CARS APOCALYPSE CHIC: TESLA'S CYBERTRUCK GIVES LUXURY A NEW SHAPE

FIVE YEARS AFTER Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled plans for his polarizing Cybertruck, I found myself standing in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot on an afternoon in July, surveying the automaker's surrealist take on the electric utility vehicle: a triangular behemoth, sharp-angled and brutalist.

- JACLYN TROP

Its wide, unpainted, stainless-steel body boasts a massive windshield and nary a curve throughout, and it has managed to draw comparisons to both the Eiffel Tower and a preschooler's loose-leaf sketch.

"Just be careful if you walk too close to the front, or even the back, because people have cut themselves," says LJ, the owner who rented me his truck for the day through an app. He pointed to the jagged intersections of body panels, which did indeed look sharp enough to cut flesh.

Those perilous edges were the result of a Musk decree that the designers eschew pliable sheet metal that can be molded into rounded shapes, in favor of far less practical stainless steel, which is impervious to stamping machines. (Another downside: Every fingerprint shows up on stainless steel.)

For $340 a day, LJ had promised me "the exclusive feeling of possessing a car that has only graced the hands of the top one percent." And the experience started out seeming suitably swanky: The doors unlocked soundlessly at the touch of a Tesla app on my phone.

It wasn't until I was sitting behind the wheel that I started to notice some of the truck's more unsettling features. First, despite its advertised "beast mode" ability to rocket from 0 to 60 mph in a neckscrunching 2.6 seconds "while maintaining highspeed stability," the truck lacked tangible practicalities like grab bars. Then there's the world's smallest rearview mirror. Roughly the size of a deck of cards, the slip of glass created a blind spot that swallowed whole cars behind me.