When the Cybertruck was unveiled, it created a lot of talk about how it looked. For the car lovers, we focused on the insane specs and prices, but many were talking about the car unveiling itself.
During the unveiling, Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen threw a steel ball at both the prototype’s door and windows. While the windows didn’t shatter, they did break, and from the reaction of the designer and the CEO, it didn’t look like it was supposed to happen.
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk took it to tweeter to explain why this happened he said that an extra-strong steel body explains something else about the Cybertruck: Why it looks so weird.
The body is made from thick cold-rolled stainless steel of the sort used to build SpaceX rockets, Musk said. (Musk is also CEO of SpaceX.) It’s not the ordinary thin, pliant steel car bodies are typically made from. Auto body panels are usually made using stamping machines that can press the metal into complex sculptural shapes. But you can’t stamp the Cybertruck’s steel, Musk said.
“The Reason Cybertruck is so planar is that you can’t stamp ultra-hard 30X steel, because it breaks the stamping press,” he added, “Even bending it requires a deep score on inside the bend, which is how the prototype was made.”
That resulted in the truck’s strange flat-edged appearance, which has inspired a number of creative comparisons online. The Cybertruck has been compared to everything from a doorstop or an old Apple Mouse to the SpongeBob SquarePants character Flats the Flounder, or a triangle on wheels.
