Last Saturday and Sunday, some 250,000 people gathered on the shadeless industrial expanse of Alameda’s decommissioned Naval Air Station for the traveling electric vehicle and accessories convention known as the Electrify Expo.
Positioned at the front of the convention were legacy brands like Toyota, Volvo, General Motors, and Ford, with sleek pop-up showrooms and clean-cut salespeople handing out gift bags and pamphlets. Just beyond this normie facade, a survivalist subculture made its presence known.
Visitors were confronted by rows and rows of vendors selling defensive mods for EVs: Protective ceramic coating to repel being keyed; brighter high beams; reflective wraps; and surveillance systems. Vendors demonstrated rooftop tents and roof racks specified for Cybertrucks and Rivians, made for attaching tools like shovels, batteries, weapons, flags, and plastic canisters. PawkyMo, a Chinese e-bike brand, offered demo rides on a bike strapped up with everything you might need when the Big One, or whatever disaster worries you most, comes crashing down: a cargo box, fishing rods, a shovel, and a bow (without arrows).
Elements of gamer culture and the police state bled together at the event, creating a distinctly dystopian essence.
Most of the “showoffs” — what car shows call customized vehicles on display for guests — were painted either military green or some artificial, dopamine-stimulating hue: electric purple, holographic silver, mint blue, the acid green of toxic waste. Pokémon decals were stuck on the bullet-resistent windows of Cybertrucks, little Squishmallows smiled on dashboards, and rainbow LED light strips pulsed through EV interiors like a Twitch streamer’s basement lair on wheels. A company called UP.FIT that manufactures “turnkey Tesla fleet vehicles” showcased a Model Y police patrol vehicle. Prime Hydration, the line of sports drinks founded by manosphere YouTuber Logan Paul, was available for free in the VIP tent.
On one hand, I found this all striking. It wasn’t so long ago that owning an electric vehicle implied liberal politics and a gentle collectivism. (Think Ed Begley Jr. on The Simpsons driving a vehicle powered by his “own sense of self-satisfaction.”) Priuses were the must-have car of the eco-conscious intellectuals of the late 2000s and early 2010s, back when San Francisco could be called “the smuggest city in America” on South Park, and Silicon Valley still stood for techno-optimism and global collaboration in the American imagination.
Call that EV 1.0.
E.V. 2.0, on the other hand, seems increasingly marked with an electrofascist energy. And this makes perfect sense now, in a moment when a company like Palantir gleefully markets itself with the tagline “Software that dominates.” Silicon Valley has toughened up and entered its “hard tech” era, according to Mike Isaac in the New York Times.
“Tech has become harder, the perks are fewer and the mood has turned more serious,” Isaac wrote recently. Weapons development is becoming fashionable among investors as well as recent Stanford graduates, and electric military-grade equipment is rolling down our streets. Earlier this month, the Palo Alto Police Department debuted a Rivian patrol car: Finally, the muscle of the tough-on-crime moment and the hope for a sustainable planet, come together in a totally kick-ass electrified cop car.
At the Electrify Expo, all these subcultures — prepper-style individualism, video games, the American military, and EV tech — seemed to coalesce in one popular showoff, a Cybertruck souped up to look like a tank from the video game Halo.
“I got this as a blank canvas and I expressed myself the way I wanted to,” Kai Martin, the car’s owner, told me. Martin’s Cybertruck had it all: push bumper, extra-powerful high beams, ambient LED detailing. On the rooftop tent in giant block letters was the slogan of the game’s fictional United Nations Space Command: “GREATNESS AWAITS. UNSC ENLIST TODAY.”
“I didn’t want to be a sheep, you know? This is my story. My feelings,” Martin told me. “Bro, I’m a disabled vet, I did two tours. I don’t need to prove myself to anyone but my wife and my family.”
Martin, a large, extroverted man from Sacramento by way of Kauai, told me that to own a Cybertruck is “to come into a brotherhood” that always acknowledges each other, protects each other, and loves tech. As heavy-duty, EV-specific outdoor gear emerges as an industry, he thinks that the shift toward survivalism will spread across brands.
“Cybertrucks are doing it for sure. Rivian is headed that way,” Martin said. “That’s where we’re headed as times get weirder and weirder and as certain things are happening. People want reassurance, like, ‘I’m prepared.’”
Over the two days I spent at Alameda Ferry Point I talked to several vendors, attendees, and organizers at the event. Not everyone there was a part or even aware of the paramilitary turn EV culture was taking, and those in charge used euphemisms and careful elisions to keep things polite. The Tesla tent had been stationed coyly behind other headliners like Lucid and Rivian. Instead of inviting consumers to prepare for civil war outright, most brands promised to help them prepare for what they called “adventure.”
Despite the handful of Tesla protestors outside the expo entrance who had inflated Elon Musk tube-man effigies, each with one arm flapping to simulate a constant ‘sieg heil’ gesture, Cybertrucks were, by far, the most prominent vehicles at the event.
Indestructability was the main selling point. Under the Tesla tent, a constant stream of attendees stepped up to bash the driver’s side door of a Cybertruck as hard as they could with a mallet. (One wonders if they remember when Musk unveiled the car’s unbreakable windows by shattering one.)
A man in a pink linen shirt approached the car with his wife and two small children, also in pink linen outfits.
“Daddy, what are you doing?” the older daughter asked, as her dad wound up to strike the steel truck.
And then, “Daddy, hit it hard!”
Only the mallet was available for attendees, but the Tesla rep told me people love the Cybertruck because it can withstand flamethrowers and bullets, and it is anti-submergeable.
“You could drive to the bottom of the Bay,” the rep said, pointing to the water at the edge of the dusty former airfield, “turn around, and drive out.”
(Tests of this are inconclusive; it’s also unclear if it voids your warranty.)
At the expo, one of the perks of my press pass — aside from all the Prime Hydration I could drink — was that I could skip the line for the demo drives. I chose to give a Cybertruck a spin.
In the Cybertruck, I felt absolutely nothing. All physical reality outside of the driver’s seat is abstracted. You can barely feel the vibrations of the ground passing beneath you. Scant rays of sunlight made it through the tinted windows, and the tiny black rearview mirror is “just for decoration,” my Tesla-provided chaperone riding shotgun told me when I went to adjust it.
Driving this consumer tank, I began to understand why it was perfectly logical to mod your car the way Martin, the guy with the Halo showoff, had: It felt like I was inside a war simulation. Even the steering wheel was small and boxy like a Playstation controller. I was the player, and everyone outside was an NPC. When you drive around desensitized, feeling like you’re in a first-person shooter, you’re not just bracing yourself for battle at all times, you’re looking for it. It’s a game. It’s fun. This struck me as a very dangerous way to feel on a real road.
As we made our way back to the expo on the demo loop around the decaying military base, my chaperone, just like the Tesla rep with the mallet, started listing out the things a Cybertruck could withstand, including 9 millimeter and .45 caliber gunshots.
“Are we expecting to be shot at?” I wondered aloud, my fugue state fading as the test drive neared its end.
“Well, you know,” he said, giving me a serious look. “It’s just a sign of the times, man.”
