Seeing my bride walk down the aisle toward me at our wedding. Driving my first car home. And now, in a somewhat distant but still significant third place: my initial glimpse of the new, industry-changing Tesla Cybertruck electric pickup in a clandestine September meeting at the automaker’s design headquarters just outside of Los Angeles.
Few outsiders have ever been allowed inside the top-secret Tesla Design Studio, nestled away next to the sprawling SpaceX factory, a Falcon 9 rocket, and a scale replica of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop in a corner of the Hawthorne Airport. Elon and his righthand man, chief designer Franz von Holzhausen, invited us to be the first journalists inside to see the automaker’s most hotly anticipated debut since the Model 3: the Tesla pickup truck.
Leading up to the truck’s public unveiling, MotorTrend got behind the scenes with the Tesla team, provided feedback, and watched the Cybertruck go from a life-size clay model to a (purportedly) bulletproof working prototype.
FIRST CONTACT
As we enter the studio, Franz scans his key card and holds open the door as Elon leads us into the repurposed airfield hangar, where the first, radical Northrop flying wings took shape. Now serving a much different purpose, the well-lit design studio nonetheless sports an equally revolutionary machine today.
Like a Zumwalt-class destroyer meets a leftover Blade Runner prop, Tesla’s truck looks like none I’d ever seen before.
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