A good article showing the "why" this truck is the way it is.
"The plusses for a folded stainless steel, origami truck are compelling: no paint shop and no expensive tooling. No Godzilla-scale stamping machines stomping it with multiple strikes. Without all that, the capital and environmental costs of using stainless steel body panels are small. And big attractions for a company that's sensitive to both types of green—cash and environmentalism. Just groove the steel where it's supposed to fold (avoiding cracks) and bend it on simple, cheap machines (like I was actually doing last week with my garage vise!)
Brilliant … but prickly with trade-offs. Unlike the strength-to-weight efficiency of compound curves (feathery eggshells are the epitome), the flat-ish planes between the Cybertruck's simple bends require greater thickness to resist buckling compression loads or wrinkling oil-canning. Adding weight.
To counter this? Ditch the heavy, traditional, body-on-frame, and rethink the structure as weight-efficient trussed bridge in its simplest load-spreading configuration: a triangle set on its hypotenuse. One side is the Cybertruck's wedgy cab, the other, its tapered, sail-sided bed, their meeting point at the truck's tall peak resulting in a huge cross-sectional area for maximum stiffness."
"It almost looks like a deliberate, suicidal attempt to trigger boundary separation—a potential drag-raising catastrophe for limited-energy EVs. And an odd 180 turn from the Model X and Y, which have such delicately arched profiles precisely to avoid drag-raising trip wires like this.
Tesla might have erased the problem with active suction to bend the boundary-layer downward just aft of that peak. Gordon Murray's
McLaren F1 used this trick, and SpaceX has plenty of expertise in active measures to manipulate airflow around its re-entering Falcon 9 first stages. However, with the bed cover deployed, the angle of its vast descending surface is evidently shallow enough for the flow to naturally reattach. The benefit being that it harvests a useful fraction of the air pressure that blocky, open-bed trucks almost entirely forfeit. Actually, the tougher aerodynamic trick has been coaxing the temperamental flow around those sharp A-pillars."
If the Cybertruck is a shock to the eyes, it's a jump-start to reimagining the foundational assumptions about vehicle appearance, engineering, and manufacturing. Remember Elon Musk's plans to leapfrog car assembly with a high-speed, robotic, alien dreadnaught "machine-that-builds-the-machine" that would fire-hose Model 3s out its tailpipe? He had to sheepishly remove some of the robots and conveyor belts to speed things up.
Now, the "machines-that-will-build" the Cybertruck will go dramatically skinnier, scaling the dreadnaught down to simple dinghies that groove and bend (with the $200 million paint shop getting an auditor's line drawn through it). Real progress is assembled from the debris of failures.
