Keep on truckin’

Elon Musk has explained why the windows of Tesla’s tank-like Cybertruck smashed during a humiliating launch.

Chief designer Franz von Holzhausen cut a gleeful figure as he prepared to throw a steel ball at the armoured glass – but it shattered on impact. “Let’s try another one,” he beseeched his boss in a hellscape fast resembling a space-age boules tournament gone wrong. The second window met the same fate.

The problem was, according to Musk, the order of the demonstration. In retrospect, he said, they shouldn’t have hit the vehicle with a sledgehammer before reaching for their balls.

To Musk – and Von Holzhausen, who’s probably already been sent to Mars without supper for this debacle – we say accidents happen. But see it as a wake-up call; a lesson that cockiness gets you nowhere.

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. If Musk had his way, the steel ball would’ve bounced straight off the window and into one of Von Holzhausen’s eye sockets; the billionaire’s version of a Love Island hunk being taken out by a cork at an Ibiza champagne party.

It’s time for Musk to get serious, lest a ball through a window is but an apéritif for one of his tunnels crushing a city of commuters – or worse, one of his brain-computer interfaces mistakenly playing footage of James Corden and Kanye West’s Airpool Karaoke.