A recent article in The Economist about Tesla said its cybertruck had “retrofuture design”.
This thing.
Something “dropped off by an alien race” is not futuristic?
Is anything “futuristic” today? Can anything be? We used to have ideas - multiple ideas - about what the future might look like. Is that sort of thinking dead?
This (ad-laden) site contains supposed futuristic designs, but they look far more retro than the cybertruck.
Here are some future car concepts, none of them as shocking or striking as what car companies were doing in the 1950s.
Can’t we do better? Why can’t even professionals think about the future anymore?
The Meaning of Liff introduced the term “Zeerust” to refer to things that were once meant to look futuristic, but now look dated. I guess “retrofuture design” means that as a current design aesthetic.
Those cars look perfectly fine as “futuristic” to me. The designers focus on different things than they did during earlier eras (e.g. not so much the idea that cars would hover) but they all seem to have some “future-ness” to them.
For something like a vehicle issues like design for fuel economy, crashworthiness, or least cost producibility drive out a lot of the possible trade space on the outer mold lines.
Separately, we seem to now be in an era favoring simple cleanliness of shape over gewgaws. Which means that being futuristic either needs to be even cleaner, or reintroduce gewgaws, but without looking retro doing it. A tall order, given how thoroughly the world of post-war SF, or just 1950s/60 consumer boosterism explored the vast and populous space of possible gewgaws.
The future used to be 2001… and, in a way, it still is. Our current popular culture doesn’t have an idealistic view of the future (save some hangers on from half a century ago, like Star Trek). The future is global warming, nuclear annihilation, and zombies. At best the future is where every consumer product looks like or fits on your phone - a miniature monolith. There’s nothing in the future to inspire a present-day designer.
Tony Joe White called it in 1998:
The new Cadillacs, it’s hard to even tell 'em
The colors ain’t too cool and they’re shaped like a watermelon
If they give me one I don’t think I would even react
One thing on my mind
I want my Fleetwood back
Well, that got real depressing real fast, but I think you guys are right. There’s a name for the design spirit of everything we now think of as retro-futurism, and it’s optimism.
Except they’ll be solar-powered EVs, not gas powered. Gas cars are too complicated and finicky now for them to make sense in a postapocalyptic future. Maybe back in the days of carburetors, but not today. EVs on the other hand are easy, and modular. Motors and battery packs can be scavenged and reassembled at will. And solar farms require negligible maintenance as compared to mining crude oil and turning it into gasoline.
Maybe not, but they’re futuristic enough. The real question is why none of those concepts ever ship. Not one of those was ever driveable as a prototype, let alone a production car.
Whatever else one might say about the Cybertruck, it’s going to be a shipping product real soon now. And ship in enough numbers that we’ll all get a chance to see them on the road.
The concept car teams should be in closer contact with production. It’s not clear that they have any goal other than making something that looks cool. Some of them are obviously stupid, or illegal for road use, but there shouldn’t be any shortage of ideas that are at least plausible for production.
Things have gotten a little better with EVs due to the differences in packaging. But still, very little that’s head-turning in the way the Cybertruck is.
Little is more bizarre than to look back at history and see that the Depression and the greatest world war ever were times of optimism about the future but that today at the peak of human well-being the future is seen solely pessimistically. (Yes, we’re at the peak of human well-being. It’s either now or pre-civilization and I like civilization.)
You might say that describing the future in opposite terms to the present is normal human behavior. I’m not sure that’s true. (I’m talking about western culture for the last few centuries. The modern notion of the Future didn’t exist before then.) It certainly wouldn’t explain the 50s in America.
I think the challenge from a design perspective, at least compared to a few decades ago, is that modern materials and manufacturing processes make it possible to build “the world of tomorrow”…TODAY!
“The future” tends to look like a natural extrapolation of current trends and recent discoveries. They often tend to look dated in a few years as reality catches up. For example:
The “Buck Rodgers” future of chrome rockets and Art Deco skyscrapers of the 50s and earlier
The “Plastic” future of the 60s and 70s where everything looks like a shopping mall full of cheap crap.
The “Cyber Punk” future of the 80s and 90s with its massive brutalist skyscrapers, exposed cables, pipes, and ductwork, clunky computer interfaces, and constant barrage of corporate advertising.
The “iPod” future of the 2000s with everything is white with integrated touch screen.
If anything, I think future designs will appear less overtly futuristic as technology will become more integrated and less obvious. Function driving form and all that.