If you’re not already familiar with Khyzyl Saleem, let us introduce him for you. Known as @the_kyza on Instagram, he’s a self-taught concept artist who hails from Manchester, UK and more recently has been grabbing attention at the likes of the SEMA show with BMW and Polestar builds (thus far) under his Live to Offend brand. Khyzyl most recently took a stab at augmenting the recently introduced Tesla Cybertruck.
Here’s what Khyzyl did in his own words posted to his page on ArtStation.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love what Elon is doing in this industry, truly breaking those boundaries and the original design is bonkers, I just wanted to add my own flavour to it.
“I modelled the truck as my base first, and altered a few body lines slightly just to make it a bit more interesting, its still a truck so went down the Trophy Truck esque route, oh, and I filmed me modelling the entire thing! I added fenders that add a bit of curvature to the truck, but still tried to maintain the futuristic element to it. Bertone inspired, still the same size/scale as the original, just on the lowest height setting.
“Genuinely had a blast with this one and happy with the outcome, I will make more renders to show the details properly! Hope ya’ll like it! Cyberpunk is ma realm, this was incredibly fun!“
It’s interesting Khyzyl mentions Bertone. By lowering the Cybertruck and adding the extra width in flares, particularly the one that overlaps onto the top at the front, the vehicle begins to strongly harken the Bertone-designed Lancia Stratos rally car. The surprisingly jeered wedge-shape of the Cybertruck, once lowered, takes on a strong harkening of 80s era wedge-shaped supercars like the also Bertone designed Lamborghini Countach. In this case, the appeal of the lowered Cybertruck likely strikes a nerve for those who grew up with such cars printed to posters on their bedroom walls.
Could Kyzyl Saleem and Live to Offend build a conversion kit for the Cybertruck? It’s certainly be rad if they did. At this point though, it’s too early to tell. The Cybertruck has barely been shown to the public by Tesla, so any conversions like this will have to wait until after the truck goes into production.
Of course, in scale, the Cybertruck would dwarf a Lancia Stratos by a considerable margin. It’s made to scale closer to the Ford F-150. Even still, if you’d have told us before viewing Saleem’s work that a 4-door pickup body style would resemble the Lancia Stratos, we’d have told you that you were crazy. Now, we’re the crazy ones… crazy for Khyzyl Saleem’s take on the Tesla Cybertruck.
