Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on this article.
For Nagley, it’s too early to talk about Tesla failing to survive, “but the question is, can they thrive? One of the iron rules about the car industry is that there are model life cycles. People get bored of cars of one generation and want a new generation, or they go somewhere else,” he says. Customers “have decided that a lot of Tesla cars, including the ‘new’ Model Y, are looking very familiar.”
In an automotive world where China designs are advancing far faster than Western competitors, how cars look is becoming ever more crucial. For Jamie Tomkins, senior project designer at the Royal College of Art’s Intelligent Mobility Design Centre in London, an only slightly updated Model Y design is a missed opportunity for Tesla. “Just to update the front and rear and make it kind of Cybertruck-esque … it’s not enough,” he says.
Referring of the historical global success of the Y, Tomkins adds that it would have been prudent for Tesla to invest in a full redesign, “but they’ve done it on the cheap. Any brilliance that Musk may have shown before is now history.”
Frank Stephenson, the renowned auto designer who has worked for Ford, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati, Fiat, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, and McLaren, and is perhaps best known for redesigning the Mini, has a clear opinion. “They’ve got a great design team [at Tesla]. But the worst designer at Tesla is Musk. I know a few guys on the team. They’re very capable. It’s just that when Elon says ‘I want something’ he gets it, and it’s not to everybody’s taste—which is I’m sure what happened with Cybertruck.”
Model Y is “the most successful volume seller for the brand, and it’s doing well,” says Stephenson. “But it’s that philosophy of if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. But a lot of times, in the world of design, that is the wrong path. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving back. So everybody’s full on, especially the Chinese right now.”
Stephenson feels that the addition of the light bars to the ‘new’ Model Y was a response to some of the more positive reactions to the Cybertruck—“so they borrowed that,” he says. “The one on the back has the wow factor. The light bar on the front is as boring as you can make a light bar.”
However, Musk appears to not merely be pinning hopes of extending the Model Y’s lifespan on just the recent refresh. “Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon,” Elon Musk stated in a post on X earlier this month, though this only brings the EV brand in line with what the likes of Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have already done in adding AI assistants to their vehicles.
And just this week it’s been revealed that Tesla has a longer-wheelbase version of the Y, the Model Y L (a six-seater, 456 HP, dual-motor iteration of its electric SUV) coming to China customers to fill the demand for such vehicles there right now. Whether it eventually also lands in the US remains unconfirmed.