In Defense of the Thing I Can't Stand

There's an episode of Top Gear, Series 10 Episode 8, where Jeremy Clarkson and James May go looking for the first car that drives like a car.

Not the first car. That was the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a three-wheeled contraption you steered with a tiller, good for about nine miles before it ran dry. They drove that. They drove a Royal Enfield that turned out to be less of a car and more of the world's first quad bike. They worked their way through the museum, one beautiful failure at a time, looking for the moment someone got it right: three pedals in the order we still use, a wheel instead of a tiller, a key instead of a hand crank.

They found it in a 1916 Cadillac Type 53. Three pedals on the floor, in the right order. A handbrake and gear lever in the middle. An ignition key. Nobody at the time knew it, but that car was the template. Everything since has been a variation on it. The thing that's wild, watching it now, is how un-obvious it was. There was a stretch of years where nobody knew where the pedals went. Where the controls lived was an open question, and a dozen companies were all guessing differently.

We don't live in that world anymore. We live in the world the Cadillac built. And somewhere along the way, "settled" turned into "identical."

Go stand in a parking lot. Really look. A modern crossover from one brand is, to within a rounding error, the same silhouette as a modern crossover from any other brand. Same swept headlights. Same blacked-out pillar pretending the roof floats. Same coupe-ish roofline mashed onto a tall body. Same closed-off grille now that engines don't need as much air. They've been sanded down by the same wind tunnel, the same pedestrian-safety regs, the same focus groups, the same shade of metallic gray that something like 78% of you apparently keep buying.

There are good reasons for all of it. Aerodynamics is physics, not opinion. Crash standards save lives. Platform-sharing keeps cars affordable. I'm not pretending the homogenization is a conspiracy. It's mostly just what happens when an industry matures and everyone optimizes for the same constraints. The Cadillac Type 53 won because it was right, and being right is contagious.

But the cost of everyone being right is that everyone looks the same.

Which brings me to the truck I hate.

I think the Cybertruck is hideous. I want to be clear about that up front, because I'm about to say something nice about it and I don't want to be misunderstood. The proportions are wrong. The panel gaps have become a genre of internet content. The stainless steel that doesn't dent apparently does rust, smudges if you breathe on it, and turns every car wash into a science experiment. The build quality, by every account I've read, ranges from "questionable" to "actively coming apart." It looks like the placeholder model a video game loads before the real textures arrive. And I have my own complicated feelings about the man whose name is attached to it.

It is, by most of the standards I'd normally apply, a bad car.

And I'm genuinely glad it exists.

Because for the first time in a long time, I saw something on the road and didn't know what it was. Not "couldn't place the trim level." I didn't recognize the shape. My brain did the thing it used to do as a kid, the double-take, the what on earth is that. In a parking lot full of the same five blobs, here was an angular stainless wedge that looked like it drove in from a different decade's idea of the future. Wrong. Stupid. Impossible to ignore.

That feeling is rare now, and it used to be the whole point.

Here's the thing the Top Gear episode gets at without ever saying it: design only converges after a long, messy period of divergence. The Cadillac Type 53 was the answer, but it was an answer to a question a hundred weird, wrong, wonderful cars had been asking for two decades. The tiller-steered Benz. The Royal-Enfield-quad-bike. All the dead ends. The settled layout we drive today exists because people were once willing to build the indefensible.

The car industry got its answer and stopped asking the question. Most modern cars are very good and almost none of them are interesting, and those two facts are related. Risk got optimized out. A company that builds the same gray crossover as everyone else is never going to be the funniest car at the meet, but it's also never going to be the one that flopped.

The Cybertruck is a flop in a lot of ways. But it's a swing. Somebody looked at the most conservative, most format-locked category in the entire market, the pickup truck, a shape that has barely changed in fifty years, and built something that makes people stop in the street. Half of them to laugh. But they stopped.

I don't want a world full of Cybertrucks. God, no. I want my own taste to win: clean lines, honest proportions, the cars I actually love. But I've come around to wanting a world where the Cybertruck is allowed. Where a major manufacturer can build something genuinely strange and ugly and divisive and ship it, because the alternative, the world we're mostly in, is a parking lot full of correct, aerodynamic, focus-grouped sameness, every one of them descended from the same 1916 Cadillac and none of them willing to risk being the next weird thing nobody recognizes.

Variety is the part of car culture worth protecting. Not because every swing connects, but because a culture that only builds the safe shape stops building anything you'd cross a street to look at.

So here's to the truck I can't stand. May it rust in peace, and may it have a hundred strange, ugly, brilliant children.

I'll hate most of them too. I can't wait to see them.