A Los Angeles-area Tesla Cybertruck owner shared a video of a motorcyclist vandalizing his vehicle while driving on the freeway.
In the post on r/TeslaCam, you can see the rider weaving between traffic, before reaching their hand out to smack the Cybertruck's side mirror, at which point a piece of the electric vehicle appears to fall off and bounce away down the highway behind them. The motorcyclist proceeded to continue driving past them like nothing happened.
Electric vehicles have been a sore point for a small subset of the population for years now, and the Cybertruck has been a particular magnet for the ire of others. Teslas as a whole have seen people remove their chargers while in use, and keying their cars, but Cybertruck owners seem to be facing more direct acts of vandalism and damage. We've seen truck drivers throw rocks and roll coal at the Cybertruck, and in June the Fort Lauderdale police investigated a case of vandalism in which 34 of the vehicles were spray-painted.
The hate toward electric vehicles is baffling, because they have incredible benefits for the environment. While there is a pervasive belief that the mining operations for batteries has just as profound an environmental impact as traditional combustion engines, University of Oxford researcher Hannah Ritchie recently showed that mining for dirty energy sources vastly outstrips the amount of lithium or other ores used in the creation of batteries for electric vehicles, per Sustainability By Numbers. And once those batteries are made, the vehicles' non-reliance on fossil fuels makes them an environmental boon.
If you're looking to make your next car or truck an EV, check out TCD's handy guide.
For their part, commenters on the video were quick to point out the driver should take legal action.
"Looks like you have the license plate, submit insurance claim with the video," one commenter said.
"Make a police report too," another said, "Doesn't matter if they don't do anything. You want a record of it."
"I take the 405 daily and I've seen this and cyclists kicking Teslas," another commenter chimed in. "I want a ban on lane splitting. They drive too fast and do stuff like this when you lane change in 20mph traffic."
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