so cold you could feel ice crystals forming on vibrissae inside your nose. The guy was thrilled to show off the cybertruck’s features, starting with the pointy front of it. If you don’t know, the hood and the windshield are on the same plane. “Bugs fly right off,” he said, swooping his arm up to the Kármán line. We saw the single windshield wiper, an enormous arm that shot back and forth in a protractor arc, and the buttons to open the doors.
That was as close as my brother got to driving one, though. A near-miss.
*
An opportunity to travel to Ottawa presented itself this summer for my brother, fortuitously putting him on the same cartographic line as my parents (“this will be our last trip to America,” my dad announced to everyone he saw on this trip, and thus repeatedly to me), and one twirl of the compasses from the Albany Tesla center. So brother was back—four of the five original members of the fam!—and temps were supportive this time for a cyberouting.
T booked a test drive for Friday afternoon when the kids would still be in camp and I’d be working. A perfect jaunt for my dad and himself, a father and son dyad passionate about removing as many superfluous buttons from dashboards as possible and seeing what it’s like to drive around in a stainless steel pentagon.
Then we hit a snag.
“They won’t take an international driver’s license,” T texted the family chat.
I saw my at-home lunchbreak take off from my open palm and flit up to the sky.
I saw myself typing: “I can come.”
I was not a jerk, I was selfless, a family hero.
I drove us all to Tesla in my Honda Pilot (three rows, vestigial gearstick, runs off 91 petrol) feeling very mumsy. When we got to the front desk, the guy said he only tells international drivers they can’t test-drive the cars in the booking phase. Looking at my brother, Tesla-guy to Tesla-guy, polo a polo, he had no problem. Besides, with Full-Self Driving (FSD; unclear if another Elon joke?), it barely needed a driver.
“I actually got extra points when I took my driver’s test,” I said to the Tesla guy, who gave a ha but had no use for me, and didn’t care to see my license. I slid it back into my wallet.
The first thing Tesla workers want to show you is the tray of the cybertruck, which has a fancy bed liner and an articulated lid that you can camp under if you don’t get claustrophobic sleeping in a file-o-fax. A review I read pointed out that because of the triangular sides, you can’t really load your lumber in (fits 8x4!) except from the back tailgate. But: you do gotta appreciate the paradigm-smashing.
“Kids are actually our best salespeople,” continued the guy. They love the shapes.
Cybertrucks do look like a child’s drawing of a moon buggy, all triangles. The mirrors are triangles, the rearview is a sharp trapezoid, the wheels (round) sit in hubs that are all straight lines. Inside, the windscreen extends down almost out of view to an acute angle that my father and brother observe must be hard to reach if you need to clean it.
“Someone invented a special stick” for cleaning the inside of the windscreen, I hear my brother say as we drive along a road by the airport, loosed on the old world from our prismatic place in the future.
I’m in the back, relegated to my original place in the birth order (second, but middle, but eldest daughter). I’m a cyberpassenger; the thing we often forget about the future is you probably won’t be driving.
My bro turns on FSD and we rumble quietly toward Somethingorother Kills, a landmark I found near the Mohawk River to give the computer something to aim at. The truck takes itself through a roundabout, lurching forward with the confidence of a MWM. I get out my phone to film this precious moment for my brother and dad, and they’re both also filming on their phones. I see the horizon in a cascade of screens.
We pull off into a gravel carpark where hiking trails start. The steering is one of the most impressive features of the cybertruck: it is “steer-to-wire” engineering, meaning that turning the wheel doesn’t mechanically swivel a column connected to the wheels. Instead, it’s like a computer game; you turn it a bit sideways, and the truck pivots all four wheels at once. We turn a tight circle on the gravel, then get out and look at this silver monolith that has landed by the green hiking trails.
I hop into the driver’s seat. “They got rid of the stalk,” explains my dad of the button-blinkers on the steering wheel, which is more of a squashed basketball shape. A big decarbonization guy, as well as a treaty guy, my dad has a Tesla also. His E-model has also done away with the stalk.
To put the truck in gear, you drag the picture of a car on the screen forwards or backwards. To park it, you just tap the car—it won’t work if you try to drag the car icon into neutral. Driving along the road I feel very conspicuous—it’s a real statement, driving a truck that looks like a fridge—and also invisible by virtue of seeing the world from inside such a strange polyhedron. You feel separate from all other traffic.
“There you go Janet, you could get one of these instead of your SUV,” says my dad, and it’s an exquisite alloy of dialogue that offers a nod to T’s vision, the faux suggestion that I would associate myself with a cybertruck and/or have the financial capability to buy one (I would love an EV), and the knowledge that the best epoxy is a filler statement. Maybe half of the things we say we don’t really mean. It helps things to run.
I glide the truck over to a bunch of baseball fields, then park it and get into the back.
My brother takes over again. He hits the lift button and the whole thing jacks up to 17 inches, tilting like a treadmill on hard mode. “Whoo!” says everyone.
We head back towards the airport a few inches higher up on an idea. My brother and dad have gotten quite excited about the whole thing, about what happens when you throw out the design book and replace an engine with a frunk. I see the glint of it flying by the blurry green bushes, grown children and their parents connecting at odd angles, moving really fast now.
*Like two sides of an equation waiting to be rationalized, it is true that:
(I miss my family)ˣ
and that
=
[-b ± √(when they visit I usually act like a jerk for some reason)] / 2a].
I think Descartes called it the family systems theorem.
Thanks to T for fact-checking this essay. Love you bro.
japhy getting picked up from camp by my parents
my mum: your mum will be excited to see you at home!
japhs: finally, someone actually FAMILIAR
message from the universe
we were standing in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston about to take a Freedom Trail tour when the wind blew this flier into Noodles’ foot:
noted, I guess
*
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“Corporate storytelling is one of the only avenues left”
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I love Alison Roman but felt very witchy reading the responses to her “my baby isn’t a picky eater” post of said baby eating an artichoke leaf (see: “all babies eat everything lol wait til he turns two!!!!! not hating just want you to prepare” and “came here to say this with love 💜”)
*
dAIddy?
Perplexity Pro’s prompts include a tag that simply says “Parenting.” When I clicked on it, it offered these sample queries
:/
Today I learned that there are American Ottawas. Neat!
I learned so many new words today!