When Tesla Motors rolled out its original Model S in fall 2011, some folks (myself included) were a bit underwhelmed by the rather restrained styling of Elon Musk’s opening salvo in the electric vehicle wars.
To me, it looked like a next-gen Mazda6, which wouldn’t have been a reach—given that Musk had poached Mazda U.S. chief designer Franz von Holzhausen with barely enough time to pull out his sketch pad before needing to design Tesla’s franchise car.
When I asked Franz about the Model S styling, he patiently swept aside my thinly veiled critique about his design and said the conservative approach was intentional.
“People need to think really hard about taking this leap into uncharted territory,” he said at the time. “I didn’t want to alienate people by creating a vehicle that was awkward and weird. We wanted to create the cornerstone from where the brand is going to build.”
In other words: One thing at a time. Make the transition from gasoline to electric as seamless as possible. Don’t make it hard on early adopters by making them explain to their neighbors not only their decision to go electric but also why they were driving some goofy-looking vehicle.
Then Franz added a kicker: Expect traditional styling for the first generation of cars. Let Tesla get established. Then look out.
Guess the second generation has arrived.
The Cybertruck concept that Elon rolled out in the wake of the 2019 Los Angeles Auto Show is anything but goofy looking. It is seriously radical, like something Arnold Schwarzenegger will emerge from in the next Terminator movie. No one will look at a pickup truck the same way again.
In silhouette, the Cybertruck looks like the collision of two doorstops (thanks, Ed Loh, for that vivid description). Head on, or from an offset perspective, it’s all hard angles and aggression. The testosterone levels are off the charts. Musk already (jokingly?) tweeted about a “pressurized version” for when he and his crew of interplanetary voyagers need transport on Mars.
In purely automotive terms, the Cybertruck may pay homage to exotic ’70s concepts like the Maserati Boomerang, Ferrari Modulo, and Lancia Stratos Zero, but that’s where the disco-era tribalism ends. Line it up against all the trucks currently on sale, and they all look ancient. Forget the 2002 Thunderbird, this is what J Mays was searching for when he dropped the term “retrofuturism” a few years back.
To the unpracticed eye, the lines of a Cybertruck may look basic, like a kid’s Tangram puzzle spilt on the dining room table. But it actually owes more to very complicated modern-era military design—from the F-22 stealth fighter to the Zumwalt-class destroyer.
“People will argue that this is overly simplistic. I call it un-design,” Franz said in a recent interview. “Erasing the normalizing of design out of our heads was a long, drawn-out process. We started out with a shape like this, then we had to go all around the world to come back again to this. It’s so foreign from what we’ve done. “Let’s get to the construction: Seriously, 3mm-thick stainless steel as the body panels? The last stainless steel car was the DeLorean (although Ford and Allegheny Ludlum steel conspired on a limited promotional run back in the 1930s and again in the ’60s). But the Cybertruck reimagines its use. Durable? Bulletproof? Yep and yep.
Another cool thing about stainless steel: It gets stronger as the temperatures drop. You know the average temperature on Mars? Minus-80 Fahrenheit. Talk about protecting your design for the future.
In the 1990s, when Nissan rolled out its first lozenge-shaped vehicles like the Altima and Infiniti J30, the late Jerry Hirshberg, then-head of Nissan Design International, referred to his new wave as breaking away from “the tyranny of the wedge.” It wasn’t long before the entire industry followed suit with their own slippery suppositories.
With the Cybertruck, Franz von Holzhausen has broken Tesla away from the tyranny of the lozenge. The wedge is back.