Five years after Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled plans for his polarizing Cybertruck, I found myself standing in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot on an afternoon in July, surveying the automaker’s surrealist take on the electric utility vehicle: a triangular behemoth, sharp-angled and brutalist.
Its wide, unpainted, stainless-steel body boasts a massive windshield and nary a curve throughout, and it has managed to draw comparisons to both the Eiffel Tower and a preschooler’s loose-leaf sketch.
“Just be careful if you walk too close to the front, or even the back, because people have cut themselves,” says LJ, the owner who rented me his truck for the day through an app. He pointed to the jagged intersections of body panels, which did indeed look sharp enough to cut flesh.
Those perilous edges were the result of a Musk decree that the designers eschew pliable sheet metal that can be molded into rounded shapes, in favor of far less practical stainless steel, which is impervious to stamping machines. (Another downside: Every fingerprint shows up on stainless steel.)
For $340 a day, LJ had promised me “the exclusive feeling of possessing a car that has only graced the hands of the top one percent.” And the experience started out seeming suitably swanky: The doors unlocked soundlessly at the touch of a Tesla app on my phone.
It wasn’t until I was sitting behind the wheel that I started to notice some of the truck’s more unsettling features. First, despite its advertised “beast mode” ability to rocket from 0 to 60 mph in a neck-scrunching 2.6 seconds “while maintaining high-speed stability,” the truck lacked tangible practicalities like grab bars. Then there’s the world’s smallest rearview mirror. Roughly the size of a deck of cards, the slip of glass created a blind spot that swallowed whole cars behind me.
It wasn’t an ideal setup for piloting a 6,600-pound tank—but for the brief time I was driving this brash automobile, it felt like the rules of the road no longer applied.
Evoking images of a Mad Max–style Armageddon, this truck may be the most controversial vehicle of all time. “Ugly,” “horrifying,” and “apocalyptic” are not the words carmakers usually wish to attach to their latest luxury vehicles. Buyers have traditionally seen their car as somewhere between a beloved pet and an essential home appliance. But the angular metallic brute now rolling through suburbs across the country presents a new version of luxury for our times—one that has little to do with such bourgeois values as comfort, convenience, or beauty. “Built for any planet,” as Tesla’s promotional site says, the Cybertruck’s citadel-like demeanor offers a suit of literal and metaphorical armor.
“I’ve always thought of the Cybertruck as a good-looking assault or warfare vehicle,” Morningstar analyst David Whiston says.
Its ascendance raises the question: Can something be both jarringly unsightly and the status symbol of the year?
Though the Cybertruck’s foreboding silhouette has bedeviled bystanders and critics alike—“I wish not to be quoted about that low-polygon shit heap,” one respected trucking analyst tells me—the hulking electric vehicle, which starts at around $80,000 and can top six figures, may well prove to be a design touchstone.
Tesla’s long-anticipated truck was designed by Franz von Holzhausen, who created the shapely Tesla Model S, which Consumer Reports likened to a supermodel sashaying down a Paris catwalk. But the Cybertruck is unlikely to draw comparisons to female anatomy. The inspiration board for the project included Blade Runner, RoboCop, and Back to the Future’s DeLorean DMC-12.
Biographer Walter Isaacson recalls Musk looking at common pickup trucks with von Holzhausen. “Musk says these things are boring,” Isaacson writes. “He doesn’t like to be bored.”
Love it or hate it, the Cybertruck is certainly revolutionary, in an industry where the design has barely changed in more than a century: The typical three-box template for a truck is trifurcated into distinct compartments for the powertrain, passengers, and payload.
The Cybertruck’s arrival late last year challenged that uniformity, pioneering a new shape: the triangle. The exoskeleton’s pointy architecture distributes the truck’s load and tension more evenly, Tesla says, to handle like a sports car.
“The triangle approach looks unique compared to everything else out there,” says Whiston. “Whether it succeeds beyond Tesla loyalists and rich people who want to show off is another matter.”
So how does it feel to drive this aesthetic oddity? Surprisingly uncomfortable. At highway speed, the truck produces a bumpy ride, tossing me around like a seat-buckled rag doll. To further complicate matters, the dashboard does not contain a single physical button, relying on an iPad-like touch screen instead. Even shifting gears requires pawing at a sliver of pixels at the screen’s corner.
The biggest benefit for the Cybertruck’s target customer seems to be its conspicuity. It’s built to be a status symbol for a flashy city like Miami or Los Angeles, not a workaday truck for a Wyoming rancher.
And driving the truck does confer a kind of instant celebrity. Everywhere I went, onlookers held out their phones to take photos or video. At the Jack in the Box on Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway, the entire staff congregated at the drive-thru window as the server handed over my 99-cent taco.
As I lumbered around in this conspicuous piece of concept art, I realized that Tesla may have delivered exactly what the world needs in this era of political, environmental, and economic angst: something else to talk about. Whether it’s mocked or praised, the Cybertruck is the ultimate conversation piece. That’s perhaps a luxury in itself.”
This article appears in the August/September issue of Fortune with the headline, “Apocaplypse chic: Tesla’s Cybertruck gives luxury a new shape.”
