Note to Tesla and Elon Musk: Nobody cares if your Cybertruck can beat a Ford F-150 in a towing contest

• Tesla's Cybertruck "won" a disputed, theatrical tug-of-war with a Ford F-150 pickup.
• Ford challenged Tesla to a rematch.
• This is all fun stuff, but nobody cares how much the Cybertruck can tow because it can tow as much as a full-size pickup is supposed to tow.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk loves theater. He also likes to troll the traditional auto industry, stoking the belief among his fanbase that Tesla is creating the cars of the future rather than simply remarketing electric technologies that have been around for decades.

This is why, after Porsche claimed a lap-time record for its new Taycan EV at a German racetrack called the the Nürburgring, Musk and Tesla quickly sent a modified Model S to the venue. It wasn't so much that Tesla thought it could beat Porsche, which has been turning 'Ring lap times as a matter of course for years. Rather, it was a way to keep Tesla in the conversation, ensuring that "Taycan" and "Tesla" were never far apart in a sentence.

That same script is being written with the company's new Cybertruck, revealed last week.

The Cybertruck is insane, in a good way, with an out-there design that's truly reset Tesla's overarching story and shaken the blahs out of the burgeoning EV market.

Cybertruck is impressive, but not wildly impressive

The specs are also impressive. But they aren't wildly impressive. Specifically, the Cybertruck's maximum (theoretical) towing capacity is according to Tesla more than 14,000 pounds. That's with Tesla's new triple-motor configuration, and given the ample torque provided by electric motors, to be expected.

The best-selling gas-powered pickup - since the Reagan administration! - is the Ford F-150, and its max towing capacity is just over 13,000 pounds. The difference between the Cybertruck and the F-150 is largely irrelevant, and not because properly configured F-150s have been towing 13,000-plus pounds for quite some time and the Cybertruck won't technically demonstrate its practical capabilities for two years.

It's irrelevant because if a Ford customer wants to tow more than the F-150 can handle, they move up to a larger and more powerful F-Series pickup. The company offers F-250, 350, 450, and 550 models - the latter of which can tow more than 30,000 pounds.

But Tesla knows the value of tweaking the giant, and so the company staged a tug-of-war between a Cybertruck and an F-150, claiming victory and prompting Ford to ask for a rematch.

This is all in good fun for Ford, which leads but doesn't dominate the full-size pickup truck market in the US; Chevy's Silverado and RAM's 1500 round out the Detroit Big Three's flagships, and each automaker sells plenty of trucks every year. Dearborn, Michigan, is certainly delighted to have Musk choose the F-150 as the Cybertruck's half-ton agon. Free press is free press, and Tesla is the undisputed king of getting people to talk about its products without having to spend any actual advertising money.

There's a towing standard, and pretty much everybody meets it

Ultimately, however, towing capacity in full-size trucks is important only in that there's a standard, dictated largely by what a customer needs to tow. All the full-size trucks in the US market can, if correctly configured, tow about the same amount of weight. All the stuff that would require towing is designed to fit into this framework. If you're significantly behind in this context, then you're the Nissan Titan and Toyota Tundra - and you can still tow 9,000-10,000 pounds. That's basically good enough.

So, the question: If the Cybertruck can win a tug-of-war with an F-150, would that make you choose the Tesla over the Ford?

Of course not. You were probably going to choose the Tesla anyway, and all you needed to know was that it could tow what the Ford can tow, which is to say that it can basically tow what any other full-sizer is supposed to be able to tow. this is classic Musk: He expects mad props simply for meeting a standard. Tesla managed to build a few hundred thousand cars in 2018! WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT! But Ford does that in a couple of weeks.

Ford is going to roll out a hybrid F-150 next year, by the way, and there's a pretty good chance that it will have a much higher tow rating than the gas-powered truck. A prototype all-electric F-150 recently towed a million pounds, but it's not like any person needs to tow a million pounds.

Tesla degrades its cool factor

The upshot here is that with Nürburgring lap times and tow-wars, Tesla is seriously degrading its cool. Nürburgring lap times are a total dork-fest for car geeks; the practical value for automakers is to prove that their performance vehicles can sustain that performance over an eight-minute stretch (a great 'Ring lap-time is less than that, and the fastest cars have gotten around in under seven).

Tow-wars are useful to the degree that they prove the Big Three are doing enough business to throw gauntlets at each other, rather than hunkering down to ride out a recession or dealing with a spike in fuel prices that clonks sales of big pickups.

For Musk, this is all worth it, despite the silliness and at the expense of Tesla's cool, because it makes his pickup that doesn't really exist yet a sort of phantom competitor for the most successful pickup in human history.

But for anyone who might be thinking about buying an electric pickup in the next five years, it's a pointless waste of attention.