I’m not sure there has ever been a vehicle that inspires so much simultaneous adoration and revulsion as the Tesla Cybertruck. The thing isn’t even out yet, and there’s already people both ready to burn one in (a simple, plywood) effigy and those that are seriously considering starting to pray to it instead of their current deity. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything like this before.
A fantastic example of this can be seen when, just yesterday, Tesla’s lead designer Franz von Holzhausen showed up to the Malibu Cars and Coffee with a pre-production (I hope) Cybertruck wearing a matte black wrap. Autojournalist Daniel Golson spotted the thing and took these pictures you see here, and there are two really interesting revelations: the surprisingly rough build quality of this thing, and, even better, the alarmingly rough interactions of Tesla -philes and -phobes in the comments of Daniel’s X (something something former Twitter something) post. Because they’re nuts.
Here’s Daniel’s initial post, which has been retweeted by over 1,200 people:
Don’t worry everyone, the Cybertruck looks horrible in matte black too pic.twitter.com/hMu0mUk1zJ
— Daniel Golson (@dsgolson) November 5, 2023
And here are some more pictures of the wrapped Cybertruck:
Then Daniel posted these close-up pictures of the Cybertruck, which reveals some pretty iffy build quality and panel fitment issues, and I think this is really where all the fun starts. I mean, look at this:
Oof, that’s um, not great, even if we ignore the wrap wrinkles. There are lots of tricky angles coming together there, I get that, but that hood doesn’t even really look closed. Here’s another angle:
All those angles and straight edges can be pretty unforgiving for this type of thing; I think it’d be challenging to build well for almost any carmaker, if that helps. Of course, that could be part of why other carmakers haven’t decided to build a car like this, with these huge, flat, stainless body panels.
Getting these wheelarch trims to fit flush seems a challenge, too. But by far the most egregious issue had to be with the tailgate, which looked like this when closed:
I’m pretty sure that the tailgate is supposed to meet and close flush with the bedsides there, and the rear taillight bar is supposed to line up seamlessly with the light units build into the bedsides.
As you can see, it’s not, by at least a good quarter inch or so? Maybe a bit more? Also, even in matte black, this all feels like commercial kitchen equipment, somehow. And, yes, with the bed tonneau up, you do lose the rear window.
Also interesting is the size of this support pillar under the steeply-raked A-pillar, where the rear-view mirror is mounted. It’s a pretty thick block of metal and plastic that does make for a hell of a blind spot:
🤡🤡🤡 https://t.co/yuJz8QB0Y2 pic.twitter.com/YdTZkw5dZI
— Daniel Golson (@dsgolson) November 5, 2023
There are lots more good pictures here, too, beyond what was tweeted, which we have purchased from Daniel to run here:
Of course, when Daniel pointed out some of these issues – many of which, to be fair, may be solved when the final production Cybertruck hits the market – he got a lot of predictably cranky responses from the Cybertruck faithful.
The type of response varies a lot, but there are a few key staples, like the reminder that most of us have not, in fact, designed and developed a full-size automobile and placed it into mass production, and I guess that means you can’t complain about any production car as a result:
You know, it’s how there are no movie critics that have not produced entire movies, or food critics who have never run a restaurant, or cultural critics who have never started an entire society.
There’s also the attacks based on doing a lot of Googling for pictures of the original poster, and saying some shit about their style choices:
This is only a tiny look at the unacceptable harassment Golson has dealt with from Cybertruck diehards.
This interaction, though, I think is my favorite:
Here’s a nice example of the truly unhinged culty Tesla fan, where changing the world comes up:
I do have to disagree with Daniel on this point: I think Back to the Future picked the DeLorean BECAUSE it was cool:
Ah, Cybertruck madness! I hope it never ends!
All photos: Daniel Golson/The Autopian
How dare he mock the Delorean in Back to the Future! It was the perfect car because they needed something that took 5 minutes to get to 88mph because of plot effect.
As for the Cybertruck, Tesla really needs to just rip off the bandaid and get this thing in the hands every journalist out there. They are just delaying the inevitable panning of the thing. These are the best pictures I’ve seen of close up details, and it seams like every choice in the design process, they purposefully chose the more difficult, more expensive, and more bloat choices.
While I think the Cybertruck is stupid and I don’t hold a high opinion of Elon, for the most part I think Tesla cars are good and can see why people would buy one. But the complete lack of objectivity displayed by Tesla-stans who can’t fathom that their beloved brand may actually have flaws that even John Davis would have complained about on Motorweek in 1985 and hand-wave them as a non-issue is a major turn off to Tesla ownership.
It’ll go down in history much the same way the Hummer H2 did.
I always appreciate a fridge that comes in black… or white… or stainless. The options are unlimited!
I have a thing I regularly say about Twitter since Musky bought it and that is:
The Clusterfuck Continues Unabated.
It clearly applies to the Cybertruck too.
I don’t understand it when people say that twitter has gotten worse. It’s not better or worse, you are just using it wrong.
If only there was data to back up Crank Shaft, like a drop in users, massive drop in advertising, massive drop in value, or research on the rise of hate speech and amplification of it (some by Musk). Oh that’s right there is.
Ok, but who cares about any of that crap? I certainly don’t. It’s not my money or my problem. I don’t see ads b/c I use adblockers and the hate speech stuff goes in every direction anyway if you are looking for it. It always has and always will.
If you stick to the people you follow and not read all the bullshit general topics, it works just fine.
Oh I get it, like how a Blackberry is still a great device, just use it as a paperweight, not for connecting to anything.
Say what? Read what I wrote again. A defunct physical device is probably not the best analogy here.
Actually is a fine analogy.. Your original statement was “I don’t understand when people say twitter has gotten worse”. I gave a few metrics by which it has gotten worse, you say “Who cares about any of that crap”. So to my analogy; if you don’t care if a Blackberry can connect to anyone or any network, it’s still a fine device.
You don’t understand why people say Twitter has gotten worse because you use it very differently than most people. Further you might want to care about advertising as it’s the only thing keeping the site up
Except that a Blackberry is a 15-year-old discontinued piece of physical hardware (which no longer performs any of its intended tasks) that has no bearing on the topic at hand regarding the functionality of a social media site.
Your “metrics” do not affect my use case in any way, as I have already stated, hence I don’t care about them. Also, I highly doubt you can provide any actual evidence that I use Twitter “differently than most” with tangible data, and even if that were the case, I wouldn’t care about that either because it works fine for me.
Finally, if Twitter goes under it’s no sweat off my back as I don’t try to monetize my account. I can get my sports/music/science info elsewhere. It’s nice to have it aggregated in one spot for free, but there will always be another one.
For as much as I don’t get the claims that the “Twitter sky” is falling because of Musk, I understand less the people who are wringing their hands over something that they have no say in and seeming to derive glee from, just because of some sort of (in my best guess) high school level groupthink clique guidelines.
I think you are putting too much energy into getting worked up about something that ultimately has zero effect on your life. It’s not healthy.
Well I’m not even a twitter user so..
But, you shouldn’t get so worked up defending the site, it’s not healthy.
Typical.
Tesla’s chief designer is named after a stack of firewood? I wish I could think of a punny joke.
Not quite…while Holzhausen doesn’t really mean anything, Holzhaus means house of wood (house made from wood). FYI 😉
I wonder if -zen is somehow related to the -sen (“son of”) suffix in German surnames?
Unlikely: if you look closely, you will see it isn’t -sen, but -en. I’m no linguist, but that ending is sometimes used to make a name out of a word (with a meaning). Like in this example, Holzhausen sounds sounds to me (a native German speaker) like Woodtown (or house-of-wood-town)
Here in the US I was always told the circular stacks were “holz hausen” after the supposedly German name for them. It might just be a dumb Americanization of a nonexistent term.
https://www.treehugger.com/how-build-beehive-shaped-holz-hausen-wood-pile-video-4857753
That is interesting, I have never heard that. I could see that a stack of wood could resemble a little house, so maybe German immigrants called them Holzhäuser, which is the plural of Holzhaus. For a non-German speaker, those two sound similar enough (Holzhausen and Holzhäuser).
I gotta say this method of circular stacking is far superior to the more common alternating tower approach. A cylinder is perfect because you can measure how it’s drying by the loss of height over time. Also you chuck half the wood into the center instead of stacking. More time for drinking.
It does look like a little building, and maybe Haus was used differently before. It’s also totally possible that the contemporary word Haus evolved from Hausen over time, and maybe it still exists in a local dialect.
“The type of response varies a lot, but there are a few key staples, like the reminder that most of us have not, in fact, designed and developed a full-size automobile and placed it into mass production…”
God I hope one of them comes at me with this.
I’m ready with the popcorn!
“Oh hey, that doesn’t look bad in black, actually, so what’s the – BWWEAUGH” (or however you type the Hank Hill noise, iunno)
Man, if we let Teslas stans get away with acting like this, maybe I should have piped up more about Saturn’s fantastic plastic panel gaps.
The thing about this that kills me is that I can kind of see that there’s an El Camino re-make underneath this ridiculousness and that would actually be kind of neat
Wait. There is a head designer for this thing? I thought Elon just ripped one of his kid’s drawings off the fridge and went with that.
Elon drew it himself.
Because he’s such a stable genius.
No view out the back with the bed cover…
Mmmm I would hope tesla solves this with a camera and ‘smart’ rear view mirror that has a screen behind the rear view camera glass to show what the rear view camera sees…
I love auto companies trying something different and this sure IS different
My questions are how will it perform as a truck?
In real world will it really be easy to live with? Really get 300 miles of real world range? Something Teslas seem to struggle with is their stated vs. actual range
How will it compare to other trucks for TCO?
What is hard for me to square on the Tesla Truck is I listened to a podcast with Franz von Holzhausen on as a guest and he’s a smart, thoughtful designer who’s done really good work in the past and I don’t know if it’s cognitive dissonance (or just a fat paycheck) but I can’t see how he’s helping push this thing. I don’t love this concept but if it was actually well detailed and finished-I can easily see a market for it. I think it’s niche car similar to an aztec, vehicross, hummer h1 truck etc but it would find customers (though not the insane sales figures Musk’s acolytes predict) and as others have said definitely an argument for more cars breaking the mold. But as an example of this basic concept done well look at Kia’s Ioniq5, sharp angles and creases-very ’80s “cyber” but it’s very well finished and detailed. And everyone complains about Tesla’s fit and finish I’ve driven an older Type S for a weekend and it was solid-unlike this monumental POS. Why would you even show such an unfinished prototype, even if they’re still hammering out production vehicles-it’s a 1 of 1-can’t you even get your best technicians to make one that’s worth showing. Seems obvious the only reason they’re even showing all these prototypes is trying to sand bag people while they figure out how to execute and build these en masse.
What if this whole thing is just a big fake out to lower expectations, then they roll out something straightforward, elegant, and functional? Nah.
They could have beaten Rivian to market if they put a different shell over the top of the S/X but have now spent years on this. Doesn’t seem likely that this is intentional.
A great take on a famous speech that I saw here a few days ago “We do these things; not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy!” This whole Cybertruck project just seems like an exercise in throwing out the rulebook, then learning *why* each of those rules exists. The hard way.
LMAO I mean originally that’s sort of what I figured they would do a la other concept cars, i.e. here’s this insane concept to drive buzz now here’s the very watered down production version.
I am not a Musk Stan or Tesla Fanboi, but I gotta admit I like it. I guess most people on here are not the target demographic. It will sell like crazy and people will aftermarket the crap out of it. They already have overloading rigs for this thing. I’d put it next to my Delorean in my garage of cool ass cars if I ever build one. We need people to take risks- Mercedes takes risks on their designs, Tesla takes Risks- Some lead others follow.
I don’t think it will sell like crazy, I think it will sell to crazy.
I kinda like it too in black…
It does make it easier to hide from shame in the dark
The matte wraps are going to be on 90% of the ones out in the wild.
It feels like a design out of Cyberpunk 2077 (which I like) but rendered on a PS1.
Are those custom tires to fit the stupid design?
Waiting for the bitching on how expensive new tires will be…
My , well, not first thought, but up there, too
shortly followed by thinking I would like to see one doing epic burnouts just because.
-best check availability of tires, though!
Every time I hear something new about this thing, it’s somehow funnier. TIL that you can obscure the whole rear window with….the tonneau? Sheer brilliance.
I built a lot of car models that looked like this before I learned how to use clamps and glue correctly. I’ll give Tesla credit, at least there’s no polystyrene oozing out of those seams though they are big enough to remind me of earthquake damage. Love the crown moulding around the wheel wells.
Are we certain that the Cybertruck is not actually secretly being built by Faraday Future?
Incidentally, it does look better in black. Not good, just…better.
To be fair, that IS a low bar… so very low…
So – less worse in black?
I’m gonna be honest, I check in on Faraday every day or so because it’s absolutely fascinating to me that they actually DID bring the FF91 to market, at least so far in Zenvo-like numbers.
And from what I’ve seen, to be fair, Faraday would have done a better job than this.
Jason of all people should recognize that they are going for that late 80s classy BMW look with the taillights.
brunson-quint-bmw-e32-735i-rear-end-tail-bacl.jpg
What’s the deal with the tires? Are you limited to just one particular model so that the design matches up with rim/hubcap? I don’t get what people see in this truck.
It is a bit of a double standard compared to like a Wrangler or Bronco fit and finish, I mean those are +$50k trucks, that have been built for years, and the tops still don’t always fit right, the soft tops have plastic windows, they’re loud on the highway with minimal noise insulation, but it’s part of the ‘charm’ of the off roader, I mean you can take all the doors off and essentially be in a lifted Polaris Slingshot that you paid 3 times as much for.
So part of the charm of the Cybertruck could be it’s dystopian Mad-Maxian slapdash fit and finish.
Made me think….would be fun to wrap one with a rusty patina wrap like that minivan on the old site some years ago
I’ve been in and around a few prototypes and while many of them are kind of rough, I’ve never seen a non-camoed one that was this rough. I can’t wait to see what the production versions are going to look like if that ever ends up actually happening.
that bezel on the windshield. what is this, 2008?
So it’s too big, has ginormous blind spots, has hideous wheels, is slapped together haphazardly in a non-union shop, and is capable of idiotic speeds for something its size?
RAM should be worried.
I’ve seen home-built kit cars with better build quality, that’s just sad. Here’s a tip for Tesla: don’t start showing off prototypes until they actually look decent?
Like imagine if Steve Jobs had presented the first iPhone with wires and tape all over it. Yes it had a lot of bugs at that point, but Apple nailed the presentation and made everything look seamless, that’s called marketing.
I assume these prototypes are hand-built, so why not take the extra time to fix the gaps and make things line up? Even if you have to do some awful things under the skin to make the panels sit properly, you gotta make a good first impression.
Just wait ’till you see the aircooled pancake flat four ‘range extender’ in the back!
To prove your point, I went to an auto show when Dodge introduced the Magnum wagon. The pre-production car on display had an interior D-pillar that was malformed so there was a gaping hole several inches long on part of the metal pillar, over which Dodge had spot-welded a piece of metal to close the gap. However, when the rear hatch was closed, it fit perfectly.
Yeah. Fake it ’til you make it, but make it look good. That’s show business!
The iPhone didn’t work when they first showed it, Jobs faked the presentation.
God I love when the internet (read: you) catches people making wrong analogies. The car world doesn’t understand the technology product development process of fail fast. Build a prototype. Learn. Build another. Learn. Build another. Learn. Good thing Ford sits there making shiny prototypes only to fail at nearly every vehicle launch in the last 5 years.
https://www.theautopian.com/how-ford-is-attacking-its-quality-problems/#:~:text=Basically%20every%20new%20Ford%20vehicle,takes%20to%20survive%20long%2Dterm.
I just recently read the whole story about that presentation… they wanted to fake it because the prototypes were so buggy and kept crashing it, but Jobs insisted on doing it live, with a real iPhone. So they found a “golden path,” aka a sequence of actions that wouldn’t make the phone crash, and rehearsed the crap out of it. They did “fix” a few things, like making the phone permanently display all 5 bars of cell service, having a private WiFi network for the iPhone to reduce interference, and having several extra identical iPhones on stage in case one crashed. It worked out perfectly, at least to the people watching the presentation. The Cybertruck, on the other hand, has been failing miserably at that.
It’s stupid hoaky garbage and I love it. More weird experiments in the automotive space pls
I feel this way, too. Do I love it? No. Am I glad a carmaker’s being super freaking weird? Absolutely.
I’m not sure the shareholders would agree. I really see this vehicle as a 21st century Edsel.
I suspect there’s enough Tesla Stans that it’ll do just fine. And, even if it doesn’t, I’m still grateful for every weird kick at the can
I will still always call it the KET (Ketamine Ego Trip). However, my right to wrong ratio isn’t exactly stellar, so we’ll see.