Before Elon Musk revealed the Tesla truck in 2019, there were a million concept images and magazine stories speculating what the incoming Cybertruck, or simply some sort of Tesla truck, would look like. These Cybertruck concepts prove everyone was wrong. Very, very wrong.

We didn’t expect this:

Tesla did a great job of keeping us all in the dark. Nobody would have expected the angular stainless steel body, the flying buttresses in the rear, or the large flat-glass windshield. Instead, back in the day, artists did their best by looking at then-current cars and previous Teslas to design their dream Cybertrucks.

They are hilarious.

Most concept artists drew some sort of tall off-road truck that looked like a Hyundai Santa Cruz on steroids. Others decided the truck would look like an F-150 but with a Tesla front end. Still others decided that it would be a ute, or a car with a truck bed, like a modern El Camino only electric. We did know it would have a lot of fancy new technology, though.

Car and Driver did its best. So did Britain’s Autocar magazine.

Thanks to X user @EvaFoxU, a journalist who has covered Tesla for several years, many of these first-generation Tesla truck renderings have been preserved via social media. Some are awful, some are great, and some are just weird.

Some of the design elements were leaked

Some of the design elements of the Cybertruck concepts were leaked in the first one @EvaFoxU posted in 2019. The large front flat glass windshield did make it to the final version of the Cybertruck. The stainless exterior, too, is included. But, beyond that, it looks like the artist did their best based on the few posts Elon Musk sent that showed a couple of weird angles of the truck.

In the second image, it looks like the artist was more inspired by Musk’s other company, SpaceX, which is a rocket ship company. Clearly, this rendering looks more like a Mars lander with a bed and a crew capsule than something we’d see on the 101 next to a Camry.

Others thought it would look like a “normal” truck

Some artists seemed more conservative and expected Tesla to build more of a conventional-looking truck. Yeah, right. But, this particular rendering would have looked right at home on a Ram or Chevy showroom in 2019. It didn’t look too terribly different from the Ford F-150 Lighting or the Rivian R1T.

At least one expected Tesla to rebody a current truck

Others expected Tesla to simply take what looks like a contemporary Ford F-150 and Tesla-ize it. Of course, this wasn’t an out-there idea. The original Tesla Roadster was pretty much a Lotus Elise with a battery. The original Roadsters, which were sold between 2008 and 2012, used the Elise platform because it met federal crash standards and was praised for its handling. It was a great introduction to the Tesla brand. So, why not repeat that idea with a truck?

Others were just, well, weird

Other artists took what they could from sci-fi movies and adapted those concepts to a truck. This rendering may look strange, but Musk is a huge fan of sci-fi movies and it made sense in 2019 that the truck would be inspired by moon landers as much as anything else. Also about this time, Tesla was teasing images of its Semi big rig. The flat windshield and weird door frames were likely inspired by its big commercial truck concept.

We’re not sure what future Cybertrucks will look like, but we’ll be wrong

We do know that when Musk pulled the cover off the original, nobody expected it to look like what it does. What could future Cybertruck concepts bring?

This article was originally published on April 8, 2022, and was updated for freshness on June 6, 2024.