I Returned My Cybertruck Over Worries for My Kids’ Safety

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ben Baker, a Tesla owner living in Sacramento, California. Business Insider has verified his identity and former Cybertruck ownership. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I have been a big tech guy as far as I can remember.

In my youth, I liked space, I liked the idea of SpaceX, and I liked all this stuff that Elon Musk was doing — and he seemed like a Democrat at the time. So, I was like, “Ok, this guy is awesome. He’s doing all this cool stuff.”

I was a Democrat my whole life but it wasn’t too far back that I started to see the country getting more and more divided. It just felt like there was a huge push to run to as far left as people could go and that was a real shock to me being a Democrat. So I decided to switch to being an independent.

Somebody keyed my Tesla Model Y not too long ago after the election and I was like, “OK, that’s no big deal.” I live in California, which is a Democratic state, and so I kind of figured that there would be some of that stuff.

I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal until I went and bought a Cybertruck.

My daughter asked me to return my Cybertruck

The first week I drove the Cybertruck, I took my family to Starbucks in it.

While my family went in, I took some cool pictures of it and was thinking, “This is super awesome.”

As I was doing that, three people walked behind me and started looking at me and laughing. Then one of them called me a Nazi.

I go, “What are you talking about? I’m just buying this awesome truck. I think it’s awesome. I’m not a Nazi.” They were like, “Whatever, Nazi.” I thought was weird.

Later on, one of my daughters told me that if I kept the Cybertruck, she was going to get bullied. She said, “Dad, under no circumstances keep this.” My son, who leans right, said I should be able to drive the car I want and not have to worry about what people say.

But then I started thinking about if one of them is driving the Tesla Cybertruck down the road and people get out of the car and start vandalizing it in front of her or when she’s driving it. My daughter is young, she’s just had her license maybe a year. That’s terrifying to me.

I’m a father and I have to do the right thing by my kids, which is to protect them. Maybe if I had all the money in the world to own the Cybertruck myself and then send them to school with another vehicle, then great, it would be on me if it got damaged.

But I can’t have that happen to them in that vehicle. And who knows how far these guys will take it. They could harm my kids physically — and I couldn’t live with myself if that happened. To me, it just wasn’t worth seeing my daughter live in fear of the vehicle getting vandalized at their school.

I ended up taking it back and Tesla was really cool about it. I was able to unwind everything.

This doesn’t feel like freedom to me

I feel like protesting has always been the American way.

I think people should have the right to protest — but they should have the right to protest without destruction. That’s where the lines have been crossed.

Nothing that’s happening right now is logical at all. It’s all emotionally driven and ideologically cultivated. My kids are afraid of taking this nice vehicle that’s fast, awesome, and cool and saves on gas. It’s probably great for the environment.

It’s a lot of money to invest in a vehicle and to buy one of these Cybertrucks, and I grew up from nothing. My mom was a single mother on government assistance so I had to work super hard to get where I’m at.

What’s worse is that I’m a huge fan of this technology. I really want a Cybertruck. I think they’re freaking awesome. They’re really fun to drive. They’re roomy and spacious. I wasn’t buying it for other people. I already own a Tesla which I absolutely love, but I was buying the Cybertruck for me because I wanted to drive the future.

I thought this was the land of the free, but this doesn’t sound like freedom at all to me.

When you start going down a pathway of saying, “This is what we think you should believe, and if you don’t believe this, then we’re going to come at you and we’re going to take away what you’ve earned.” That sounds like something else — and it doesn’t sound good.

I don’t think that hate and division are the way forward for this country or the world. As long as we keep doing that and trying to put people into boxes and categorize them and label them, that’s just going to create more division and hate and it’s super unfair.

We have got to find a way forward together that brings back basic human decency but also common sense so that we cheer for American companies to grow and thrive and help our pensions, versus cheering for the fall of an American company.