Tesla needs to fire Musk, abandon the childish and already dated Cybertruck and just build a normal truck/SUV. One that can compete with popular offerings from Rivian, Ford etc. and soon to be Porsche, RangeRover etc.
And that can be easily sold globally unlike Cybertruck which has concerns from Australian regulators (and likely others) about whether it would be street legal given its unique sharp metal corners at children height design.
I don't disagree that Musk probably isn't doing Tesla any favors lately, but even absent Musk, does the company actually know how to directly compete against established car makers in the same market segment? Tesla benefited a lot from being first with the "electric cars are cool now" approach, and they've been able to ride that early momentum pretty far as the other automakers struggled to catch up.
Now all the other companies are coming out with competing EVs, it's not obvious Tesla as a company has moved beyond a strategy based on being your only nice EV option to actually being better than the competition. The Cybertruck is an absolute joke for the truck market compared to competitor vehicles, which also have the advantage of being products you can actually purchase.
But even beyond the Cybertruck, the rest of the Tesla product lineup isn't the obvious choice it was even a few years ago. You can get a lot of nice EVs these days made by companies that also have a long history of being good at building cars in general and that you're fairly confident will be around for decades to come. Early on, the basic argument for Tesla was obvious...they were basically the only option for a cool, upscale EV. What's their marketing pitch in 2023?
Tesla is going to win on cost. They keep driving down the cost to manufacture EVs. That will bring down the selling price as well. Legacy auto makers offering EVs won’t be able to compete on price with Tesla without huge losses.
Yeah, after new rule rollout Tesla in one of the few manufactures still eligible for the EV subsidy. Unfortunately they made the rules too stringent focused on US manufacturing. Which is great in theory, but in todays world of global supply chains isn't exactly practical.
And yet Porsche, Range Rover, Rivian etc manage to sell the same cars globally.
I'm not a rocket science/engineering/business genius like Musk but pretty sure having one design that may require some minor regional modifications is going to be significantly cheaper than having two completely different cars.
Porsche (~300k units/year) and Range Rover (~90k units/year) are niche brands, Rivian isn't even profitable and a volume manufacturer. Conversely, the Model Y was the US' 6th best selling vehicle last year [1], is currently the 4th best selling vehicle in 2023, and will likely the world's best selling car in 2023 [2] based on demand and supply forecasts.
> According to a report from Focus to Move, the Model Y is now the fourth best-selling vehicle worldwide after an astonishing 88 percent jump from 2021 to 2022. There were 759,000 Model Ys sold last year, just 28,000 units behind the third-place Ford F-150 which has been the best-selling truck for the previous 46 years. Toyota claimed the top two spots, with the RAV4 at 870,000 and the Corolla selling 1.12 million.
The Model Y has a very conventional style, so the fact that it sells well would seem to be a point in favor of the GP’s argument. It also sells in many continents, which Cybertruck might not be able to do.
Consider Tesla did not copy existing manufacturers. They built their own markets (S->X->3->Y). People complain online loudly about the touchscreen, quality, but I'll be damned, these units get moved regardless (well on our way to almost 3M/year [1]). For example, Harley can't woo younger riders to the brand because their attempt to acquire them turns off older Harley fans who are slowly dying out. Tesla doesn't have to attract legacy truck owners (Ford, Ram, Chevy), they're targeting young buyers and then locking them into the brand [2]. Buying a car is an emotional purchase [3], they're not going to convert older folks, they're going entrench themselves in youth purchasers as older, sticky auto buyers age out with their legacy preferences.
Cybertruck doesn't have to sell well, it just has to have greater demand than supply globally. Global pickup truck market is ~4M/units annually, so Tesla should do just fine carving out some of that for itself.
> Consider Tesla did not copy existing manufacturers.
I own a Model 3 and was considering a BMW 3-series (non-EV) briefly before I bought the Tesla. While shopping I was surprised to notice how closely the price of Model 3 option packages tracked the BMW equivalent packages, almost within a few dollars (although the Tesla had fewer packages.) It seemed obvious to me that Tesla had done this on purpose, in an effort to carefully market the Model 3 towards an existing successful market. Similarly, the crossover they came out with next was named the “Model Y” and seemed almost perfectly tuned to compete with some of BMW’s popular X-line of crossover SUVs, again an existing market that could easily be optimized against. So while I would not use the word “copy”: it sure seemed like Tesla was carefully targeting existing markets, with slightly more flashy vehicles and similar price points — all with enormous success! The Cybertruck, on the other hand, throws this successful and cautious strategy into the garbage and then backs over it.
The original Tesla Roadster was based on a Lotus chassis, and the models after that weren’t major deviations from the norm (aside from maybe the gull wings, but even those have some design heritage). Elon was a car guy before Tesla—one of his first splurges when he got rich was a McLaren F1, which he infamously crashed with Peter Thiel in the passenger seat—and as a result, Tesla cars all seem reminiscent of European sports cars. He’s not a truck guy, though. So while his personal tastes have been beneficial for Tesla in the past, I think they miss the mark with Cybertruck.
Also, trucks are functional vehicles, and Cybertruck violates a lot of common functionality that most “legacy” trucks have. There are probably a lot of people who drive trucks who don’t need that functionality—i.e. poseurs—and maybe some of them will buy Cybertrucks.
Agree, most people who buy trucks don’t use them as trucks. That’s the primary Cybertruck market. Most of life is status and signaling. Sell what people want.
> For example, Harley can't woo younger riders to the brand because their attempt to acquire them turns off older Harley fans who are slowly dying out.
That cuts the other direction as well, if Tesla/Musk just alienate 90% of the population and the backlash builds against their touchscreens and build quality then they may find that they're just selling to fanbois.
And the EV Ranger is the vehicle that is targeting the kids of the people who presently drive F150s.
A car/truck purchase is emotional, and if you live in Astoria, OR a cybertruck is going to get you a ton of shit from everyone you know.
The successful Tesla models have had styling that pretty much looked like any other vehicle and didn't stand out a lot and any cachet was based around what it was and how it performed.
So... the strategy is to not appeal to older buyers who have money and instead court younger buyers who can't afford your vehicle so they're "locked in" to a brand they can't purchase. Interesting.
Cybertruck has 1.5 million preorders and revolutionizes the technology used today in cars and trucks. It may be ugly but it will win in every other category.
Porsche and Range Rover are popular in the SUV space. But please explain the thought process.
That if a company is popular and profitable they should always build an entirely different product for each country. Makes you wonder why tiny companies like Apple and Nike don't follow this brilliant idea.
I think their point is probably that the personal-use pickup truck (_presumably_ the Tesla truck isn't intended as an actual utility truck) is _mostly_ an American phenomenon; the idea of having a personal pickup truck is just far less common in most countries (I think it's somewhat a thing in Australia). So there may not be much of a global market for this _anyway_.
Musk behavior is significantly weighing the stock down. I saw Tesla early on as a slam dunk investment. But at a certain point when everyone began to see them this way (vain hope!), I had serious doubt they could deliver.
And 10 years later, I realize anyone else with industrial experience could have done a better job of delivering cars than Musk could.
We are giving this guy more credit than he deserves. There have been far too many layoffs at Tesla, good employees with similar vision, all because this guy was a billionaire jerk, without the billionaire title.
And at the end of the month, Elon's got to sell another chunk to fund the Twitter debt payment. But I'm sure he's playing 11th dimension chess and knows what he's doing. I'm sure when he doesn't have cheap debt to do a stock buy-back TSLA will go up instead of down.
The current product is not even remotely one that can compete in the market. It has to be redesigned, or they’re going to end up shipping the Pontiac Aztek of EV trucks.
Jay Leno hit the nail on the head “this doesn’t look anything like a pickup truck” which is exactly what the problem was with the Aztek. Crossovers are a huge market but the totally ridiculous body style was a flop.
If Tesla priced this more like a Raptor, in order to market it as a futuristic status car, it might work. That’s not what they’re doing. Rivian is eating their lunch here and will continue to do so.
If you're basing your criticism on looks, there are two responses:
1. it's an opinion, and there are a substantial number of people who like the cybertruck
2. a truck is a functional vehicle, and functionality is the primary consideration. Lots of people think the Ram is the best looking truck, but it's substantially outsold by F-150 & GM.
Unless it massively changes between now and launch (which is possible) Tesla is only going to outperform traditional trucks on one functional vector, which is speed and acceleration, but they don't outperform other EVs on that front. The Ford F-150 Lightning, Hummer EV, and Rivian's truck are all among the most powerful EVs you can buy. On other functional vectors like reliability and towing capacity they either don't really matter or Tesla won't win.
Rivian's truck in particular has solidly beaten them to market with a highly functional vehicle that has a ton of incredible design details and has some of the highest driver satisfaction ratings of any new car models on the market. They have already captured a significant chunk of the market in luxury SUV and truck EVs, also partially due to the fact that a lot of rich liberals don't want to be associated with Elon Musk in any way now, and Tesla has moved downmarket pretty hard.
Separately, a big part of the reason Ford massively outsells Dodge or other brands is because Ford is particularly loved by fleet buyers. Expect them to continue to do so with the Lightning.
So that leaves the Cybertruck to pin its whole hopes on style/appearance, selling to the same type of bros that might buy a Ford Raptor or higher end Tacoma/Tundra model at similar price points. Not exactly a move poised to win the EV truck market overall, given how polarizing the design is.
Not existing? They built an entire factory for it in Texas, is in going through crash testing, qualification, and the truck is regularly seen on test runs around their offices. This just seems like a lazy hit piece with little actual information even though there is a lot out there if you actually follow the development.
The defining feature of vaporware is that the product gets announced and then either isn't released or isn't released for a very long time. The term has nothing to do with the amount of resources being poured into it.
One of the most famous examples of vaporware was the game Duke Nukem Forever, which started development in 1996, was announced in 1997, and wasn't released until 2011. I believe it was in nearly continuous development during that time. The size of the team working on it shrank and grew, but over time that seems like a massive investment. It doesn't change the fact that it was vaporware though.
I guess you have to use your own common sense to determine if a product is moving forward or not. DNF is a great example of something that obviously was not moving forward. CyberTruck obviously is.
In what way is the cybertruck moving forward? You still can't buy one and if you put money down on one, you're still not getting your cybertruck.
Reminds me of my Starlink experience: pay $100 to get on the waiting list, wait a while, pay an additional $500 to get the downlink terminal, wait, wait some more, try to figure out who I know who still works at SpaceX because there's no support contact info for people who have paid for a terminal but haven't gotten anything, send emails to about 10 people inside SpaceX until someone responds with an offer to refund $450, then take the offer, then wait for the refund, and wait for the refund and finally get the refund 3 months later. So I'm only out $150 from trying to subscribe to Starlink.
Building factories and qualification testing is literal progress.
Starlink has global availability right now though a laser backed network. The only place you can’t get it are overloaded cells and countries that have not given landing rights.
I’m sorry for your anecdotal issue, but the system has over a million users so I think it’s fine. Starships first use will be to put up the 2nd gen network.
It’s funny how people cry about high speed low latency internet in remote places that wasn’t even possible a few years ago.
> Building factories and qualification testing is literal progress.
I get ~monthly emails about the progress being made manufacturing a chair I backed on a crowdfunding platform years ago. They constantly show great progress being made ("we finally have a factory lined up", "here's the final version of the legs", "we've begun mass production"). It feels like every one of these emails has a message about how they're going to start shipping chairs out to backers in the next couple months. This has been the case for several years now. I'm pretty skeptical I'll ever get the chair, as is basically everyone else who ordered it.
I imagine the Cybertruck will eventually be released, but it sounds like it's now almost two years behind the originally announced release date. I think it matches the spirit of vaporware currently, just as Duke Nukem Forever did for over a decade.
I think it's understandable that people would describe a delayed release from Tesla/Musk as vaporware given how their promises of "full self driving" have been going.
The CyberTruck is Vapor. It was announced, blew through it's original release date. Blew through it's updated release date. They claim they're going to do a prototype run of something like 1000 this summer. I'll believe it when I see it.
I don’t know why it’s absurd to compare the Cybertruck (promised, delayed, not released yet) to that kickstarter (promised, delayed, not released yet). They’ve even been announced for similar lengths of time.
As for “full self driving”, those cars are still not fully autonomous. That’s the whole problem that people object to. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but it’s certainly not fully self driving yet. They still routinely fuck up. Also, as I pointed out earlier, being released eventually does not mean it wasn’t right to consider something vaporware at some point (hence the example of Duke Nukem Forever).
You've always been able to get Hughes service, but it was expensive and high latency. What I cry about is some huckster who claims to have intarwebs service but really doesn't.
And yet Duke Nukem Forever has shipped, and Cybertruck has not. So right now, today, at this moment, DNF is not vaporware, and Cybertruck is. This is true regardless of how one feels about it.
I made no such comments, but OK, sure, whatever you say. Bottom line is, if you cannot buy it, it doesn't exist to the public. You can't drive .jpegs of cars.
If you give me $100 I will put you first in line for my new electric "xracy-truck" when it launches in 2027. We have a perfect track record of hitting our target deliveries for all of our projects.
NOTE: You aren't actually getting the truck, I'm just giving you a spot in line to buy the truck. The truck still costs $80k
Good idea, you won’t get any money which will prove my point that people can tell bullshit from an actual product. Well not you, but most other people.
What about the hyperloop? Was supposed to be a vacuum-sealed tube with driverless pods that go 600 mph. -> tunnel with driverless cars that go 60mph -> tunnel with driver cars that go 30 mph... for a bit... until they hit traffic.
Edit: How do you feel about the California High-Speed-Rail Project?
It’s very strange how anti innovation people are here on hacker news. Tesla does a lot of things, they’re not all going to be winners, why hold that against them, instead of celebrating their drive to do new ideas and not just what’s safe.
They built a test hyper loop in California, boring company is actively building in Vegas and hardware to hold pressure in a tunnel was tested in Texas. It’s not like they say things and don’t follow up. Maybe it doesn’t happen at the speed you like, but there is a plan being executed on slowly but surely.
Tesla has delivered more than enough, but people here will never be happy. Just like Bitcoin, I guarantee you the day it hits 100k people here will still be complaining about it
Having a perfect track record is a pretty high bar. Lots of entrepreneurs have failed with some of their businesses. We usually consider them successful if one works out really well, much less two.
Err, First completely private crew to go to space... Is that actually something we're considering a first? Can you really tell the difference between a person who works for the gov't and a person who doesn't well enough for that to be meaningful?
If you have to explain in the accolade what it means, then it's not much of an accolade.
Who cares about first of anything. It’s all about operationalization.
Dragon and Dragon 2 are rediculously successful programs that most people said was not possible. Most notably Boeing which is years behind sending crew to orbit even though receiving billions more from NASA.
US astronauts would be depending on Russia right now to get to the ISS if not for SpaceX. Which means in this political climate there’s the good chance the IIS would be dead right now.
Are you referring to the viral April fools video they released a couple weeks ago showing "crash testing" without any crash? Which was presumably just very slow driving with the video sped up, because they didn't want to damage their prototype?
If you were doing real crash testing you wanted to show off, you wouldn't skip the actual crash... It was a joke.
Wait you think they brought the vehicle to a crash testing facility, wired it up with sensors, painted all the structural components for identification and then didn't actually crash it? Talk about conspiracy theories, wow.
Tesla doesn't waste their time on crap like that. It's why they barely have anyone working in marketing or PR in the first place. The video was made from actual test footage, super quick, and they kicked it out.
Tesla's Autopilot page [1] still has a video demonstrating it's self-driving capabilities but the video is actually a composite of videos taken over numerous runs because the car hit objects and ran off the road during some of them which does not make for good marketing material. (previous discussion [2]).
That video is purely for consumption by a possible consumer; you can't get any more marketing than that!
I think you missed what I said. That isn't some footage that they pulled from some random test drive. They picked a route and drove it over and over until they had enough footage to splice together to appear as a successful run. The primary feed is also not filmed from a dash cam.
That video you linked is so old it’s the fact that they have very little marketing that they’ve never updated it.
But it doesn’t matter because there are tons of the same kind of video on YouTube uploaded everyday.
You think this is a big deal, when people are driving places daily with it just fine. I myself only drive like 10% of the time while autopilot does the rest. Gets better every month as well.
You're ignoring the fact that Tesla does "waste their time on crap like that." And the robot isn't real. Watch the video I linked if you are actually honest with yourself.
People said SpaceX was wasting their time trying to land a rocket. High risk, high reward. The potential for advanced robots in vehicle production is a no brainer.
>People said SpaceX was wasting their time trying to land a rocket.
Others did that before. It doesn't appear that you are capable of having a good-faith discussion on this topic given your tendency to change the subject and offering incorrect information. If you did not watch the video there is no point in further conversation.
Thunderfoot is a joke who feeds off haters like you. Half his critism is about products still in development. Totally ignoring how Tesla is pushing producing 2 million cars this year and SpaceX is launching more to orbit than the rest of the world combined.
But yea focus on the stuff in dev as if that negates the rest of the real progress.
Trivializing the significance or landing full size boosting from orbital velocity reliably is laughable. You must be jealous of real accomplishments.
That's the worst turning radius I've seen on a pickup truck that didn't have an RV behind it, amply demonstrated by the test driver backing up when he fails to make a fairly wide u-turn at the far end of the test strip.
The Cybertruck appears destined to go down in history as the Google Glass of the automotive world. (Notably, the Glass had the same type of limited tech-centric hype before it launched, and was widely ridiculed by the non-tech community.)
We will see. Current strategy is demand is a function of price. Not marketing. They will change price continually to meet the production output of the factory.
Between no marketing, no dealers, and making their own batteries - it’s very hard to compete.
CyberTruck looks cold, angry, mean - there’s more than enough truck drivers with the matching personality to meet the supply.
I agree, CyberTruck has no chance of competing with the Lightning or the Rivian. It's considered a joke by people who actually own trucks, and the very "features" that Elon thinks makes it cool are precisely what make it DOA for people actually looking for an EV pickup.
The only type of people who would consider buying a CyberTruck are the ones who also went all in on Google Glass.
> Tesla GigaBier [is] a “limited edition pilsner-style beer brewed in Berlin with our exclusive strain of Cyberhops and notes of citrus, bergamot, and sweet fruit.” [...] GigaBier is sold in packs of three 330-ml bottles for 89 euros (close to $100—or about $30 a beer)
Fuck off Elon fuck off together with all those dimwits who find it stylish or funny to shell out 30€ for a can of beer. Please take all your buddies with you too, and you can take those politicians with you who bypassed democratic institutions to secretly strike a deal with Tesla to build a factory near Berlin, then went to TV to brag about it. When you came around for opening day and got asked by the public about groundwater concerns and you broke out into inane laughter I finally understood what a dangerous and mad person you are. Go to hell and stay there.
If they had built a normal truck, but electric, they could have tapped a huge market. Instead they went super niche with the sci fi truck. I hope for Tesla's sake that Tesla have enough fanboys.
The number of cybertruck reservations say otherwise. It’s riskier, yes, but might payoff. I wouldn’t buy a normal truck, but a cybertruck is my dream vehicle. I’d rather own that than anything else, even if money was no object.
And I’m far from a Tesla fanboy.
But... here's the thing... they have to build and deliver the cybertruck before they can recognize the revenue. That's the problem with building tangible assets. If he had only sold an NFT of a cybertruck with a vague promise you might get to exchange the NFT in the future for a physical truck, he would be rolling in the cash.
Not to mention... I think cybertruck owners only put down $100 as a deposit. They didn't pay the complete price for it. So Tesla has to actually make trucks before people will pay the majority of the sales price.
I'm with you that I believe it would sell well if they released it, but I do not accept the number of reservations as being firm proof of that. I don't think it's controversial to say there is a lot of hype around Tesla product announcements, especially that one. Hype can drive reservations without necessarily driving sales. It's something we'd just have to wait and see about.
Large, extremely safe, no paint to maintain, no body that gets easily dented, impact resistant glass, electric, high performance, long range, great torque and acceleration, can haul stuff, can fit a family, can be used in a pinch for power, and looks awesome.
And maybe the self driving stuff will turn out to be useful too. Too soon to say.
Electric vehicles are coming much more slowly where I am and they cost 1.5-2x what they do in the US. So I bought a ICE car this year. But I hope one day a cybertruck will be a practical option for me.
Let me start off by saying that it's silly to discuss the design of a vehicle that does not exist. All anyone has seen so far is a scale model. I'm not sure it's even developed enough to call a concept. We might as well discuss whether it's better to ride a unicorn or a griffon.
>Large, extremely safe
So engineered to kill everyone except the driver. Big, heavy cars are safe only because they flatten the other party in a crash. The Cybertruck will be even worse than your average murdermobile because, as an EV, it will be unusually heavy.
And it gets worse:
>no body that gets easily dented
Cars don't have squishy bodywork by accident. Flexible, easily-dented bodywork is a safety feature. The front end of a car is designed to crumple to minimize acceleration.
Well, everyone knows about crumple zones. Clearly cars need to crumple at highway speeds, but the driver is in no danger in a parking lot. However, it is crucial that this happen even for minor collisions. Any collision with a pedestrian is a minor collision from the perspective of the car but catastrophic from the perspective of the pedestrian. The hood, bumpers, and panels must flex and dent even in a fender bender if they are to protect a pedestrian at 20 miles an hour.
Maybe it makes me a bit of an asshole, but I’m ok with that tradeoff. I’ve never had a collision in my life, but my cars have been hit by others.
I’m principally concerned with safety for myself and my family. Concern for others on the road comes a lot further down the list. Sorry. I drive with great care and responsibility, but many others do not. I’m worried about protecting me from them, not the other way around.
I do not understand people like you. Everyone does the wrong thing sometimes, but I do not see how you can calmly and knowingly choose to do evil and not even be ashamed of it. How can you be so casual about hurting other people for your own selfish ends? It is completely alien to me.
The reason that body panels are dentable is that denting helps absorb impact energy, and replacing a body panel or two is cheaper than totaling the entire car due to a dented frame creating a risk of structural failure. IOW, it's a feature, not a bug.
It's also safer for the other party in an accident, since the vehicle(s) will absorb crash energy that would otherwise be transferred to the occupants/pedestrian/cyclist. Given Tesla's abysmal self-driving record (literally, more self-driving accidents, injuries, and/or fatalities than the entire rest of the global automotive industry combined), that's a fundamental consideration.
Similarly, most cars have impact-resistant glass, but not shatterproof glass, for safety reasons. There are plenty of times when you want the glass to break.
I understand you are excited about this truck. I just want to highlight that aside from the paint thing most of this applies to a Rivian or a Ford F-150 lightning. I am not really sure the "no body that gets easily dented" is true - time will tell how durable the body is.
But I am not arguing with you about your preferences. I am saying that for the broad base of consumers, most of these needs (except no paint) can be met by existing vehicles. The Rivian for example is getting great reviews, and I think it has great looks. And the F-150 is already the highest selling vehicle in the USA, so an electric version will be a good choice for many of those consumers. Tesla coming out with such a unique vehicle means they're really going to have to prove its worth.
Yes, I’d be surprised if it outsells the electric F150. That being said, I would obviously rather have the cybertruck. Time will tell if it was a good business decision or not for Tesla. I think they’ll do alright though, and nothing stops them from bringing out a more traditional truck later as well.
Nothing stops them from coming out with a more traditional truck later except that it clearly takes them many years to ship a new model, and all the while customers who want a truck now or don't want a cybertruck are going to competitors.
Of course at this point they are committed to release. But I agree with others that releasing a more traditional truck would have been more savvy.
I don't know much about their status but other people in this thread suggest their factory is tooled up and they are close to release, so it might be a bad time to cancel everything and go back to the drawing board. Then they would have no truck for another 5 years.
But Mr. Musk is playing 11th dimensional chess that the rest of us are incapable of understanding. But more seriously, there are reasons they didn't start on it until now, maybe those reasons will persist and they'll get past the sunk cost fallacy and just decide to cancel it.
Even then, what's the chance that Tesla will remember who gave them a $99 deposit. SpaceX completely forgot about how I gave them $599 for a downlink terminal. I had to email them scans of my credit card bills to convince them to look for their records of the transaction so they could refund the charge on my credit card. (And even then, they only refunded $500 or the $599 I spent.)
But I'm grousing about SpaceX, I'm sure Tesla has a better AR/AP/CS system.
Do you care about the safety of others, or only yourself? You listed safety second in your list of positives, but I'm curious if you're considering things like pedestrian safety or just driver/passenger safety.
> I'm curious if you're considering things like pedestrian safety or just driver/passenger safety.
I'm sure some people do hold this view, but I've never met someone who's buying a vehicle and looks into how well it deals with people outside of the vehicle as part of safety considerations. While pictures of lifted trucks and high-bumper vehicles are fairly common posts on Twitter, usually for dunks, people still buy SUVs and crossovers that are known to be unsafe to those outside of them. Often this is disguised as "but I need it to go skiing once a year" or "what if I need to drive the entire soccer team home?"
The mindset of drivers, and especially Tesla's corporate view of it, channels Lord Farquaad. "Some of you [pedestrians] may die and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
We haven't met in person, but hi! Part of why I own a sedan rather than an SUV (although not the only reason) is safety of others. It's also part of why I avoided car ownership for many years!
I'd prefer that this safety consideration be handled via regulation, though. I'd love to see cars that recklessly endanger the lives of those outside the car banned, limited, or taxed.
Safety of others is the domain of the government or regulator. And that, unfortunately, relies on the government being competent, and free from corporate influence. Neither of which are really the case in the US (nor much of the world).
Um... the impact resistant glass was not especially impact resistant at the unveiling, but you just go on believing that it was. Life is too short to get bummed out by consensus reality.
There’s more to that story than meets the eye. The other tests and sledgehammer hits to the door may have weakened the glass. Either way it’s more than my car will handle now.
Unless I’m mistaken, there’s quite a difference between the cybertruck glass and regular auto glass. It doesn’t exist yet, so it’s possible that could change, but it’s also not marketing drivel.
It remains to be seen what it ships with, but you can add films and coatings to the glass to make it much more resistant. I don’t think that would affect certification, although I could be wrong.
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Edit: You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Aggressive swipes will get your account banned here, so please don't post like this, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is.
It might attract a new segment of the market that wouldn't otherwise buy a truck. e.g. My partner, she has no interest in a normal pickup truck, for some reason I still can't fathom wants one in bright orange.
As someone who owns a truck (F150) and uses it for truck-like things (wood, rocks, concrete, towing, etc.), I would never be caught dead going to the local lumber yard or landscaping yard in a Cybertruck. The Rivian and Ford at least look like trucks.
I hauled off storm debris in a 1960s truck and definitely got some funny looks at the wood pulp place. Modern trucks were about twice as big and I was more or less the only guy without a trailer.
You care enough about what some random Joe down at the lumberyard might think of you to base your car purchase decision on that? What if the guys there will laugh at any electric vehicle? Better stick with gas, or better yet diesel, and be a real man. And don't even think of bringing anything with a bed less than 80" in there.
If you care about getting things done more than fitting in, the Cybertruck actually looks like a much better work truck than a relatively delicate F150.
So I could buy one Cybertruck or two Ford Mavericks for the same money. I'm going with the two mavericks. When one of them wears out I'll start using the other one.
It was (is?) common in the days of steel bodied trucks to cut out and weld, bolt, or rivet things like tool boxes, extra gas tanks, etc. into the otherwise useless space. Many aftermarket options that matched body contours as well.
Is there any indication that the Cybertruck is delayed for reasons related to its unique aesthetics? Why would a new truck that is normal looking be easier to build than the cybertruck?
They didn't design it that way for giggles. They did it because it's much cheaper to build that way, which helps make up for batteries being so expensive.
Do you have a source for this? I don’t see the cost-savings in a stainless-steel paneled vehicle like this. Not to mention that if does dent, you’ll have a harder time popping it out.
Also since it’s Tesla, you’re gonna have to see a certified repair shop for it. Idk this just feels like an internet rumor, I’d love to read something substantial on how the manufacturing process is cheaper.
There was a lot of talk about that several years ago, but I couldn't find the specific article I was thinking of, which went into a lot of detail. But there were a lot of articles referencing analysis by Sandy Munro, which apparently is mostly on video. Here's one: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-cybertruck-engineer...
> there is no need for Tesla to invest in casting machines for the vehicle. Its steel exoskeleton also means that Tesla will not be setting up expensive paint machinery for the all-electric pickup...even the Cybertruck’s glass, which are flat as opposed to the curved ones used in other Teslas like the Model 3, will likely give Tesla some savings as well.
I believe there's a not so small crowd of people who want videogame like thing in real life. Now how many people in that crowd have the money for an EV truck.
InsideEVs just released an article this morning about how many people plan on following through with their reservations. According to the study done by Recurrent Auto, about 75% plan on sticking with their reservation. That's a lot of trucks to sell with the 1.5 million reservations.
On the other hand, I actually believe Tesla is right to prioritize scaling production for their existing Model 3 / Y demand. Their problem is not generating more demand (things like Cybertruck, Roadster, etc.) but in producing the supply for existing demand. They've always been short on that, for good reason (hard to scale production fast, huge organic demand).
it doesn't even look futuristic. something like honda's EV concept cars look way interesting to me and look like they could actually function as vehicles
I have a model Y performance and love it. I reserved the cybertruck within the first 5 minutes of being able to. I will enjoy rolling around in bleeding edge technology while people have their opinions.
This is incredibly messed up. If I'm a shareholder with a conscience against alcohol and beer, this goes against every nerve in my body. It's like Tesla announcing hemp CBD smoke vapor. Since when did I agree to become a drug dealer? Or a black water vendor?
It is technically equivalent because if you buy shares you increase the value of an elastic commodity that directly benefits the company when they issue more shares (or offer for sale shares which have been authorized but unissued.)
And that can be easily sold globally unlike Cybertruck which has concerns from Australian regulators (and likely others) about whether it would be street legal given its unique sharp metal corners at children height design.