Tron-Like Paint Is All a Mini Tesla Cybertruck Needs to Make Off-Road Conversion Fade Away

Not because it will be a revolution in tech or design, but because it’s weird and has Elon Musk written all over it.

All of us who were around and awake during those hours in November 2019, when Musk and his cohort of Tesla geniuses pulled the wraps off the Cybertruck, instantly thought the man had finally gone mad – a belief enhanced by the pathetic display that showed how the supposed armored windows of the concept can actually break when hit not-that-hard.

Then we got to terms with it, some of us even started liking the idea of an electric truck that looks like a funky shoebox, and we all started doing what we always do when it comes to a new Tesla product: wait, wait, and wait some more. Three years have passed since the Cybertruck was first shown, and we’re only now starting to get the first glimpses of production starting in the foreseeable future.

There are some who got tired of waiting, and started making their own Cybertrucks whichever way they could. Even companies got involved, with Hot Wheels, for instance, rolling out a diecast version of the truck in 2021.

Strangely enough, not many of these scale replicas got remade in custom Cybertrucks. Or, at least, far fewer than we expected. And just as we were getting ready to call it for this year, the guy running the Jakarta Diecast Project (JDP) dropped this into our lap: an off-road take at the Tesla EV.

The project started as a 2021 incarnation of the Hot Wheels toy, which underwent the usual trials and tribulations JDP subjects these cars to: it got dismantled, stripped of non-paint, cut and glued together, until at the end of the many hours of work (compressed in almost 13 minutes of video, check below) we are left with something even more insane than the stock Cybertruck.

Looking a bit like something people would definitely use in a future Tron movie (Tron 3 is for now scheduled for release in 2025, by the way), the makeover also gives us a glimpse of how the EV truck would look with paint on. You know, like all other normal cars have.

For all intents and purposes, and completely disregarding any off-road flavored modification made, it seems all the truck needed to become more pleasing to the eye and more alluring to the brain was a coat of black and some blue-ish highlights here and there.

Not disregarding the changes, we’re looking at a miniature version of something we’ll probably see plenty of once the Cybertruck actually gets here: a beast transformed to allow any kind of terrain to be navigated easily, protected all over by skid plates and rollbars, and equipped with enough lights to chase away nights, no matter how dark.