Tesla did not respond to Wired’s request for comment on this article.
It’s too early for Nagley to talk about Tesla’s inability to survive, “But the question is, can they thrive? One of the iron rules about the automotive industry is that there is a model life cycle. People are bored with a generation of cars, want a new generation of cars, or they’ve gone somewhere else,” he said. Customers “have decided that many Tesla cars, including the ‘new’ model Y, would look familiar.”
In a car world, Chinese design is moving forward much faster than Western competitors, and the appearance of a car is becoming increasingly important. For Jamie Tomkins, senior project designer at the Royal Academy of Arts Intelligent Mobile Design Centre in London, the only updated model Y design is a chance Tesla missed. “Just to update before and after, make it a Cybertruk style…that’s not enough,” he said.
Tomkins mentioned the historical global success of Y, adding that Tesla investments in a comprehensive redesign were cautious, “but they have done it at a cheap price. Any glory that Musk might have shown before is now history.”
Frank Stephenson is a well-known car designer who has worked for Ford, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati, Fiat, Fiat, Lancia, Alfa Romeo and McLaren, perhaps best known for redesigning the Mini. “They have a great design team [at Tesla]. But Tesla’s worst designer is Musk. I know some people on the team. They are very capable. It was just when Elon said “What I want” that he understood, it wasn’t everyone’s taste – I’m sure what happened to Seberak. ”
The Y model is “the most successful seller of the brand and performs well,” Stephenson said. “But it’s that philosophy, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. But, in the design world, it’s the wrong path. If you don’t move forward, you move forward.
Stephenson believes that adding light bars to the “new” model Y is a response to some of Seberak’s more positive reactions – “So they borrowed that,” he said. “The one at the back has an amazing factor. The light bar at the front is boring, just like you could make a light bar.”
But Musk seems to be not only relying on extending the lifetime of model Y to a recent refresh. “Grok is about to arrive at Tesla cars,” Elon Musk said in a post on X earlier this month. Although this only matches the EV brand with companies like Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, it is already adding AI assistants to the vehicle.
Just last week, it was revealed that Tesla’s YL model YL (six-seater, 456 hp, 456 hp, dual-sport iteration of its electric SUV) was a longer wheelbase version to fill the current demand for such vehicles there. Whether it eventually lands in the United States, too.
