Tesla CyberTruck Design Review: Elon has balls of steel

… and he lets his team throw them at the new truck…

We always complain that no company is thinking bold enough to follow a designers radical vision.
Well it looks like Rivian has the conventional Truck transformed into the family mans electric Truck of tomorrow.

But T E S L A delivers us the Marsian version.

Personal:

I for one love the unrestricted mindset, the result not so much. Me wants to be the good guy in my CiFi World, not the villain.
The whole unveiling event with Musk and Holhausen in their black clads looked like some distopian villiains came to earth with their armoured vehicles.

This leaves me rethinking what to purchase next. VW is out. Tesla was in. Until yesterday.

mo-i

P.S.:Let’s see how the ordering goes and what the stock market says.

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  1. I know I designed this in 8th grade. I’m looking through my scrap books hoping to prove my upcoming copyright infringement case.

  2. The “it’s practically armored, it can stop a 9mm”. Has America really turned into the Purge? In Canada we walk around with no flak jackets, carrying weapons is illegal, although no one has one to carry. My mayor is obsessed with bicyclists getting hit by cars. No one has ever said, “I really need a car that it will take a 9mm round.” It will be scary if I don’t see more people being creeped out by this.

  3. The design is bad. Surely, the rear head room is worse than a Veloster and pickups this size can double as family cars in the US. Who wants their teenage kid to bang their head into the roof all the time. That should be reserved only for the children of parents in mid-life crisis who buy Camaros. Moreover, the design is spartan and minimal at best, but honestly, boring is more like. Flat panels will show any small defect and tend to look dented because of how we perceive forms, so they are only ever seen on concept cars (see the wedge car thread). It also seems like the utility of the bed is comprised because it’s impossible to reach into from the sides of the vehicle. Was there any designer of this thing at all? I’m confused.

  4. Back to point 1, I did draw a lot of wedge and pyramid shaped cars in 8th grade. I wasn’t confident with curves, as inexperienced drawers tend to be. However, the copyright infringement is a joke.

I’m on the line of trying to decide if maybe this is a joke and they’re unveiling the real thing soon?

I let out a hearty guffaw when I saw it this morning.

  1. Good for them for stepping out of the box and pushing what might be considered a truck
  2. Try harder
  3. Cyber? I feel like that’s such a 90’s word.
  4. It’s got a KITT from Knight Rider steering wheel…

To AVClub - You might be on to something. Have you been following SpaceX’s Starship at all? That huge monstrosity out in a field in Texas? I can see the ripples and waves in the stainless steel sheet. Aircraft, Rockets, Spacecraft… need to be smooth. I feel like this whole thing is an elaborate long-con.

Also this:

Looking closely it is nothing like a DeLorean. The DeLorean is full of subtle curves, arced cross sections, nicely resolved details, and well handled form transitions. The CyberJunk doesn’t have any of that.

Different is easy, good is hard.

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You’re totally correct. My not very clear/subtle response was two-fold, though. The Tesla is also stainless steel, and I feel like Elon Musk is headed down the path of John DeLorean before long.

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I kinda like it.

Sure, needs a bit of crowning on surfaces and detail to be resolved, and looks like an N64 low polygon racing game generic vehicle, but I’m so over the overly aggressive vents and swoopy lines that everything else has… not to mention, most trucks are just overcompensating dick swinging with logos and grilles 300% larger than need be…

That said, commercialization of this and sales is another matter…

R

If you just described this thing to me in general terms - completely minimalized form, aggressive stance and proportion, bold and compromised vision - I would tell you it’s the perfect design for me. What we ultimately got, though, is just so lacking in polish and detail that I

A.) had an incredibly negative gut reaction for any number of reasons
2.) don’t actually believe this “truck” will see the light of day, at least in this form

If you’re going this minimal, I’m a much bigger fan of what Bollinger’s doing.

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First truck accessory company to make Cybertruck compatible truck nuts is going to be a millionaire…

Richard, some good thoughts, I want to respond to each as if we were having an IRL convo :slight_smile:

The contrarian in me likes it, the designer in me thinks it crass

StarFox called, he wants his low polys back :smiley: Actually, the headroom on StarFox’s ship seemed more appropriate. This kills me:

me too, but that isn’t a rational for whatever this is

but that is exactly what this is, just the tech bro version

All that said, I don’t think this is a product, I think it is a marketing stunt, and a brilliant one. The shine has started to wear off the brand. The Model 3 is shipping and it has quality issues and not a very good feature set for or fit and finish for the price point. While production still hasn’t ramped up globally and the brand made money but it was reveled if you took away the tax breaks they would be in the red and the competition from Ford and VW is getting ready to launch. As a marketing stunt it has pulled the spotlight right back on them. I think this might be solely that and not meant to be a product.

It goes against every previous behavior of the brand. The Model X, 3 and Y were locked down tight all the way to launch day. This is thrown out there with a totally different design language and a very low price… I don’t know guys, it seems cynical to me.

but whichever, enjoy some of the reactions. My daily new podcast said it looks like something architects use to draw blueprints which I thought was funny.

I could be wrong, maybe it looks great in person…


I think it’s awesome. Maybe it goes too far, maybe the details can be more resolved, maybe this is a pre-production marketing stunt.

But maybe this is just some batshit crazy design from a guy who builds rockets to go to Mars. I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing comes with some zero gravity mode.

I know it looks like it came out of Starfox but if this is a real product I think the haters (who were never in the market for that type of vehicle anyways) will continue to post about how much they love the new BMW iFart3Xdrive40i, and this thing could really break into the rough and functional world of being an actual pickup (including all of Tesla’s normal quality faults).

It’s a bold move cotton, let’s see how this pays off (Tesla stock down 6% in early trading - but they’re still way up after their last earnings call).

Bizarre. Plain and simple. Elon popped a few gummies with some other dudes who had a piece of parchment paper and a crayon. I seriously thought this was a joke (and may still be, yet very elaborate). That said, if we envisioned REV2 where the team takes into account all that the media + target consumers have to say, soften everything by 20%, dial back the roof rake and add actual utility instead of hard creases everywhere it begins to make sense.

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OK, deep breath.

Its a wild looking art piece, and one might expect TARS to come crawling out of the rear lid. Truck-wise it has more to do with a Honda Ridgeline. Styling looks like a negation of aerodynamic, streamlined form, which is odd for an electric vehicle as they usually attempt to optimize for this. The ‘bulletproof’ and ‘armored’ inspired materials are rather intellectually lazy and culturally cynical but probably still instinctually resonate with a “truck buyer”.

Will have to wait to see one on the road, whenever that happens…until then its a billionaire’s pet project.

merging this with the other topic already deep in conversation:

as an art piece it is a poor imitation of other car art pieces like this

I agree with you - its a culturally cynical marketing claim, or design approach, or material choice. Unfortunately its likely to resonate with the caricature of ‘truck buyer’ in North America. If you had the wherewithal to design a world that you wanted to live in, would you choose to go in a direction of ‘aggressive personal security’, or would you be more optimistic. I guess the founder is packing for Mars so this maybe fits within his worldview.

Its an efficient design. It will refresh in Keyshot in 0.1 seconds.

It’s the street version of the Warthog from Halo.

roger that, missed it, thanks