Cybertruck designer says Tesla’s stainless steel pickup is not an experiment By Reuters
© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Tesla’s new Cybertruck is on display at the Tesla store in San Diego, California, USA, December 9, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
Nicola Groom and Cath Turner
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Cybertruck’s angular and polarizing design will help elevate the Tesla (NASDAQ:) brand, the electric car maker’s chief designer said on Thursday, adding that the pickup is not an experiment.
“Whether you like it or not, it starts a conversation and gets people talking about the brand,” Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen said at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, which is adding a Cybertruck model to its Tesla exhibit.
Pricing for the long-delayed Cybertruck starts at $60,990. That’s more than 50% higher than the price CEO Elon Musk touted in 2019, and a smaller range than originally promised.
But it’s attracting the attention of people who have never owned a truck before, with some potential owners lining up to buy one at some Tesla showrooms, von Holzhausen said.
“Just because it looks different doesn’t mean it can’t potentially be a mass-produced vehicle,” he added. He said the pickup measures the performance of its traditional rivals. “There seems to be an air of suspicion.”
“We’re bringing people into the market who have never owned a truck before,” von Holzhausen said. “So I don’t think it was an experiment.”
Stainless steel clad trucks can be used at any angle, in part because traditional presses cannot bend steel into curves. The Lamborghini Countach, an aggressively angled vehicle, also inspired the design, as did Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter, von Holzhausen said.
“It looks like it shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing, but intelligent engineers figured it out,” he said of the F-117.
Tesla’s design studio also took inspiration from the automotive submarine featured in the 1977 James Bond film ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, which Musk purchased.
The launch of the Cybertruck was not without its flaws.
In 2019, von Holzhausen threw a metal ball at a truck during a launch event, breaking two reinforced windows. At another event last month, when the first truck was delivered, he threw a baseball through the window without causing any damage.
A recent viral video showed a Cybertruck carrying a Christmas tree being pulled up a slope that a gasoline-powered car couldn’t climb.
But von Holzhausen defended the car, saying his children enjoy being taken to school in the Cybertruck and that people have mistaken him for Musk when he drives it.
