A California police department wants to be the first agency to have a law enforcement-branded Cybertruck, according to an internal email obtained by 404 Media.
The email Sergeant Jacob Gallacher, of the Anaheim Police Department, sent in early February read “P.S. I spoke with the Chief yesterday and we still want to be the first police agency to have a Cybertruck. If anyone can make that happen, I know it is you!” Gallacher sent the email to James Hedland from UP.FIT, a company that sells modified Teslas for use by law enforcement. The email was part of a conversation about the department’s use of Teslas.
Gallacher later told 404 Media that the email was something of “a joke,” but reaffirmed the agency’s wish to obtain a Cybertruck before other agencies, even if more for “community engagement” than using it as a patrol vehicle.
“We would, but it’s not necessarily from a patrol perspective,” Gallacher said. 404 Media obtained the email through a public records request.
I actually love brutalist architecture, but the Cybertruck is fucking nasty.
Yeah, brutalist and brutal are different. The cyber truck is a fucking stupid design that will hurt people far more than most vehicles (big dumb truck hoods not withstanding).
They aren’t even going to be able to sell them anywhere that has reasonable pedestrian safety laws. CA needs to pass some and kill the fucking thing, not give them to cops who already want to kill anyone who makes them nervous.
People tend to fuck up brutalism. It doesn’t just mean angular. It’s supposed to be brutally honest. No disguising what something looks like, or what it’s made of, or why it’s there. Bare concrete needs no excuses as a building material. It is perfectly functional. Any marks left by forming it are informative and sincere. But if you have an iron railing, you’re gonna need to paint that thing. What color doesn’t matter. There is no reason it has to be iron-colored, or even one solid color. There’s no reason it can’t be decoratively patterned if you’re gonna put in the work to protect the material.
The Cybertruck is like… when steampunk means “glue some gears on it.” It’s a shallow error. Cars have obvious functions, even more evidently than a building, and a rustbucket with the aerodynamic profile of a doorstop is not serving those functions. It’s not good at anything except looking like that. That’s the opposite of brutalism. That is useless decoration, aping the aesthetics of another ethos.
A brutalist truck is a Willys Jeep. That is a car stripped back to its necessary components and put together in ways that convey why each piece is there. None of it’s left pointy for the sake of being pointy. Curves exist for a reason. Christ, it’s the straight parts of modern cars that are an affectation. If they were just swoopy and streamlined, they’d still look like wind-tunnel potatoes.
Arguably a more modern take is any Australian ute. “I don’t care if it’s fuck-ugly, I want a sedan with a bed. If I wanted to haul six bags of mulch I’d buy a damn Civic.”