Driven in Plain Sight

The Mask Slips as Cybertruck Electrifies the Pick-Up Market.

During the Second World War, Allied pilots, unable to read maps at night, used streetlights to outline their targets. Consequently, German cities enacted black-outs to lead bombers astray. All cities except Constance, a lakeside-city bordering Switzerland. As their Swiss neighbours had no need to extinguish their lights, Constance also left theirs on, confusing pilots into thinking their combined glow neutral territory. The plan worked. Visitors to Constance today will be surrounded by substantial mediaeval buildings, jambs engraved with dates from centuries ago. Brutalist concrete structures are absent.

The value of blending-in is overlooked today, and it was with some surprise when Tesla launched the Model S that it seemed so, well, ordinary. It entered the market at a time when show cars were testing the public appeal of electric vehicles with new proportions and design characters. Yet here was an electric car that did not at first glance differ significantly from exhaust-emitting counterparts. It was a four-door fastback with conventional doors, bodyside, lights and even a black panel where the grille would have been. In fact, despite the changes under the hood, there was little to truly distinguish the Tesla Model S. The irresistible urge to create an icon had been resisted. Instead, the Model S discreetly slid into the traffic.

No-one foresaw that the Tesla Model S would be in production a decade later. Styling that seemed conspicuously unshowy instead enshrined the more modern concept of up-gradability. By its 2016 facelift, over 80 new features had been added. The zeitgeist too, has been kind. The bodyside theme of pronounced fenders front and rear separated by a lower, more horizontal shoulder-line has been found on cars as disparate as the Ford S-Max and 2014 Audi Prologue concept.

Well, the zeitgeist didn’t see the Cybertruck coming, Elon Musk dropping Cybertruck into the pick-up market like I.M.Pei's Pyramid in the Palais du Louvre. The first sight hits you like a punch: no warning; no first-then-second-read. Not even a novelty door concept to hook you in. Just a visual slap-in-the-face before it walks off, those corners still scratching your eye weeks later. The swagger of it is outrageous: an expletive filled with bravado, and a signal of Musk’s irrepressible impatience with the automotive industry to do things differently. So brazen that it can’t even be bothered with logos. You can’t help but admire the gall of it.

To achieve this knock-out punch, a lot of training has gone in. The three lines that create the cabin are paramount where is the high point of the centre-line; what is the angle of the shoulder line; and what is the proportion between the front and rear planes. No matter how uncompromising the execution is, the balance is correct, though the chance to exaggerate the fenders that plant the Model S so successfully seems a missed opportunity.

And how refreshing to see material-led design once more, as the stiffness of the toughened steel-alloy demands flat sections. There must surely be designers at Lamborghini lamenting the chance lost to mix the bodyside of a Lamborghini LM002 with the profile of a Countach. A shame, then, that the interior is so reduced, for beside the monarchic Mercedes-Benz GLS Maybach, launched the same week, the Cybertruck is the perfect anarchist. With a better-appointed interior, it would worry the statement-making D-segment.

In thwarting every pre-launch Photoshopper, the Cybertruck proves how imagination can trump iterative evolution, safe-guarding creative minds from machine-learning (at least until someone programs the Oddball paradigm). No matter how many chess-moves AI learns, nothing will prepare it for when you play Twister instead. But as in architecture when Modernism begat Brutalism as form overshadowed the human quotient, so Cybertruck conflicts with the car that really put Tesla on the map: the Model S.