A few will end up in car museums. At least here in the USA. Fancy some travel to a wacky hostile country full of wacky hostile natives?
IMO they’re not so much ugly as odd. Ugly vehicles have no distinct style and are simply a collection of indifferent to bad features bolted together at random.
The CT has a very consistent design language. I’m not hugely fond of it, but the consistency is what makes it “work” as odd rather than just f***ed up.
No, you aren’t wrong.
And while i think the car is ugly, i also recognize that it’s what 7 year old me wanted a car to look like. I used to draw cars exactly like it, only mine were rocket powered, and had flames shooting out the back. But it’s otherwise sooooo close to the same profile.
It turns me off in person because it looks mean. It’s large and closed-in and has lots of sharp edges that look like death to pedestrians or cyclists it jostles.
How quickly we forget the Pontiac Aztec, notorious for receiving citations from the government for violating bad taste.
Or give a seig heil one arm salute. If Mush does it, Incel Camino owners must like it, too.
Agree.
A LOT of modern cars and especially trucks are Brutalist devices meant to appeal to bullies or bullying mentalities. The CT may be primer inter pares but it has lots of company.
As Obi Wan did not say of Light Sabers …
A thuggish aesthetic for a thuggish era.
Me upthread:
The Landmaster especially is what Musk seems to be going for, with the whole bulletproof, post-apocalyptic them, but he’s angry because it doesn’t have the accompanying armament:
2 top mounted rocket launchers
4 side mounted autocannons
2 front mounted retractable bazookas
2 front mounted flamethrowers
So save yourself a lot of grief, and rent/buy a copy of Damnation Alley and watch. Much cheaper, and more fun. Or, just watch any of countless videos online about the vehicle. This is very much a what you see is what you get, there’s no gestalt that makes it better/worse when you see one in person.
Has much more of a Tron look to me. As I’ve said, I would never buy one, but I sorta kinda like it.
Disagree. It’s totally Battlezone, the 80’s tank arcade game with green wireframe graphics. Tron has a much more elegant aesthetic.
I see one or two around here on a regular enough basis but haven’t seen a wrapped on in a while. They probably should be wrapped because even the past year has not been kind to the steel bodies and the ones I see usually look dull and shitty. Versus shiny and shitty, I guess but have some pride in your shitty truck!
If you think the CT looks mean, get a load of the front end of this one from twenty years ago.
While that’s often true, I would draw a distinction between “accidentally ugly” as in “the design idea just didn’t work” and “willfully ugly”, as in “we wanted it to look like this!”. The CT is willfully ugly. The subliminal message, prized by the owners, is “I am ugly, dangerous, and aggressive, and I can roll right over whatever puny vehicle you’re driving right now!”. This is more or less Elmo’s life motto.
That looks cute, with a soft, round front end.
Given that pickup trucks are often work vehicles, it could have and should have been designed for cargo capacity and the ability to hold stuff. And lots of F150s are sold without a truck bed so that they could be customized. This thing was designed primarily as an expensive toy.
I see one every day, since the only neighbor I can see from my window has one, and believe me, it just looks more or less like he has a big gas grill in his driveway.
Bravo Good Sir! Well played!
An idea once heard that cannot be unheard. I’ll be enjoying that replay every time I see one.
I agree.
But … the same exact idea was behind the early Hummer line of 30+ (!) years ago and is definitely behind the Dodge Ram pickup line. And in a less aggressive format is visible in every Lexus Vader-mobile.
I’ve used the term Brutalist 3 times in this thread describing the CT & other vehicles. Most recently just yesterday:
The fact the CT has been a market failure suggests that maybe, just maybe, that level of overt thuggishness is not quite popular enough. Maybe. Yet.
The term “Brutalism” doesn’t come from the word “brutal”; instead, it’s from the French “brut”, meaning raw or unfinished, and is short for “beton brut”, or raw concrete. Interestingly, that means that the CT, more than other vehicles, can be called “Brutalist” not because it’s imposing, but because it looks unfinished.
Thank you, was about to mention that – the CyberTruck is more accurately described as brutalist, with the exposed material and the very elementary blocks-and-planes design with bad fit-and-finish tolerances. The recent-model pickups looking so performatively big and powerful (but winding up with a larger overall size but less cargo carrying space than the same category had 30 years ago) give me more of a vibe of spiritual descendants of the big-chrome land yatchs of the 50s, only thinking vertical instead of horizontal.
Agree about the architectural term. However there’s also a very strong correlation between beton brut as a material, and designs incorporating harsh angular lines and things scaled at inhuman proportions.
Brutalist architecture looks semi-appropriate on jails and totally bad on museums, performing arts centers, or airport terminals.
And churches. Can’t forget the churches.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Church_of_Christ,\_Scientist\_(Washington,\_D.C.)
Fixed your link:
But yeah, ugly in an inhuman and brutal way.
I just saw a coyote on my morning walk today. That was hella more interesting than seeing a CT.