The Cybertruck Design Would Make More Sense As An Amish Buggy, Just Hear Me Out

There is nothing wrong with a sphere. Far from it.

Without this shape, the planet we live on couldn’t function the way it does, and it looks quite fetching as this green-and-blue ball floating peacefully in space. The sphere makes it possible to have soccer riots, the movie Bull Durham, and constant conversations at work during March that are especially irritating if you don’t care for basketball. Giant red spheres are great for poorly driven giant SUVs to get stuck on in Target parking lots. Having said that, this shape is not universally viable for any use.

For example, a spherical house sucks. People have tried round homes (see the Bolwoningen below)  immediately realized that the space utilization with this shape was quite poor. Even if you find a way to hang your flat screen on the curved wall, once you set up your La-Z-Boy sectional to watch it, you’ll see that the space is already filled.

Of course that’s not a problem with the shape itself; it’s just that it’s being misused. The same thing appears to be the case with the latest cause celebre of the automotive world, the Tesla Cybertruck (or just “Cybertruck” in a Madonna or Drake kind of way).

More virtual ink has been spilled praising or criticizing this brutally angular, pyramid-shaped silver machine than any other vehicle in recent memory. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (even if they’re wrong) but subjectively it’s hard to deny that it’s a pretty awful shape for a pickup truck. For example:

-The angular “sail panels” prevent you from having easy access to the bed from the side of the truck.

-A pyramid shape means compromised headroom for rear passengers, yet creates a tall roof “peak” that increases the height to prevent it from getting past your garage door.

-Flat metal with sharp corners is a terrible idea for a production car in terms of panel alignment and gaps.

Tesla and their many fans will likely refute these claims, yet it’s almost impossible to argue that a design for a highly functional pickup truck would look far different than a Cybertruck. Still, that’s not to say that the general Cybertruck shape couldn’t be a reasonable fit for other types of transportation modes. How about an Amish buggy?

You read that right. I’m talking about the utilitarian horse drawn carts still used by Amish people in their communities today, seemingly unchanged from a century and half ago going about their business amongst modern traffic. Can we design a Cyberbuggy?

Not As Low Tech As You’d Imagine

It might seem strange to suggest that the basic aesthetic of a truck spearheaded by a very forward-thinking company could be accepted by a society known for avoiding modern technology. The Amish favor face-to-face conversations and rural self-sufficiency, things that seem at odds with the owner of Twitter (sorry, “X”) and overtaxing EV infrastructure. Humility and living the simple life as the Amish do has very little to do with Vegas tunnels and Mars colonies. Despite all of this, you’ll see how this ethnoreligious group could find the Cybertruck design elements to be very cohesive with their values and needs.

Visually, Amish buggy design has, of course, changed very little over the last century and a half. Still, as this Popular Mechanics article discusses, you’d be surprised how the materials used to make them have advanced. What looks at first like a canvas wrapped box of a body often actually turns out to have more in common with a Corvette: it’s fiberglass.

Aluminum is used for high wear areas, and framing is often done with something called “thermally modified” wood: ash or oak that has been kiln dried to remove virtually all moisture to make it extremely hard to rot. These horse-drawn boxes are typically black or grey with virtually no ornamentation other than the state-mandated reflectors. Still, there are sects of Amish that paint their buggies in other colors – even screaming yellow.

Buggies typically have foot-operated, unpowered brakes (usually drums) on two wheels to prevent the thing from running into the horse when stopping. The wheels feature a wrap of steel or hard rubber to spare the rim from road wear, but pneumatic tires are never used. So, you’re going to get a ride like, well, a modern performance car.  Surprisingly, LED lighting is now often used in buggies, and most have a dashboard with controls mounted to a wood panel for the interior lights, outside lighting and turn signals. Commonly used pedestal-mounted, two-sided lamps on each side are red in back and amber in front and blink brighter for signaling turns. Marine batteries or other forms of power are used in a concession to modern technology and needed safety for something sharing roads with 200MPH Teslas.

Inside, a single bench seat sits behind a glass windshield that tips forward for ventilation and the horse reins, and sliding or hinged side doors can keep out the elements in winter. The one below appears to have knob-operated manual windshield wipers. Options such as propane heaters, speedometers, and cupholders are often offered; I would have to believe that rich Corinthian velour seat and shag carpet “firewall” on the example below were upgrades as well.

Either cargo or center facing seats can fill the windowless area in back, accessible from a rear opening or door.

There are only a few places that exist in states such as Indiana and Pennsylvania that build these old school transportation modules with varying degrees of labor-saving devices depending on the shop owner’s beliefs and level of acceptance. If electricity is not allowed, a diesel engine creating compressed air is used to power their tools. Buggies sell for around eight to ten thousand dollars which seems like a good deal considering the level of craftsmanship that goes into them. The expectation is that they last for decades; like a classic Aston Martin, they often return to the shops that built them for refurbishment. Naturally, these are not vehicles that people lease for thirty-six-months and then ditch (and they also usually pay cash, as shops claim that bank financing on something without a VIN is tough to do).

Aluminum? Simple construction? Flat surfaces? Longevity? See what I’m talking about? This Cybertruck design for a buggy is starting to make more sense, right?

Cyberbuggy Comes To Life

Stainless steel doesn’t fit our “Cyberbuggy” (and I’m not sure if it’s really a fit for any street vehicle), but aluminum does. Aluminum seems to align with Amish principles better than the fiberglass of current buggies; metal is recyclable, this particular metal is lightweight, and it will never rust. You could paint it black, but I’d rather leave it bare silver to reflect the sun to keep the interior cooler during those hot Indiana and Pennsylvania summers. Here’s what I was scribbling in a very dull meeting in my actual job:

The flat sides of Cybertruck are hell to get right in a mass-produced street car, as the panel gaps on early Cybertrucks have shown. Something like the Aston Martin Lagonda sort of did it (if not as severely), but they were made by hand in small numbers where you can control fit much easier on individual cars. Thankfully, by hand is exactly how Amish buggies are built, and flat plates with straight edges are perfect for the manual bending brakes Amish use to form steel– no need for the monstrous stamping dies that car manufacturers would use. A wood or steel structure underneath would support the panels. Have you seen the quality of Amish furniture? You can be damn sure that a product with poor panel gaps would never, ever, ever leave an Amish shop.

The sort of “pyramid” shape with the sloping roof allows for rain and snow to slide off the back of the buggy, and the angled windshield allows for more light and better visibility than a perfectly vertical one. Side doors might be sliding or hinged, and the lightweight polycarbonate plastic windows can lower manually or simply just be removed for the season (the owners will not be paying tolls or going to the drive-thru).

The image of the buggy below shows special seven spoke “safety wheels” (or sicherheitsraders as the Amish would call them). Optional “stanced” wheels with the spokes angled out slightly as below could be offered for a bit wider track and safer cornering. I assure you, I didn’t come up with that merely to justify the cooler appearance.

… OK, fine, I did.

There could be a number of rear door options, but I’m showing a “clamshell” style where the top half flips up and the lower half folds down with steps on it (which keeps the steps clean when the buggy is moving).

The Cybertruck-style, full-width front and rear reflectors for safety would be LED-illuminated and powered by a battery, possibly charged via a wheel-driven generator or even roof-mounted solar panels (again, technology used within the bounds of not violating Amish beliefs).

Actually, there’s two ways to look at this: depending on the beliefs of the owner, the Cyberbuggy could be outfitted with the aforementioned low-voltage electrics (some buggy-owners are already doing this, if less stylishly), or the accessory systems could be made to function without electricity. How? Well, we might consider something used in Britain where pet waste is used to power a lamp at the dog park. Yup, shit is literally turned into shinola with methane gas providing fuel to a flame. Could horse dung work for Cyberbuggy lighting? Maybe even fiber optics from the burning light going to different parts of the buggy? A drive off of a wheel can also power the windshield wiper by engaging a clutch (not unlike speedometer-cable-powered wipers on early Citroen 2Vs). Yeah, too much, I know.

The wood dashboard is a Shaker-style slab with all of the controls you need. You could say that it looks more modern, but like the outside it’s plain geometric forms not unlike the furniture the Amish make. I mean, if an Amish buggy can have that wood filigree and custom van carpeting like the one shown near the top of this post, to me the below interior seems to be more in keeping with their principle of simplicity. I’ve added a headrest bar since this slow-moving thing getting hit from the back is the most likely collision.

Made For The Masses, Co-opted By The Rich?

You might be asking yourself how a society that shuns all things ostentatious would want an object that looks like a near-six-figure truck. First, let’s pretend the Cybertruck doesn’t exist. There is no reason that a simple, functional design should be associated with wealth and privilege, but it is, and it’s happened before.

In the thirties, the Bauhaus design movement developed simple furnishings that were stripped down to their basic elements; clean geometric forms that were intended to be easy to mass produce and affordable by mainstream buyers. However, when members of this group set up shop in the US after fleeing World War II Germany, these items became fashionable to members of avant-garde high society. Soon enough, these proto-IKEA products that were created for the budget of Joe Six Pack became expensive boutique pieces. Take a look at some new, far-cheaper-than-original reproduction versions of these items you can buy today at Design Within Reach below. Obviously these furnishings were never really “within reach”, unless you lived on the Upper West Side and drove your black XJ6 to the summer place in the Hamptons.

The Mercedes G Wagon is a similar case; this is a purely functional object that somehow became a status symbol. Again, do not pin a shape onto a socio-economic group just because they seem to have claimed it for themselves. Fight the power, people!

Which One Is The Joke?

Cyberbuggy began as, of all things, a passing laugh on Slack. However, with a little research it became obvious that things are not what they seem.

The Amish, it turns out, are not opposed to utilizing some newer technologies as long as they can still maintain their overall principals. Today, they do not eschew using things like fiberglass, LEDs, and specially treated wood in their horse-drawn buggies; they help to give them a more useful product. Oddly enough, that’s almost the opposite of the Cybertruck where the materials and shape seem to be employed despite the fact that they’re going against the functionality of a pickup truck.

Cyberbuggy or Cybertruck? Now I’m not sure which one is the joke here.

Our Daydreaming Designer Gives The Cybertruck Treatment To Tesla’s Upcoming Low-Cost Cars – The Autopian

Our Daydreaming Designer Imagines The Tesla Of Ride On Lawn Mowers – The Autopian

What It Might Look Like If Tesla ‘Gremlinized’ The Model 3 To Make A Tesla Model 2 – The Autopian

What If The Best Selling EV Prior To Tesla Returned With Styling “Stolen” By Cybertruck? – The Autopian