Dateline, Inner Mongolia…
WOW, whatever these folks did, definitely don’t do that in your Cybertruck! It blows up if you do. Offroading in a Cybertruck is perilous business, and it seems like our colleagues out east are learning that the hard way.
It brings me great displeasure to share a Twitter link, but I can’t find the video in better places. But! See the translation of the commentary below.
Inner Mongolia: China Cybertruck Wrecks Offroad
Take a look:
“It’s All Chinese to Me”
The voiceover track… it’s a little complicated. I paired my own ear (which is notoriously unreliable) with some software, and here’s what we came up with:
“Never seen this car before. Rolled from the top of the pot over the bottom of the pot. Cybertruck? [or possibly, ‘who isn’t watching?’]”
We ought to talk about fidelity in translation… the further you get from a Romance language, the more translating becomes guesswork. First off, I think “Pot” in this context is the dune. Like a Michigander has 50 different swear words that mean snow, I’m guessing your average Inner Mongolian person has a lot of ways to refer to sand dunes and all their various dimensions.
Second, the audio translation… I’m honestly not sure. The last sentence is either “Cybertruck?” or it is “Who didn’t see that?” Weirdly, they sound alike in Chinese. I’m pretty sure he’s saying Cybertruck. Let me know what you think, though!
Some Thoughts: Cybertrucks are not easily importable to China.
China, as you might have heard, is pretty big on rules. Authoritarian, you might say.
So, seeing a Cybertruck driving around in China, without any of the proper road (or offroad!) clearances, is surprising. Not that surprising when you consider the booming “gray market” for automobiles in China. The right bribe in the right place can make any auto road “legal.”
This one, though, is a total loss. The downshot of being a scofflaw is that there is no automobile insurance for scofflaws. So if you do silly things, like tearing around the dunes of Inner Mongolia in your Cybertruck, when you wreck, that is entirely on you.
Pour one out for our dear Pengyou. Something tells me they’ve got a replacement off-roading rig ready to go, if they’re wealthy enough to afford a Cybertruck, the shipping costs, and all the little bribes required to drive the vehicle on Chinese streets.
