Call me out as mad, blind, say what you will, but in my humble opinion, the Cybertruck is the greatest car design of the last two decades.
Here’s why.
We’re still driving around in things that look a close resemblance to what your typical 1960’s car looked like. A two or either three-box, fairly squared-off design.
Those futuristic cars we’d all been promised back in the ’80s never appeared.
1962 Hillman Minx Estate – https://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C1117643
2019 Volvo V60 Estate
Instead, year after year, manufacturers are too scared to mix up the formula too much.
So Volkswagen bring out the ‘all-new Golf’, which apart from a few taughter lines here and there is the same overall look for the last 10 years.
Audi bring out an ‘all-new’ vehicle like the Q3, which is a 15% downsize photocopy of the Q5. The same goes for the A3, A4, A6 and A8. It’s the same overall design with a few tweaks made bigger or smaller.
Land Rover do it too. They’ve bought out an ‘all-new’ Evoque, which adds the front and rear of a Velar to an Evoque which is nearly a nine-year-old design. The ‘all-new’ Discovery Sport looks the spitting image of the old one.
It’s prevelant across the car industry. To put it bluntly, it’s bullshit.
Yes, there are marques who have rocked the boat. BMW with the i3 and i8, Lexus with the LC, the Honda ‘e’ and to a lesser extent VW with the XL 1 – but that can’t be applauded as it was a ridiculously high price, sold too few and were all lease-based experimentation vehicles.
Year after year manufacturers pedal out the same shit, and people buy it because that’s what’s on offer. Unless you have a lottery winning ticket hiding under your sofa, you can’t afford the edgy, angular looks of a Lamborghini Huracan or a Koenigsegg Regera.
Granted, not everyone wants something futuristic, for them, they can drive a Skoda Fabia.
But I strongly believe there’s a huge majority out there that want to feel like their driving the future.
Something totally different, like nothing else out there. And that’s the reason why the Cybertruck is the greatest car design of at least the last 20 years.
It pushes boundaries like nothing has since, well, probably when I was born in the late ’80s. The last vehicle that truly experimented with radically different styling for an affordable, mainstream vehicle was the DeLorean.
Which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Cybertruck due to its angles and stainless steel skin.
Every year we see concepts rolled out at show after show, they all look incredible and garner so much interest, but sadly all are stillborn.
Nissan bought out the IDx concept a few years ago, after masses of attention they admitted there were no plans to make anything like it. Peugeot has said that their e-LEGEND concept will go into production, but will it look identical to that stunning concept?
Say what you may – ‘the Cybertruck looks like what a six-year-old would draw’, with its polygon angular shapes. But it goes to show what’s capable in this day and age, what could be produced and just isn’t.
Instead, the same old regurgitated crap is put into our showrooms on an almost endless cycle. Manufacturers too concerned about sales figures and profit to dare dream as their car designers do.
In terms of the models Tesla already sell, they’re all superb offerings. They’ve nailed the EV formula like nobody else, and why’s that? Infrastructure.
It makes living with an EV for long-distance travel a breeze. You don’t have to put up with awful third-party charging stations that have a myriad of different payment plans, cards, schemes or invariably just don’t work.
But I don’t particularly want a Tesla. The Model 3 is smaller and far more suitable for our tight streets, and the performance model would be epic.
Sadly, it’s well out of my budget and in all honesty, it’s just not different enough. The current Tesla range all just look like ‘another car’.
Then in comes the Cybertruck. I have no need for a pickup, no need for a vehicle that big. It’s no doubt going to be unwieldy over here on UK roads. In fact, I have no particular need for an EV. By Jove do I want one though!
Just look at it.
I certainly don’t think it’s a pretty design, in fact when I first saw it I was like ‘WTF?!’. Yet the more I look, the more I think how incredible it is. It’s bold, ballsy and looks like no other vehicle I’ve ever seen on the road.
How on earth can this be a road-legal, normal, street driving vehicle? It’s insane.
If the pricing translates as the exchange rate suggests, £31,000 for the entry-level model is astounding for something that looks so unique.
The Cybertruck will be an iconic design.
And I hope it goes some way to pushing the boundaries of car manufacturers. They all need a shove far away from that comfort zone.
You’ve now seen what’s possible, so why are we all still driving around in two box designs that can relate back nearly 40 years?
car design, cybertruck, design, tesla, tesla cybertruck
Owner / Editor of Carwitter - French car fiend, hot hatch lover.
Freelance writer and car journalist I've turned my passion for cars into my livelihood.
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