Cybertruck maker / FRI 11-5-21 / Jimmy of high-end footwear / Life-form led by Optimus Prime in the Transformers movies / Cabbage alternative / Automotive amenity that offers an annual Santa Tracker / Midcruise milieu / Protest movement launched in 2011 familiarly / Acorn by another name / Cousin of a firth / Paraguay's largest city after Asuncion / Big adventure through the concrete jungle

Constructor: Joseph Greenbaum

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: RAGTOPS (65A: Stingrays, often) —

1. a car with a convertible roof. (google)

The grid seems OK, but I couldn't find this one's wavelength at all, largely because of the clues, which managed to be both harder and duller than usual. The three longest answers are just fine, the rest was something of a shrug. Maybe if I were more into VETTEs and Stingrays, this puzzle would've spoken to me more. Or if I could hear the word GUESSTIMATE without wincing a little. Or if every little clue didn't seem like it was trying so hard to be hard (not so fun struggling to get short junk like ICI and IOU and ADOS). Or maybe it's the absolutely absurd and in my mind disqualifying repetition of the word STAR in the grid (STARDOM, SUPERSTAR). Maybe if the repeated "star" was the literal in-the-sky kind, I wouldn't have minded as much (or noticed), but this is a repetition in sense as well as look, and it's glaring. Makes the grid seem not well tended to, not carefully crafted. You have to rationalize doubling up on STAR, and once you start rationalizing your fill, you are done. I have no idea what an URBAN HIKE is (11D: Big adventure through the concrete jungle). I once walked from the Upper East Side to Chelsea after a crossword tournament—was that an URBAN HIKE? I thought I was just walking a long way, but maybe I was hiking and didn't know it. It was a bit of an adventure. Anyway, got URBAN and then pfft (that little pfft section, with IOU OUTS and SOIL (that clue???) (29D: Sovereign land, so to speak), was therefore even more fussy and annoying than it should've been). Does ONSTAR still exist? Do RAGTOPS have ONSTAR? Does anyone say "ragtop" anymore? I barely recollected the term—why did you need another name for "convertible" that wasn't really much shorter? Where is this PLUS"button" for enlarging an image? Is it on my keyboard? Because I have to hit *Command*-+ to enlarge things, I think. My image-editing software has a little magnifying glass icon with a PLUS symbol in it. Is that it? Nevermind, I don't care, it turns out. I just couldn't get into whatever it was that this puzzle cared about, couldn't relate to its [Vibe] (or ... SENSE? ... I guess), and that's just that. Bad day for me.