I’m a person who generally has zero opinion about how cars look. Regarding the post above, I’m that meme from the Office where Pam is saying “they’re the same picture.”
Not that I begrudge anybody their aesthetics; it’s just that for me, usually, a car is a car. Most of the classically hideous cars look kind of neat to me precisely because they’re distinct.
But the Cybertruck? That thing is viscerally ugly. Sure it’s unique, but so was the elephant man.
It’s a big suppository.
I agree that the Ioniq 6 is ugly but the Ioniq 5 is not.
Meh, poop-flavored ice cream is unique but I’m not going to give it credit for that; it’s still terrible.
Someone in a friend group posted a photo of one he saw in the wild; it was 3:1 against on looks. One thing I noticed was how blotchy the door and rear panels looked. I don’t know if it was skin oils or dirt or what but it looked awful.
It’s apparently very practical to use as a work truck in nearly every respect. I’d be surprised if even 5% of the owners are using them for that purpose.
I agree; I like the look of the 5 as sort of an angular take on a hot hatch.
I ran across a reposting of this Tumblr post which kind of sums it up for me. It’s a modern fable (or real story?) where an art student has taste that differs from the teacher, so the teacher tells the student “I only merely *dislike* this piece. I want you to make me HATE it,” and encourages the student to embrace her own style.
To me, the Ioniq 6 looks like lots of other cars, but somehow does it in an ugly way. The Cybertruck does not look like lots of other cars, and does it in an ugly way. For me, the “not” does a lot of work in how I feel about it. Like the art teacher, I give it high marks for doing its own thing.
(That is all just looking at it from a detached style perspective, once you turn the Cybertruck into a symbol of everything Musk is doing wrong at Tesla, then I really find it repulsive.)
So, to poop-flavored ice cream. I might not want to eat it, but I have to give some credit to the confectioner for the risk and creativity in making it. I’ve had lots of ice cream that’s good, but not interesting.
I guess that I don’t even find it creative. It looks like a bunch of other 80’s-era “futuristic” sci-fi cyberpunk vehicles which is intentional and reflected in the name. The only difference is that Tesla turned it into a real car instead of an anime, movie scene or comic book cover. I said before that it looks like cosplay to me. It doesn’t look like an original idea, it looks like someone playing dress-up in someone else’s original idea from 1985.
It’s as though a fashion designer started selling silver lamé bodysuits as the “Galaxy Shirt” and I’m supposed to praise how brave and innovative it is for harnessing this creative vision of the fashion future.
Agreed, it’s derivative, in a childish way. The design process started with the silly angular drawing, and everything else had to follow.
Hear, hear! It totally isn’t original. Stainless angular design was tried in a production vehicle already. It was a dumb idea then, and it’s still a dumb idea. In fact, the Cybertruck is less stylish than the DeLorean it echoes, and I never thought the DeLorean was a particularly pretty car in the first place.
Yes, I’ve said that before, too. What it doesn’t look like is other cars you can buy.
The purpose of ice cream is to taste good. If somebody makes shit-flavored ice cream, they’ve failed in the most fundamental way possible. There are no points awarded because scraping the world’s most disgusting fudgecicle off your tongue is a novel experience.
So when someone is trying to make shit-flavored ice cream, how do they know when they’ve succeeded? Does that require that they’ve tasted actual feces to have a point of comparison?
For good reason. But you cited creativity and “doing its own thing” and it lacks those things. I suppose it has “risk” since it’s a consumer product but lots of risky stuff comes to market all the time.
The Ioniq6 is ugly within normal parameters, to steal an expression from a different domain. The Cybertruck is a whole new kind of ugly.
I’d be interested in knowing how much of this practicality is made possible by the oddball design.
I’d say the cybertruck is not JUST ugly (which many cars are) but also “poser-y” since it just lifts from a different concept and tries to pass it off as innovative. So my reaction to it is harsher than to a normally ugly/dumb looking car. It’s like someone coming to an art contest with something they obviously traced and we’re supposed to laud it as creative.
Also, they picked a dumb looking thing to trace.
Does it have stake pockets?
How are you supposed to carry landscape debris or a refirgerator?
Supposedly the inside. When you open things up it’s roomy and has easy access. Also it’s good at maneuvering rough terrain at a remote site. That it’s surrounded by the odd outer design isn’t relevant. Not being a construction contractor, I can’t comment on how true it is.
Yeah, I don’t see how any of that really makes it a practical work truck. The only thing you’re really thinking of in one of those is how much it can haul easily. I’m not a contractor, but I have worked construction in the dim past. It was common to overload the truck with more than it was really rated for, because it would save an extra trip and some time.
Speaking fairly about the Cybertruck, if it looked like a bog standard pickup, but with all the features it has (and if it wasn’t plagued by early build technical issues and flaws), everyone who didn’t hate Musk for who Musk is, would probably be at least mildly enthusiastic about it’s technical capabilities. Even if it didn’t inspire, it would get a pass on just being, as @steronz put it, “ugly within normal parameters”.
If it was just trying to do the above but with an “innovative” stainless steel body that had unexpected consequences, again, it would likely still have gotten a pass for those who are fans of the innovate and take risks, and realize that mistakes will likely be made. You know, skip the first iteration of a new thing, and wait until the next model year where they iron out the kinks.
If were just a limited edition cosplay style vehicle for people wanting to channel their inner 80s teen, we’d be tickled pink assuming we had a metric ton of money to spend on such a thing. Those who always wanted a Bladerunner / Back to the future / Cyberpunk 2020 (yes I have that edition) car as a teen.
But trying to combine all of those, along with Musk’s behavior, bloviating about being bulletproof, and tying on a metric ton of tacky addons - no, that’s a perfect storm of poor choices that means it’s going to get zero, if not negative tolerance for it’s looks.