A CTS on 15s and a Cream Cybertruck: The Slab's New School Is Rewriting What Counts

"To be a real slab," D-one Tha Chosen told Hagerty in 2021, "it almost has to be a Cadillac." The veteran of the Houston hip-hop scene grew up riding in one of the city's first slabs, a candy red 1986 Lincoln Town Car, and his definition is the one most original builders still hold: a Cadillac on 84-style wire wheels with a continental kit, whitewalls and the candy color of your click.

Walk through any slab gathering now and you will see that definition getting tested. Next to the Eldorado convertibles and early-1990s Broughams are Cadillac CTS sedans, Chrysler 300s, Dodge Chargers and, in at least one famous case, a Tesla Cybertruck. The wheels, the sound and the attitude are still mandatory. The car underneath is up for debate.

Why the cars changed

Part of it is simple supply. Hagerty's history of the scene explains that when the GM full-size cars of the late 1970s and their descendants became too hard to find, younger builders adapted. They started with front-drive W-body cars like the Chevrolet Impala, Buick LaCrosse and Pontiac Grand Prix. When those got scarce, another group moved to late-model Chrysler 300s and Dodge Chargers.

Carzavier Mosley, a Katy owner with a traditional 1984 Eldorado slab, described the same split to the Houston Chronicle in 2019: traditional slabs come from big American cars of the late 1970s and 1980s, but a younger generation also uses models from the early 2000s, a shift helped by replica swangas becoming widely available. The Chronicle's 2025 look at the slab rental service HTX Garage found slabs ranging from a 1967 Coupe de Ville to a 2021 Chevrolet Malibu, and a dropped 2019 Cadillac CTS with HIGHSCHOOL DROPOUT spelled out in neon inside the trunk.

Kiwi's CTS and the 15-inch answer

The clearest example of the new approach in Hagerty's story belongs to a Houston builder known as Kiwi. With 10 slabs and, in Hagerty's words, marketing savvy under his belt, Kiwi modified a Cadillac CTS4 to accept smaller 15-inch swangers so it would stand apart from everything else in the lot.

Look at Chris Spicks' photos of the car and the logic is obvious. The black CTS sits on whitewalls with a gold stripe, the spokes poke out from modern bodywork and a spare rides on the trunk lid in its own continental-style mount. It is unmistakably a slab and unmistakably a 21st-century Cadillac. It also skips the extreme width of the longest pokes, which Hagerty reported were drawing more police attention on Houston freeways.

Eddie Kennedy of 3rd Coast Customs, a respected Houston builder known for Brougham conversions, was working on another new-school car the day Hagerty visited: a fully modified, two-year-old Cadillac XTS. It had candy purple paint, a motorized continental kit, leather redyed in a color Hagerty described as "Goober Grape" and 15-inch poke Texans on Vogues. Kennedy was reluctant to call it a slab. "I guess," he told the magazine, "this is what people are seeing as a slab nowadays."

A Cybertruck on 84s

If a CTS stretches the definition, Eric Harrison snapped it in half. In 2024, the Houston resident bought a Tesla Cybertruck and put swangas on it, and a post showing it off was shared nearly 30,000 times on Instagram, the Houston Chronicle reported. Texan Wire Wheels, the Houston company that makes 30-spoke wire wheels, added the finishing touches.

"I just happen to love the car culture here in Houston as I was born and raised here," Harrison told the Chronicle. He called it the Cyber Slab, with neon signage on the back. Paul Wall shared a photo on Facebook with the caption "Only in Houston." Not everyone was charmed. "We've gone too far and there's no coming back," Larry Cothran said in an Instagram video the Chronicle quoted.

Harrison kept going. The Chronicle reported in June 2024 that Cashout Customs, a local customization shop, wrapped the truck from Tesla's slip gray paint film to cream in vinyl, and that Eduardo Espino Jr. of Espino HTX installed matching cream dust covers and the swangas. Instead of candy paint, Harrison went subtle. "I don't do the slab talk," he told the paper. "I just let the slab talk." By July he had added a matching cream BMW on similar wheels.

What the OGs say

The traditionalists are not wrong to push back, and the Chronicle's coverage shows the line plainly. Tony Davis, who runs the fabrication shop Creative Actions and rides an old Oldsmobile slab, told the paper he dedicates his car to the people who taught him to build them. "That's why I like the old school," he said. Hagerty met another owner, a mobile mechanic called Cowboy, whose third slab is a Buick Riviera convertible because, as the magazine put it, the old body styles garner more respect.

Hagerty's own take was that the debate misses the point if it ends at the car. The magazine compared the split to the difference between a time-capsule music scene and one that keeps evolving, messy and occasionally embarrassing but alive. By that measure the CTS on 15s and the Cyber Slab are proof the culture is still moving, the same way the first Eldorado on Cragar wires was in the 1980s.

There is a practical lesson in it too. The new-school builders are solving real problems: scarce old cars, expensive parts and the legal and safety headaches of giant pokes. A modern Cadillac on modest swangas is easier to keep on the road than a 40-year-old Eldorado on Giraffe poke. Whether it is a real slab is a question Houston will be arguing about at every car show for years. The trunk will still pop either way.