On November 21, eleven days before Cyber Monday, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk introduced his company’s newest vehicle: a pickup truck with an otherworldly, polygonal “exoskeleton”—what the rest of the autosphere calls a chassis—and a crashingly pedestrian name: Cybertruck.
Yes, that is the actual logo. On Twitter, Christian Wilkie said the Cybertruck wordmark “could only be improved with the ‘3000’ suffix.”
A family resemblance? {The Cyberpunk 2077 game will be released in April 2020. Cyberpunk the sci-fi subgenre, which emerged in the early 1980s, is typified, according to the OED, “by a bleak, high-tech setting in which a lawless subculture exists within an oppressive society dominated by computer technology.”)
If you’ve followed the Tesla news even a little, you’ve heard of the failed test of the vehicle’s windows, which cracked when metal balls were hurled at them. The Cybertruck name is a fiasco of a different order: a failure of imagination; a surrender to the prosaic where a flight of invention was called for.
Before I get to why Cybertruck is so disappointing, I’ll attempt to play defense counsel. Here’s the argument: One of the principles of branding is to make the familiar seem unfamiliar and the unfamiliar seem familiar. The design of new Tesla vehicle is radically unfamiliar, so let’s give it a name built from familiar components. It doesn’t look trucklike; we’ll make sure everyone gets the message by putting truck right there in the name. But it’s also cool! And modern! And computer-y! And nothing says all these things—OK, nothing said those things back in 1990, when Elon Musk was a kid in Pretoria—like cyber.
And that’s the problem: There’s a big difference between “familiar” and “trite.” Unfortunately, Cybertruck crosses that line.
(Digression #1: Tesla’s internal style is “Cybertruck” without an article. I imagine that’s meant to sound disruptive and genre-defining. But every story about the vehicle calls it “the Cybertruck.” Digression #2: According to filings with the US Patent and Trademark Office, Tesla was considering calling the vehicle CYBRTRK and using a crafted-by-space-aliens wordmark. Maybe we should count our blessings.)
CYBRTRK logo
Tesla, which honors both the brilliant electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla and the unit of magnetic induction named after him, is a terrific brand name. But the company’s other naming efforts have been quite literally a joke, and not a very sophisticated one. The four model names—S, 3, X, and Y—spell “SEXY” when they’re lined up side by side. (The 3 was meant to be an E—for Elon?—but Ford, which recently named its own electric SUV the Mustang Mach-E, stopped Tesla from using that letter.)
With Cybertruck, Tesla takes a hard turn away from playful to played-out. The modern cyber prefix—from a Greek word meaning “to steer or pilot,” which would be an apt association for cars if only people knew about it—comes from cybernetics, a 1948 coinage by the US mathematician Norbert Wiener to describe “the theory or study of communication and control.” (A French word, cybernétique, “the art of governing,” had been coined in the 1830s.) With the development of computers, cyber- became a popular combining form. Really popular. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, one researcher “counted 104 words formed from it by 1994. Cyberpunk (by 1986) and cyberspace (1982) were among the earliest.”
Cyber is such a perfect prefix. Because nobody has any idea what it means, it can be grafted onto any old word to make it seem new, cool -- and therefore strange, spooky. [New York magazine, Dec. 23, 1996]
“Get a Cyberlife,” a report by Peggy Orenstein on Cyberthon, “a twenty-four-hour marathon conference and demonstration of Virtual Reality, the newest, fringiest, most talked about technological boom since artificial intelligence went bust” (Mother Jones magazine, May-June 1991). I found a current iteration of CyberThon—“a real-world cybersecurity challenge for high school students”—in Pensacola, Florida.
Standalone cyber first appeared in 1998, when it was a shortened form of cybersex (“a kind of interactive erotic experience, which usually involves two or more participants having real-time sexual exchanges online with the purpose of sexual arousal and stimulation”), also called cybering, it says here. Today, standalone cyber is more likely to mean cybersecurity (the long form first appeared in 1989).
The FBI says: #BeCyberSmart
The Oxford English Dictionary has dozens of cyber- compounds, including cyberkid (1975: a child brought up or created by a robot or computer); cyberfeminism (1992: a feminist movement concerned with countering the perceived dominance of men in the use and development of information technology, the internet, etc.), cyber-attack (1996: the use of information technology to infiltrate or disrupt computer systems), cybersphere (1978: the sphere or realm of information technology), cyber-bully, cyberporn, cyber-romance, and cybersmut.
“Cybercafe” first appeared in print in 1995. After 22 money-losing years, the Cyber Cafe West in Binghamton, New York, closed in June 2019.
Cyber- is also hugely popular in brand names. There are, at current count, 1,373 live trademarks incorporating cyber, from Cyberdroid to Cyber Ghost, Cyberflage to Cyberfleet, Cyberheart to CyberKnife.
Ad in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 27, 2019, for the Accuray CyberKnife. Unlike the truck in Cybertruck, the knife in CyberKnife is not literal: it’s a radiation-therapy device.
“Cybertruck” has the earmarks of a top-down naming decision, which is rarely, in my experience, the best decision. People who are good at engineering or starting companies don’t always have the skills required to create memorable, evocative, inspirational brand names. Sometimes they’re too close to the project, or have too much ego invested, or are unwilling to admit to their shortcomings. Or they think that because they named their children—Musk’s own offspring are called Saxon, Damian, Xavier, Griffin, Kai, and Nevada Alexander, and I’ll say no more about those choices—they can name anything.
Naturally, the cyberworld has had a field day coming up with alternatives to Cybertruck. GearJunkie reported a long list of them: Starship Pooper, Millennial Falcon, Mystery Science Aztek 3000 (there you go, Christian Wilkie!), Tentagon, Thing (remember that VW?), and more. On Twitter, June Casagrande proposed Muskmobile, which is adorable.
Cyberduck, “a libre server and cloud storage browser for Mac and Windows.”
Of course, I wish I’d been asked to guide Tesla and its impetuous founder to a more inspired choice for the, um, innovative new vehicle. I like to think I’d have encouraged a more poetic choice, and I can’t help thinking about the time the Ford Motor Company enlisted an actual famous poet, Marianne Moore, to develop names for a new car it was creating in 1955. Moore sent 43 names in a range of styles from portmanteau (Thunderblender, Symmechromatic) to wacky (The Intelligent Whale, Utopian Turtletop). Her very first submission, Silver Sword, strikes me as a name that could work for the new Tesla model.
Ford didn’t use any of the 43 names. The company thanked Miss Moore and then named the new car after founder Henry Ford’s son: Edsel.
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UPDATE: For more on Cybertruck’s name and styling, see Fred Scharmen’s analysis for Citylab, the design/transportation/environment site. An excerpt: “If this sounds like something out of apocalyptic science fiction, it’s meant to. Musk’s invocation of ‘cyber’ and promotional tie-ins to the famous ‘Los Angeles/November 2019’ date card from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner drive the point home further. In that film and its sequel, climate change and other cataclysms have rendered Earth hard to inhabit, and an elite have begun to emigrate off-world.”
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