Cant Rails and Tariffs

The press was at it again. Somewhere between a trade war and a cant rail, they’d decided a conspiracy was afoot—a sprawling techno-drama where tariffs tangoed with stainless steel, and adhesive became the villain no one expected.

In Shanghai, the skies were pretty clear for spring. The Gigafactory there, affectionately dubbed GigaSH by its engineers, hummed along, producing Model 3s and Model Ys like a rice cooker on overdrive. These were the crowd-pleasers, the darlings of the People’s Republic, and conveniently, they were exempt from the latest round of retaliatory tariffs that turned U.S.-built exports into financial lead balloons.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the Cybertruck—a creation so angular it looked like it was drawn by a seven-year-old with a ruler—was having… issues. The kind that made headlines, not crashes–yet.

A stainless steel strip—called a cant rail—had the unfortunate habit of detaching during high-speed wind serenades. The government wasn’t amused at videos of dudes casually peeling Cybertrucks like bananas were going viral.

The NHTSA, perhaps feeling left out of the global drama, recalled all of them. Forty-six thousand ninety-six Cybertrucks, built between November 2023 and February 2025, now needed a stronger adhesive. The good kind that doesn’t fall victim to something called “environmental embrittlement,” which sounded like a progressive rock band.

Across the Pacific, Tesla’s Chinese website had gone suspiciously quiet about the Model S and Model X. Orders for the U.S.-built luxury cars had vanished like a Silicon Valley founder after an SEC subpoena.

Some journalists said it was because of the new 125 percent tariff slapped on U.S. imports. Others tried to connect it to the Cybertruck recall despite the Model S and X having nothing in common with the panel-peeling metal monsters.

But they made the connection anyway because nothing says journalism by mashing square pegs into round holes and calling it investigative reporting. Never mind that Model S and X had always been a niche in China. Never mind that the real issue was probably the sticker shock from a 125 percent surcharge plus customs plus a few silent nods from bureaucrats who hadn’t forgotten past tweets about Taiwan.

Back home, the chaos wasn’t just economic. It was chemical.

In Colorado, a woman got arrested for tossing Molotov cocktails at Tesla showrooms. “Nazi cars,” she’d painted across the building, apparently unaware that the actual Nazis had preferred VWs.

In South Carolina, a man torched charging stations. Investigators found DOGE-related ramblings in his wallet and hand-scrawled screeds about government surveillance. Nobody knew what it meant, but it sure sounded Tesla-adjacent.

The same thing happened in Las Vegas, where the media was quick to point out the suspect was an Independent voter, though he never cast a ballot.

Tesla shares? Down 42 percent in 2025. Some blamed the recalls. Others blamed the trade war. Still, others blamed the vibes.

In the meantime, Tesla was fixing cant rails, answering hotline calls, and mailing out recall letters. Meanwhile, a team of exhausted engineers calculating wind shear coefficients worked while the press wrote think pieces about “America’s Technological Decline.”

But inside the walls of GigaSH, the Model 3s kept rolling out–smooth and tariff-free. And in the back of a Cybertruck somewhere in Nevada, a forgotten cant rail shimmered like a silver snake, loose and flapping in the desert breeze –and no one carried.

Everything is connected if you squint hard enough or on a deadline.