First of all, “only panel damage” can easily total a car, especially if the damage is distributed across a lot of panels (as is typically the case in a rollover) and even more especially if it’s panels that are welded in and comprise part of the car’s unibody. The labor adds up fast.

And that’s for regular panels that you can get mostly straight and then fair out with Bondo before painting. But this is a fucking Cybertruck with bare stainless steel: they have to bodywork every single panel to be absolutely perfect (including surface finish), which absolutely fucking skyrockets those labor costs. Hell, normal car-body workers don’t even know to go about doing that in the first place; you’d have to take it to a specialist – if you can even find one, considering that the only market for that skill before the Cybertruck showed up would’ve been the extremely occasional DeLorean!

Second, if you look at the pics in the linked Reddit thread, in the fourth picture you can see how the A-pillar is wavy (buckled) – that means the unibody is fucked. Even if the roof itself looked okay, and it doesn’t, the whole thing is pushed in and no longer located at the correct point in space relative to the rest of the vehicle. Fixing that, not only so the doors close properly but also so the strength of the frame isn’t compromised to be unsafe for the next rollover, is complicated in and of itself.

Third (and admittedly this is a little more speculative; I’m not an insurance agent so I don’t know for sure), it could be that they simply can’t get the parts to repair the vehicle (such as that glass roof) at any price, and therefore have no choice but to total it regardless.

But was it a cybertruck?