It looks like a joke, but it’s the most important car in 60 years
I can’t think of another industry more conservative than the automotive one. Aircraft perhaps, but the traditionally huge profit margins of cars have allowed automakers to innovate even less than aircraft, which run on thin margins and almost have to be on the technological bleeding edge.
The reasons for the two to be risk-averse are obvious—if you make a mistake, people die. The effect is magnified in cars because in 2017, the last year for which statistics are available, Americans moved themselves 4.8 trillion miles by passenger car and truck which is seven times more than by air.
Combine seven times the exposure to risk with a market that seems happy to drive five-year old F150s, and you’ve got a recipe for stagnation.
The car industry is so hidebound, in fact, the last car which challenged the status quo in any significant way was introduced during the Eisenhower administration. Chevy’s 1960 Corvair was an answer to the need for a smaller, more economical car with a rear engine. It came with turbocharging (eventually), an air-cooled alloy flat six, rear transaxle and styled like a European sports car. Aside from some passing layout similarities to a VW Beetle (or the related Porsche 356), it truly broke the mold.
And in doing so, it looked...alien. People literally didn’t understand what they were looking at—Corvair had no front grille, a low hood and trunk in the era of tailfins, and flat floors. Without a driveshaft running from the engine in front, it was able to have a different set of proportions than anything else coming from not just the Big Three, but even the stylistically adventurous little guys like Studebaker or recently departed Nash or Kaiser.
When Tesla introduced their long-promised pickup, the Cybertruck, in November the general reaction was uncomfortable amusement. Was this a real thing? Was it a joke? It rapidly became obvious that this was a production vehicle and the consensus turned to scorn. It had none of the reference points for automotive styling that we’re used to seeing so it had to be interpreted through whatever lens that journalists could come up with.
Usually, that was a sort of free association with the shape, which generally reminded people of building blocks and was equated with “childish” or “primitive.” But that wasn’t what was going on. Not at all.
Tesla made a deliberate decision, based in part of the practical considerations of the stainless steel structure, to ignore all the conventions of automotive design. Aside from four wheels at the corners, it shares almost nothing with any car, let alone any truck. And yet, it fills all the necessary functions just fine.
It’s coefficient of drag is probably not wonderful, but will still be better than a Dodge, Ford or Chevrolet. You can see out of it and drive it comfortably and the tetrahedron shape is certainly going to be exceptionally strong and rigid. It is truly a reinvention, asking us to reshape our ideas around it, instead of conforming to them.
In releasing the angular, unrecognizable Cybertruck, Tesla has done something that few people under the age of sixty will remember ever seeing before, a radical reimagining of what a vehicle can be.
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.