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"Love it or hate it, it's a conversation starter, and it gets
people talking about the brand," Tesla Chief Designer Franz von
Holzhausen said at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los
Angeles, which is adding Cybertruck models to a Tesla exhibit.
The long-delayed Cybertruck starts at a price of $60,990, over
50% more than what CEO Elon Musk had touted in 2019, with a
smaller range than originally promised.
But it is drawing interest from people who have never owned a
truck, with some potential owners queuing up for it at some
Tesla showrooms, von Holzhausen said.
"Just because it looks different doesn't mean that it can't be
potentially a high volume vehicle," he added, saying the pick-up
measures up to the performance of traditional rivals. "There
seems to be this air of doubt."
"We're bringing people into the market that never would have
owned a truck before," von Holzhausen said. "And so I don't
think it's an experiment."
The stainless-steel clad truck is all angles, in part because a
traditional press can't bend the steel into curves. The
Lamborghini Countach, also an aggressively angular car, had also
inspired the design, as had Lockheed's F-117 Stealth Fighter
jet, von Holzhausen said.
"It looks like it shouldn't do what it does, yet, intelligent
engineers figured it out," he said of the F-117.
The Tesla design studio was also inspired by the
car-turned-submarine in the 1977 James Bond movie "The Spy Who
Loved Me," which Musk bought.
The Cybertruck's launch has not been without glitches.
In 2019, von Holzhausen threw a metal ball at the truck during
at its launch event, shattering two of its fortified glass
windows. At another an event last month where the first trucks
were delivered, he lobbed a baseball at the windows without any
damage.
A recent viral video also showed the Cybertruck carrying a
Christmas-tree being pulled up a slope it was unable to climb by
a gasoline-powered car.
Von Holzhausen, however, defended the car, saying his kids love
being picked up from school in the Cybertruck, and he has been
mistaken for Musk by people when driving it.
(Additional reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; writing by Peter
Henderson; editing by Miral Fahmy)
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