Hasta La Ideas

A little over a month back, Jaguar gambled on pretty much any goodwill it had among its customer base with a rather odd rebrand. Not only did the company cease production of all existing cars in 2024, they decided to do a hard pivot to EVs with a rebranding that was less about automobiles and more haute fashion and edgy visuals.

When Jaguar finally debuted the Type 00 concept, it looked like something out of the Cybertruck playbook – sharp lines, low-poly design, minimal but expressive enough to garner an opinion. So designer Joe Slatter just decided to mash them together in the automotive equivalent of pen-pineapple-apple-pen… Remember that song? It’s now 9 years old.

Designer: Joe Slatter

“This project explores what a collaboration between Jaguar’s Type 00 and Tesla’s Cybertruck could look like if they joined forces. Both designs have been among the most talked-about in the automotive industry over the past five years,” Slatter mentions. “The result is the Jaguar Cybertruck concept, an electric pickup truck, combining Jaguar’s new visual direction with Tesla’s bold futurism.”

The resulting car sort of blurs lines between a luxury sedan and a pickup truck. To be honest, there’s nothing pickup truck about this car when you look at it, but there’s a fully accessible rear truck-bed at the back. The car looks effortlessly futuristic, with sharp lines that aren’t shy to show off curves in some places. The front and back are both curved, as opposed to the edgy straight angular lines on the Cybertruck, and the front and rear fenders are just mildly protruding with 3D curves around the wheels, giving the car character.

The Cybertruck looks the way it does only because of the reinforced steel plates it uses in its construction. Some would argue that low-poly half-rendered aesthetic is a small price to pay for incredible durability (it apparently even resisted bombing recently), but what Jaguar achieved with the Type 00 was basically a visual refinement of Cybertruck’s aesthetic. What Jaguar did was great if observed independently, but to throw away a great heritage legacy for that rebrand was a strange move.

For Slatter, this collab/mashup is purely about counterculture. Jaguar and Tesla both wanted to shake up the industry, so combining their design aesthetics and efforts just felt like a natural thing to do. Slatter even pasted the Cybertruck logo on top of Jaguar’s branding, making it almost look like graffiti over the boring wannabe-edgy neo-corporate rebranding of Jaguar.

Is the Jaguar Cybertruck a gorgeous car? Again, when observed in a silo, yes it is. It has enough character over the original Cybertruck to get my thumbs-up, so to speak. Would I personally ever drive such a car? Probably not – I’m a diehard retro automobile lover and I’d probably choose something vintage-inspired over something hyper-futuristic… but then again, that’s just me. What do you think?

The post This Jaguar + Cybertruck Mashup Honestly Looks Gorgeous first appeared on Yanko Design.