Elon Musk’s Cybercab and the curse of the concept car

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In 1939, General Motors introduced the Buick Y-Job, the automotive industry’s first concept car. It was dizzying, with honking horns and revolutionary technologies like electric windows and headlights hidden behind retractable shutters. But it was not intended for production and sale; It was just a topic of conversation. Since then, every concept car has been a kind of “why” work, asking: why does this company still exist? Why will your future be different? Why should you care?

tesla Hardliners had been whispering equally important questions since mid-October, when CEO Elon Musk He attended the company’s “We, Robot” event with its much-hyped Cybercab concept. The proposed autonomous taxi has two seats, Lambo-style doors and lacks pedals and a steering wheel. An autonomous Robovan that can carry up to 20 boys was also on display.

Both are part of Tesla’s vision for a future where computers drive and car owners make extra money by loaning out their vehicles when they’re not using them. “It’s going to be a glorious future,” Musk promised, shortly before anthropomorphic robots in cowboy hats and bow ties began serving refreshments. None of this was uncomfortable at all.

And yet, Tesla shares fell nearly 10 percent the next day. Which, for a company that has sometimes seemed more like a stock operation disguised as a manufacturer, rather than the other way around, is bad. He later recovered. But what exactly was wrong with the Cybercab concept?

Some of what was on offer was reminiscent of the early days of the automobile industry. Back then, concepts were generally one-offs, created to excite car show attendees, to get people on the road without necessarily going anywhere. Only a small number of them, usually made of clay, wax or fiberglass, were very functional. Very few could safely move more than 10 miles per hour. And, once their public relations were consummated, most were discarded or suspended.

They would display absolutely crazy ideas on the flagpole just to see if anyone would salute them.

That short lifespan gave rise to many strange specimens. Take the 1957 Ford Nucleon, a jet-age style truck, abundant lead armor and a nuclear reactor as a power source. “The designers weren’t afraid to make fools of themselves,” J. Mays, Ford’s former creative director, told me before he retired. Mays wouldn’t know much about that. He designed some of the greatest show cars of all time, including the 1994 one. volkswagen Concept One, which became the best-selling New Beetle. But in the old days, “they would present absolutely crazy ideas on the flagpole just to see if anyone would salute them.”

There were beauties too, like the lasciviously streamlined trio of Alfa Romeo Bat cars, created in the mid-1950s by Italian industrial designers Bertone. They sold at Sotheby’s in 2020 for about $15 million.

By then, concept cars had become a fundamental part of the automobile design process. They are the closest an industry can come to routinely inviting itself to lie on the couch and remember its mother. “Everyone has a strategic mission,” Ed Welburn, GM’s legendary top designer, told me in 2008, amid a series of startling concepts that defibrillated. cadillac of a long design lethargy. “They may highlight a new technology or a new type of vehicle. They help us test the market. At Cadillac, one concept after another helped establish the vision of the brand.”

For some, self-knowledge is a curse. Cursed concept cars come in three varieties: they are not provocative enough; too much mockery; and too daring to provoke effectively. The first tends to arise during periods of economic unrest. In the years after the crises of 2001 and 2008, for example, crazy ideas were in short supply.

Joking too much is worse. I was at the North American International Auto Show in January 2007, when chevrolet removed the canvas from its Volt concept. Inspired by seeing the first Tesla a year earlier, GM executive Bob Lutz had tried to create an all-electric vehicle, this time for real. What was actually shown was an advanced hybrid, but that didn’t matter. The Volt concept made the world’s largest automaker finally ask: “What if we took this green nonsense seriously?”

And the answer was totally surprising: a brawny, burly American-made car with legitimate green credentials and BDE to spare. The problem was that manufacturing costs and complexities meant that the version of the Volt that consumers could buy looked like a bean.

He bmw The GINA Light Visionary model, revealed in 2008, was something completely different. The name stood for “Geometry and Functions in ‘N’ Adaptations,” whatever that means. Its exterior was made of polyurethane-coated stretch spandex, meaning that electric and hydraulic actuators inside could reconfigure the vehicle’s shape on the fly. While the overall design holds up fairly well a decade and a half later, it was mocked at the time for being too ridiculous.

Today, automobile companies are questioning themselves more than ever. Much of this is due to the success of Tesla. For years, big American manufacturers were happy to let it serve as their regulatory pass, making billions by selling them carbon tax credits while they figured out how to make electric cars that others couldn’t be bothered with. Now that Tesla is the largest automaker in the world (at least by market capitalization), they have to compete by coming up with more compelling ideas.

Which doesn’t quite answer the question of whether the Cybercab is a Volt, a GINA, or something more promising? Part of the difficulty is that among the many norms Musk has challenged is the concept car itself. Consider Tesla’s previous big idea, a polygonal pickup truck that starts at $75,000 and looks like a DeLorean rendered by a Playstation 1. That vehicle has generated untold amounts of chatter, both good and bad, even though Tesla has only sold about 30,000 of them. Is the Cybertruck a concept car or a real product? The answer is yes.