- The emissions credit market (where Tesla made most of its money) is dead due to lowered standards.
- Manufacturing costs haven't come down.
- EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter).
- Chinese EVs are dominating every market outside the US.
- All the overhyped moonshots (sub-$30K car, unsupervised autopilot, autonomous robots) are nowhere to be seen.
It's hard to see where Tesla goes from here as a company. The stock is still surviving on Elon hype but has been stagnant for 5 years. The day he gets bored and decides to resign to focus on SpaceX full time the company is basically done.
US car companies have been protected and bailed out too many times and are now not only completely uncompetitive on the global market, but set up to be completely demolished as EVs take over.
Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency mean that either investors are going to pay a massive price, or US consumers are going to pay a massive price. If we keep on pushing up consumer costs by propping up bad manufacturers with protectionism and bail outs, the US's entire economy is drug down by that.
There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.
I hadn't followed just how bad US manufacturers were failing at EVs the past two years, what with all the other disasters unfolding, thanks for the wake up call. Two years of wasted time, of the US falling even farther behind... such a massive fail and yet not the most massive.
It's interesting to try to work out what the civ-style "dependency tree" of viable electric cars has been. It requires at the bare minimum high energy density light batteries, which were a spinoff of the cellphone revolution. As well as high efficiency digital power control, which while not impossible in 1970 would have been larger and heavier without modern SiC semiconductors.
Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.
Well, perhaps, but the time for the followers in the field to push on EV manufacturing capability has been the past 5-10 years. And the US majors are all followers, not leaders. About two years ago they all put out press releases saying "we are not seeing EV sales so we are pulling back on manufacturing" meaning "we couldn't figure it out and are scared so we are abandoning our future."
With the strangle hold that these industries have on getting the government to bail them out, we are in a really bad position on the national level. We have let bad politics and weak management override good economic decision making.
Hundreds of Cybercabs are driving around cities right now with no steering wheel or pedal making money and growing 20% a week, Model Y is the best selling car (of any type) in the planet. European sales are going through the roof, they are doubling production.
Cybertruck was a mistake but rest of the business is printing cash hand over fist.
A side effect of Trump's war with Iran is that every country which doesn't have sufficient domestic oil production, which is most countries especially in Europe, has accelerated their EV transition. Buyers are grabbing every EV they can get their hands on, and yes Tesla are the leader there.
"Tesla (TSLA.O), led the UK BEV market year-to-date, with registrations up 25.4% from a year earlier and a 9.53% market share
South Korea's Kia (000270.KS), and China's BYD (002594.SZ), continued to compete for second place, with market shares of 6.9% and 6.8%, respectively"
And that's when ranked by manufacturer, which is only slightly less arbitrary than by model as auto groups just use it for market segmentation. If you rank them as groups (e.g. VW group), then Tesla isn't even in the top 5.
It's also a meaningless metric because most manufacturers sell multiple models of the same type. Toyota has Corolla, Prius, Camry, Crown, Mirai, Ativ, Century, Belta - all small-mid sized sedans. Add them up and they outsell every Tesla model put together.
BYD has 61 different models in its lineup compared to Tesla's 2.
Not sure what numbers you are looking at but Tesla vehicle sales peaked in 2023 and have been falling every year since then. The "sales going through the roof" narrative exists on Twitter, not their balance sheet.
> Hundreds of Cybercabs are driving around cities right now with no steering wheel or pedal making money and growing 20% a week
Huh? The cybercab with no steering wheel is only operating in Austin, in tiny premapped areas. There are 45 registered in Texas, and they have only been operating since September.
This isn’t Twitter, you’re generally expected to at least attempt to provide factual information here.
I think they have a future as a "normal" car company, but in order to do that they'd have to manage to deliver a new "normal car" model at some point, and accept normal stock prices.
That EV market share direction in the US, though .. really bad compared to non-petrostates (except Norway)
They’ve never been a normal car company. And that’s the problem.
They don’t do a good job at the car company part. They make nice cars, but the company part has issues. Quick example… I was very happy to drive a model 3 for many years. But the constant changes in price of their new cars destroyed any resale value mine had. Every time Tesla was having a bad quarter, the value of my car dropped. That’s not the way to get me to buy another one.
There are certainly other areas where they could improve too. But my point being - they’ve never been all that good at (or interested in) what it takes to drive long term success in selling cars. It’s just too long of a time horizon for them.
A stock drop does not in and of itself kill a company which has positive cashflow, although it may give the executives heart attacks and leave it vulnerable to takeover.
Oooh, normal cars. Now there's a concept. Can we get a real EV minivan? Not a gimmick like the Buzz. I've got kids and go on long road trips to visit family. Seats, cargo capacity, range, and 800V charging speed.
Closest thing is like the Ioniq 9 but the cargo space really sucks.
For a polished product that ticks all the boxes, I would pay a premium for this.
It’s slightly amazing how persistent the Elon hype is. Quite a few of those problems are at least partially due to own goals that Musk himself has been scoring.
I realize that some of it is just a cult of personality, and that part will be unusually sticky because of things like cognitive dissonance. But that can’t be all of it. My next best guess is a bunch of it is a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky, but keep it to themselves because it’s not their money they’re putting on the line and taking a contrarian position would risk angering a presumably vocal subset of clients of unknown size. Which isn’t a great way to make yourself popular with your boss.
There’s a severe lack of focus and the only endgame that still makes sense to me for Tesla is basically turning into a cab service like Waymo. Perhaps you own the car perhaps not.
They are running a fleet of taxis around the Bay Area. It's kind of scary because they aren't that safe, given the lack of LIDAR. But they are doing it anyway.
Photogrammetry + AI has developed to the degree, that there are 3D scanning apps on iPhone that don't even use the Lidar when available, so you can certainly make do without and get comparable results.
He seems to suggest that the future is Cybercabs and Optimus.
But if Optimus ends up with a HW3 problem (current manufactured Optimus bots aren't autonomus yet because the software isn't finished) he'll have a pile of Cybertrucks and early-model Optimus units rotting in a field.
Personally, I just don't see it. If he merges Tesla and SpaceX it won't really be about cars or vehicle autonomy.
Their current stock valuation can't ride this uncertainty forever. At some point he has to have new products that work, no caveats.
This is the most realistic scenario. Hide the stock losses by folding it into SpaceX. Dare the US government to nationalize it. Walk away a “business martyr”.
Elon resigning from Tesla and just letting it run as a reasonable car company making just regular incremental quality and price and new model improvements on normal vehicles people want to drive could be the best thing for the company. The Model 3 is a huge success. That they didn't follow that up with just a regular pickup truck in a similar niche, and instead got distracted by this cybertruck nonsense is an indictment of Musk's poor leadership at this point.
They should just be the Toyota of EVs -- mass produce quality vehicles people want to drive -- instead he's trying to be Tony Stark and keep pumping it as a meme stock.
Tesla remains excellent at engineering and manufacturing. They need not seek the exotic.
He's a liability to that company, not an asset, at this point. And his name has become a brand liability.
Elon's honestly their biggest problem. Can't focus on finishing one thing to save his life and alienated the shit out of the European market with his fascist beliefs.
I get so much joy from seeing these on the road. They are not to my taste, but it’s so nice to see something new on the road.
I still remember years ago seeing one in a grocery store parking lot, with a banana yellow wrap and the Zelda unlock sound as its lock chime. A brief moment of inconsequential joy.
Lastly, having the cyber truck drag race a Porsche 911, while towing a Porsche 911 (and win) has to be one of the best marketing stunts of all time.
A bad design that costs too much, the only people who bought these were ideologues committed to the vision of a man responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths, the gutting of the American state, and some of the most destructive politics of hate in living memory.
Some of us just got one because it’s a fantastic self driving electric family car. I have a family and live somewhere nice, life’s too short to get so wound up about politics. And you’ll still be seeing them on the roads for many years to come :)
The guy literally tweets and retweets neo-nazis and white nationalist content on a regular basis. He celebrates an election win with a literal nazi salute. He openly supports fascist parties and politicians. Being aghast at someone calling him a nazi is ridiculous.
If someone’s “different ideas” involve literally praising hitler then it is logical to call them a nazi. The only way someone believe what you said is if they have not listened to a word Elon has uttered for the last 8 years.
I pity the family of someone who cannot get “wound up” about a man who gleefully dismantled USAID at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives,[^1] ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into far right politics, and did a fucking nazi salute.
Outside of Mad Max it’s hard to conceive of a more dangerous car to be involved in a pedestrian collision. The cybertruck is a symbol of staggering ignorance and selfishness.
We’ll probably still see them on the roads for many years to come—and laugh at the lickspittle Elon toadies who gleefully bought them, knowing full well what they symbolize.
Yeah, why worry about the politics you’re supporting with your money? Presumably you believe you aren’t a likely target for the hate and violence Musk spends that money you gave him advocating for. Must be nice not to have to worry about your or your family’s personal safety or emotional well-being. Thanks for the advice about “getting wound up” over politics.
I'm not an Elon fan in the least, but it does feel like most cars are designed by committee and converge on a few well-defined shapes and segments. And they sell a ton of them, so sure, of course.
But there's certainly some charm when you see a weirdmobile that doesn't conform and somehow got by the bean counters and into existence. The MINI Clubvan, for people who needed something compact and cargo-focused. The Cadillac CTS-V wagon, for people who wanted to haul ass ... and the family. The Toyota MR2, which felt like Toyota engineers decided "let's take these Corolla parts and build them in the shape of a Ferrari".
With the high costs of certifying a new car for sale it seems like we see fewer and fewer of these oddballs, and that feels like a shame.
So even though I'd never personally consider driving a poorly rendered dumpster from a 1980s video game, perhaps the world is a bit more interesting due to its existence.
I agree. I was personally getting really sad on how all design appeared to be converging on one 'allowed' shape without considering any other possible -- ah ha - angles. I posted on this before, but I will repeat it here, because it is relevant.
Those cars did have uses, but those uses revolved around drawing attention ( think advertising ). Whenever I saw one in my neck of the woods, they were selling something.
> Lastly, having the cyber truck drag race a Porsche 911, while towing a Porsche 911 (and win) has to be one of the best marketing stunts of all time.
I suppose, if you don't really like cars much, this was interesting. No one debates the ability for EVs to have absurd 0-60, 0-100 times, but there's almost no overlap between why you'd buy a Cybertruck versus a 911 besides status symbol, which gets back to... maybe it's neat, if you don't really care about cars much.
Agreed. Even if the design is polarizing, has quality issues, whatever about elon and politics, it is refreshing to see something different and distinctive on the road in a sea of blobby SUVs and extended cab trucks.
I can't find the post where the guy wanted something like Uber, but the driver shows up in a beat up pickup truck, and just agrees with everything you say, "Hell yeah, brother!"
Yet again I consider the disparities between the US market, as described by commentors, and the UK market. Cybertrucks never made it to road legality here, and would probably have required an HGV license (if the maximum manufacturer permitted vehicle+load weight is over 3500kg).
The US style pickup is pretty rare. There are some Ford Ranger/Raptors, which look comically large but are apparently smaller than the common F150 (??). People who need a truck bed get a Ford Transit or similar with the bed variant.
Agricultural use cases are handled with actual tractors (who can use the cheaper "red" diesel!)
The pickup in the US is a staple of the plumber, roofer and other tradesmen, and as you say; this use case as a tradesman’s tool is broadly filled by the panel van in Europe.
To some extent you even see this in New York too. Certainly there’s a need for these vehicles in rural areas where road conditions may be poor or absent altogether and the work needs done regardless.
The cybertruck on the other hand isn’t a work vehicle, it’s bought by the same people who buy the super kitted out models and who have no interest in using it for work, let alone taking the thing off road.
Ultimately I think of it as the modern Delorean, but I don’t think it will engender the same level of good will when it ages out and becomes less common due to the increasingly negative profile of Musk and his connections to the politics in which the vehicle was created.
If you would be using it just locally, as opposed for road trips, note that it has an LFP battery. LFP batteries are perfectly happy to be always charged to 100% and discharged down to 10% (lower is OK but most people want to keep some spare in case they aren't able to charge when they expected to).
Lithium nickel batteries suffer accelerated aging at high charge and at low charge, so it is usually recommended to stay in the 80-20% range, only going to 100% shortly before a road trip.
A Slate with a 200 mile range operated 100-10% would give you 180 miles between charges. That would be the same range as a lithium nickel battery EV with a 300 mile range operated 80-20%.
I only have one car at a time (not married). I frequently visit family that lives about 80 miles away that live in a charger desert. I used to own a Chevy Bolt and it could get me to those family and back on one 100% charge with a little bit for grocery runs etc. while there. Even that I wish had like maybe another 20 miles of range lol.
Exactly. 200mi EPA is essentially 130-150 highway in winter, which is stopping for charging every 2hrs going 65 - not feasible for anyone living in the midwest.
What are your use cases that need more range than 200 miles? I used to drive a nissan leaf with 90mi range in southern california and only had to stop to charge outside the home a few times for days where I went between LA and Orange County. Otherwise I never really cut it close - and this was with the slowest wall outlet charging at home.
Personally I live in the Midwest. I make fairly frequent drives of around 200 miles to visit friends and family. I drive a pluggable hybrid. EV charging stations exist at both destinations, but are very spotty in between.
During the winter, range plummets. That 200 isn't getting me all the way from A to B. Having a hybrid fueling option is just much more practical for me.
I'm not saying I couldn't get it done, I could, but sitting for hours waiting for some slow-ass EV charging station in the middle of winter is not bullshit I'm signing up for.
Not that I am trying to argue with you, I'm not, but people have a "gas station mindset" about EVs and it leads to confusion, so let me spell out how this trip would look with a "charging station" mindset:
Leave home at 100%/200mi
Drive to destination (approx 3 hours) arrive with ~0%/0mi
Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi
Begin driving back home with a 20%/40mi deficit of range.
Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
Charge for 20%/40mi (~10 minutes)
Complete drive home and fully charge again.
Total extra time on 400 mile trip vs gas (assuming 300 mi tank range, so 1 fill-up): ~5 minutes (or 8 minutes if you stop for a quick charge on the way so you don't have to white knuckle down to 0%).
For cold driving in the winter, it would probably be closer to an extra 20 minutes.
I love my EV, but you're really not being at all realistic here. That's more of a perfect possible case scenario based on numbers from a website, not a real world scenario. I take a ~350 mile drive to Milwaukee in our 300 mile range car (2025 Ioniq 5) and we have to stop three times on the trip in each direction.
You're not actually going to get 200mi from 100% when you have 2 people and baggage loaded and traffic exists, and no one sane would be comfortable arriving with literally 0% battery. Charging stops take minimum 10 minutes just accounting for getting off & back on the freeway; usually more like 30-40 minutes because why would you not just charge back up to 80% since you're stopped anyway? Your destination hotel almost certainly does not have a charger, or if they do they charge an idle fee, so you can't just leave it overnight, so really that has to count as another charging stop.
For a 200mi each way trip, realistically you're talking probably two 30 minute charge stops in each direction. That's not completely unacceptable (eg just have some lunch at one of the stops) but your 5-8 minute quote is absolutely not realistic. A bump up to 300mi range would drop that down to one stop in each direction, which would be a real benefit.
Sorry to be blunt, but if you need to stop 3 times to charge to go 350 miles in an 300 mile range EV, you are doing something severely wrong or there is a problem with your car.
The only way I can make this happen in my head is the combination of driving in freezing temperatures, with the heat blasting the whole time, while doing ~80mph.
Mind you we do trips to Maine in the winter and only have seen ~20% range loss. Heated seats, cruise control at 65, heat on only as needed (about 5-10 minute an hour).
I occasionally drive 300 miles in an EV rated for ~319 miles, and I have to stop once in each direction, but I also have to charge at my destination. There's a Tesla station near there, and the rates are fantastic if you get there before 7 AM.
I keep it at 65 and let the heater do whatever it wants to do so that people are comfortable. Temperature, elevation differences, and wind definitely change things.
There's a section of the drive where I average something like 1.3 mi/kWh on the way up the mountain, but something like 6 mi/kWh on the way down. On the return trip, it's kind of fun to see the guess-o-meter show 110 miles remaining over the course of 25 miles, or have it actually increase.
I'm sure that gas vehicles follow a similar pattern, but I don't pay attention to usage like I do in an EV.
A drop from 80% to 20% in a 300mi car is 0.6 * 300 = 180 miles. It's a 350 mile trip. 350 / 180 = 2 80-to-20 discharges, and that's assuming no little detours for stopping at a cheese store or whatever. So we could do it in 2 stops if we were OK arriving with 20%, but we need some charge at the destination for getting around MKE, so it's three stops. And yeah, we drive 75 because that's the speed of traffic and the HVAC does whatever it does to make us comfortable.
A few things -- I am not op, but I do drive an EV and sometimes drive it through some rural areas.
> Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
This is the aspect which isn't really possible in very rural areas. There is nowhere to stop at to charge, or the options are very limited. It's getting better, but it's the reason why people want more range.
Plus, in the midwest, the ranges tank in the dead of winter, due to sub-zero temperatures and headwinds.
If you can.
I have some family that doesn't have any power near where I park when I visit.
I'm also there for less than the _many, many_ hours it would take to get an EV from ~0 to ~80% on a standard 15A/120v outlet.
In one case, they have a pretty big tesla super-charger something like 40 miles from them so I can top all the way up just before I get there if I go slightly out of my way. In the US, we still have a long ways to go in the US before _high current_ charging options are as ubiquitous as gas.
Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes and it has 300+ mile range and 135kWh battery. And its still a 400v architecture
> Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes
Unfortunately a lot of people only really have a level1 class charger at home and that's a 10+ hour charge on a F150. Probably somewhere around 5-7 hours for a level 2 charger but that's only a "given" on new construction.
If you live close to a level3 charger than you can get topped up in under an hour but that also isn't as convenient as plugging in when you get home and forgetting about it since you have to drive to the charger.
It's pretty perfect as a 2nd family car (and I may buy it for exactly that if the production model reviews are good) but yeah, it's a tough sell for a primary car with that range. Assuming they manage to meet their sales targets and stay in business, I bet it'll improve rapidly over the next couple of model years.
EV trucks sound good but you can't haul anything heavy or your range plumments. Unless the battery is huge but that is weight. A truck that can't haul is just for show.
Even gasoline trucks are stupid no low end torque, you need to rev it. I had a 6 cylinder Cummins diesel and at 500rpm idle on a hill it could move the 10,000 pound truck up the hill.
I feel like this is less true nowadays. Or at least, less of a concern.
I have a Rivian and my 400mi range gets cut significantly (down to 200 or 300, depending on the trip) when I have 7k lbs on the back, but never enough to stop me from towing. And with good charging in the area, it's a non issue. And waaaaayyyyy cheaper than diesel.
Maybe if I was towing daily, I'd feel different. Your mileage may vary. (Couldn't resist the closer!)
Edit: btw instant torque is a game changer. You can't beat an EV on that front
I used to think this way, but it turns out that EV trucks hold up on range better than one would expect thanks to regenerative breaking. The added weight of cargo requires more energy to get up to speed, but you get most of that back when breaking, so it's not lost energy. Meanwhile, a gas or diesel truck's range plummets when hauling since all the energy used to accelerate the load is lost in breaking. I'm not saying that EV hauling is perfect or a solved problem, but that the trades offs aren't as intuitive as they might seem.
I think regen braking only helps if the load is on the bed. If it's on a trailer, the trailer will have normal breaks and a lot is lost.
(Edit: spelling)
Trailers may not have regenerative braking today, but that's a chicken-and-egg problem; trailers already have wiring hookups, and once EVs become the default for personal vehicles, it's easy to imagine that regenerative braking will become standard.
+1 recommendation for this video. Also the owner of the channel participated in an EV cannonball run several times. I don't think they made it in one go, but still very cool how they had to plan for the trip and modify the vehicle.
Some gas engines have low end torque, big block V8s and anything turbo. But yeah if hauling uphill is your thing diesel is a no brainer. It would be great if our half ton and midsize trucks had diesel options but as usual other countries have better options.
Personally I'm going hybrid truck next time. The advantages of electric (torque, 240V inverter) with the flexibility of gas. Payload is lower but I'm hoping they fix that by the time I need a new truck
I have an f150 lightning. Weight isn't a problem for range you barely notice it. Towing though matters mostly about the number of axels and aerodynamics. I have a small trailer I occasionally tow and it knocks the range to just under half which is... Not great but not terrible either. Running around town towing is fine, but if we were doing long distance (hundreds of miles) I'd probably rent a ice vehicle for it.
But I've done a 600 mile each way trip with the bed fully loaded and it's completely fine
I might be ignorant here as a german but how often are people towing something big 100 miles and more were they do not have time to just charge? I would have said 2-4 times a year (lakelife location far away twice a year?).
I mean for sure, if you are the person who constantly need this, EVs might need a little bit more advantages, but what does an avg F150 owner would tow 100mi every day / regularly?
I would put it like this: many many truck drivers in the US go years without towing a thing. Even work trucks (eg plumbers rarely need to tow anything). But, for the people that do tow, they tow a lot. And the US is an incredibly large place. West of the Rockies it's essentially empty until you get to the coastal cities. So if you do anything agricultural, or your business is located in the rural places because of local resources (wood, minerals, whatever) you will be towing heavy things long distances. Fun example of distance: last week I was in Tonopah, Nevada. My spouse wanted to try McDonald's. No problem, the sign on the billboard says there is one nearby (that exact word). It was in Hawthorne. 150km away. Americans, especially rural Americans in the Western states, have a different view of driving distance than Europeans. Bill Bryson was not really joking when he wrote that Americans will drive 60 miles for a taco.
For towing, 75% of truck owners claim to use this feature once a year or never.
More than 60% of truck owners use the bed to haul at least once per month; but it's difficult to determine the percentage who could have used a car instead. A small car can fit quite a few bags of soil in the trunk, for example.
I'm looking foward to the arrival later this month of my 280PS ""compact"" EV (Abarth 600E), which will be roughly as much power as every other car I've owned put together.
I borrow my brother’s truck all the time to transport various DIY supplies. I could probably get a roof rack for my car for things like plywood and drywall, but borrowing the truck is easier.
most people don’t use the capacity of the pickup trucks on the road today. I’m not going to tell people what to drive, but I know personally a smaller pickup with occasional bed use and better efficiency and parking the rest of the time would be an easy sell.
Then you need to get our and do more real work of lots of different types. Exposed bed is often an advantage!
I have a welder, the safety instructions include "Never carry the gas tanks in an enclosed vehicle" -if there is a leak the gas tanks (nitrogen, argon, helium) can quickly displace the oxygen inside and I'll die before I know what happened.
Most things I carry don't need to be inside constantly. A little rain won't hurt anything, I wouldn't want to store anything outside but just a couple hours won't harm most things.
Also it is a lot easier to load things in a truck than a van. I can lift it over the sides (perhaps with a forklift). I can stand up in the back while arranging things - even when it is full I can stand upright.
I have used both trucks and vans to carry things over the years. Both are a compromise - and like all compromises there are negatives where something else would be better. Overall I fall on the truck is better side for what I do most often - but that is overall and I recognize there are good reasons some will choose something else.
Every Saturday I fill my truck bed with garbage cans and dump them at a transfer station across the highway from where I live. (We have no trash service in this rural area). I used to cram bags of trash into the back of my Honda CRV, which worked, but was often messy and stinky. You can hose out the back of a truck bed.
I used to think trucks were mostly useless, but have found that many people have weekly uses that make a lot of sense.
I do question the logic of lifting your truck so high you can't reach into the bed.
I keep a minivan as a secondary vehicle / "work truck". It tows, I can fit 4x8 plywood or drywall sheets flat on the floor, and drive them around in the rain. Then put the seats back in and take 6 kids to a movie.
I’ve been seeing complaints on the internet about how all cars look the same nowadays. I think the cybertruck proves why. A lot of design has coalesced around the same thing, not just for cars but for websites and apps, logos, furniture, etc. because people like that stuff.
Something new and fresh can be accepted and loved, but it still needs to be familiar and somewhat iterative. A radical change like the cybertruck is hated for that reason. (People also hate it because of Elon, but they don’t hate the other Teslas nearly as much as they hate the cybertruck)
When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.
By the time of its delayed release, Musk had become deeply unpopular with many of that original coalition of fans and buyers, the truck was more expensive than originally promised, his new ‘base’ probably couldn’t afford to buy many of them, and it was structurally a fairly normal car underneath the steel panels. It also suffered plenty of embarrassing issues, which people were of course gleeful to publicise.
It could have been a cool funky status symbol, but Musk screwed it all up.
> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.
People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.
Not universally. Your tech office and online spaces may have disliked it, but I also saw a lot of excitement and positivity about it, both online and IRL.
From my memory, a lot of the excitement was directed at what the design was trying to achieve: a structural body made from easy to make pressed steel panels. This was meant to enable a much cheaper car while also removing the bottlenecks plagueing Tesla's production lines at the time
None of this materialized. The truck that ended up in production was a traditional body construction, but with unpainted steel panels so it looks like the truck Musk presented. It ended up with all the drawbacks of a steel body, while being expensive and hard to manufacture
Agreed. When it was first announced, I was kind of interested. I laughed at imagining it as a screenshot from an N64 game.
But it didn't live up to the selling points, it is very expensive, has design issues that weren't necessary for the aesthetic, and the company's owner turned out to be a really horrible person contributing meaningfully to changes in my country that are dangerous.
I think a lot of the reason most cars look the same is they all have to pass similar pedestrian crash standards. Once you account for all of that, the basic shape of the vehicle is set and there is only so much unique styling you can attach.
People don't just hate it because it looks different. They hate it because it's ugly, unreliable, and a symbol of the modern idolatry of the billionaire class.
It's a massive, gaudy symbol of unfathomable decadence, and every purchase was made to visibly support the passion project of the world's most influential white supremacist.
It's one thing for a vehicle to be "ugly," but this one stands for so much more.
There’s a school of thought that anything is better than blandly conformative design. In that school, the Cybertruck counts as progress.
To me, it’s more like answering a complaint about the blandness of pop music with electric bagpipes and nails on chalkboard: if you can’t be different and good, maybe don’t try so hard to be different.
I really thought it would have had a lot of potential for cheaper manufacturing. No paint process is huge. And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
The steel exoskeleton idea didn't survive to production. The production truck has a mix of aluminum castings and welded steel unibody, with the stainless panels just acting as the skin. Maybe they bring some structural rigidity, but not like the origami plan that was originally discussed.
The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.
It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.
It’s staggering how much money they wasted because Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts. It was years late because stainless steel is so much harder to work with, especially when it has so many complicated geometries, and every one of those delays was a chance for him to say “maybe the people I hired for their expertise know something I don’t” rather than “I’m the boss, make it work”.
They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
Part of the delay was also the 48V architecture. So in addition to the obvious new things like stainless steel panels they also had to redesign mundane parts like window motors and interior lighting. The Cybercab is also using a 48V architecture so even though they've never talked about it being an R&D platform maybe they'll retcon it that way.
That forces a redesign of all the car electronics. While it might well be a good idea anyway from an R&D point of view it's undeniably expensive.
(I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)
> They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
They could have Roadstered it.
Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter.
The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
A real expert told Elon that self landing rockets were possible over chutes. The retconning to build the myth of Elon is ridiculous.
Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.
No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).
Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.
Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.
So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.
> Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
How much money have Americans gifted NASA to pay Russia for launching payloads ton Soyuz rockets?
"real experts" are not always correct. A bet a lot of people told him that the original Teslas were a bad idea or SpaceX would never...wait for it...take off.
But sometimes people win when they push the boundary of what might work, push the problems to the surface and then solve them.
I don't like the guy but you can't really deny his ethusiasm and single-mindedness.
An engineers isn’t going to say “EVs will never work” or “reusable rockets are impossible”. They’d say things like “we’re really going to need to minimize weight and try to build better batteries to hit that range goal” or “it’s going to require a lot of money to do the R&D for reusable boosters, you need to land a NASA contract so we can afford dozens of tests”. Engineers express tradeoffs far more than absolutes.
Musk has enthusiasm, yes, but he’s let his luck at PayPal and successfully buying Tesla from the original founders go to his head. Nobody is right all of the time, and no serious project goes perfectly according to the original vision without adjustments. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an electric truck — companies with better engineering culture are making great ones — but the Cybertruck failed exactly the way everyone who isn’t a superfan expected: it’s designed in a way which guarantees high costs and it just doesn’t deliver corresponding benefits for most people. Diving into the culture wars against a large chunk of potential Tesla buyers was a bad idea but even if he hadn’t, there just aren’t that many people who have that kind of money to spend and the ones who do usually won’t accept so many limitations and flaws.
That’s a little bit revisionist. I don’t like Musk much either but to be fair:
- no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible. Sure, there may have been individuals, but it didn’t make it into corporate strategy or product delivery. The Model S plus the Supercharger network changed the face of the car industry.
- none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality. They had an infinite head start vs. SpaceX and failed to innovate. Even now, having their lunch money regularly stolen by SpaceX, where is the reusable competition?
> no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible
No executive in the established "expert" car companies had any reason to rock the boat. Establishing EVs as a credible alternative to ICEs required a build-out of charging infrastructure that none of them were willing to commit to. But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existed.
> none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality
All of them would have told you that there's nothing impossible about a reusable rocket, only that their customers were happily served by their current offerings. Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
It's not just high costs, its high costs that are only there to appease one man. The stainless steel sheets don't provide features that the average consumer even considers and has more than a few drawbacks
I can deny it because he overpromises on everything just like Elizabeth Holmes. Only difference in space isn’t something new the us government did it in 1960’s and didn’t destroy nearly as many rockets. Elon isn’t smart enough to try an interfere with production rockets. His distance from decision making is what made it a success.
You invented a fictional group of people, got mad at them, then declared what you imagined they did was wrong.
I want you to know that.
Musk came into Tesla as funding. People were trying to make the cars.
With regards to SpaceX, he was looking for people to build rockets to go to Mars. But no one wanted to sell to him. So he hired rocket scientists to build the rockets.
And yes, while there will always be some asshole who says "That won't work", there were plenty of ""real experts"" who were working at those companies.
And the "real experts" left us dependent on Russia for launching a couple capsules a year to the space station.
They could have done what Musk did with Falcon 9 in the 90's. Instead they chose to mess around more with solid fueled heavy lift vehicles, all the while proclaiming that they were the experts/science.
(I don't necessarily disagree with you, but there's a difference between thinking outside the box and trying new ideas, and literally ignoring factual reality and repeated clear feedback from people who actually know what they're talking about.)
I mean once you buy the tooling, it’s still probably cheaper to produce stainless steel trucks than paint normal steel. I agree on everything else though
If that’s true it would only be the case if you could amortize that tooling across enough vehicles. Selling 10k-20k per year from a production line planned with a capacity of 125k per year won’t get you there.
Not really. Stainless is expensive and brittle. It's a lot more work to form complex panels out of stainless, and then they're essentially scrap if there's even a tiny amount of damage. A small dent will start a crack.
Painted piece of plastic gonna be cheaper than sheet of stainless steel. Stainless is significantly more expensive than typical materials used on car, which would be normal steel or plastic depending on panel.
Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).
Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper
"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about
They developed, at great cost, the process used for the cars with the giga press and the plastic. It would've been a fine process for an inexpensive truck.
Speaking out of my ass here, but I would not be surprised if it's much cheaper to paint cheap stamped steel, compared to using more expensive stainless steel that's treated to remove all surface marring/scarring from the stamping process. Those panels don't come out all brushed from the metal presses...
What happens if you scrape your fridge getting it into the kitchen?
You go to the DIY shop and buy a tin of white spray paint.
What happens if you scrape your brushed stainless fridge getting it into the kitchen?
Well, now you get to either live with it, or come up with some really clever ideas on polishing out the scratch and then sanding it back to disguise it with the rest of the surface which will never really look right.
The original design is what gave them millions of pre-orders, it was the reduction in range and increase in cost that made most people cancel those pre-orders.
$100 is a fair chunk of money for the average person. I agree some preorders were probably half hearted, but the $100 commitment definitely weeded out some the jokers for sure.
$100 is a fair chunk of money for anyone who would have never been a buyer anyway.
$100 is also a trivial amount of money for a larper with half the budget required to complete the purchase. Or someone with plenty of money who just put in a reservation "just in case" they wanted one.
Thats not really fair, the $40k promised price is not that much higher than your average middle class car purchase. I think anyone willing to go to the site, sign up, and hand over $100 would be willing to to take on a payment plan for a $40k car.
The average buyer in the US can't afford a new car of any kind. The average car sale is a used car. Used cars outsell new cars 3 to 1. And the average used car sells for $27k.
Entertaining the idea of a new car purchase is an upper-middle class thing, and a fully-refundable $100 is impulse buy territory for most of them. Yes, many of them would have been capable of taking on a $40K purchase, but $100 is not a serious indicator that they were serious about doing it. People who have this money are doing relatively well and blow $100 on much more inane things that aren't refundable.
A traditional dealer would ask someone with much less money looking at a used Nissan Sentra to put down $500 to hold a car.
You are fully entitled to your opinion but the data shows very little overlap between the groups of people who buy new cars and the groups of people for which $100 is a significant amount of money.
If you want to hold reserve a damn Toyota the dealer is going to ask you to show up in person, put down $500-1000 and fill out a credit app.
Tesla knew the $100 reservation was too low to show serious commitment, and this was intentional for two reasons:
I wonder how many people liked the design vs tolerated it? If Ford offered a cybertruck trim on the F-150 without changing the price would people buy it?
No doubt there is some demand for an "out there" design, but I'd have to guess that the projected $40K price was itself a large part of the attraction.
Possibly, but as it cost $100 to put down a deposit I would be surprised if that many people were willing to actually pay for something they only tolerated.
It was a refundable deposit (and small), so I wonder how many people were even that serious - no real commitment.
2019 USA annual car/pickup sales were ~17M. I find it very hard to believe that 10% (2M cybertruck pre-orders) of those purchasers were seriously interested in a cybertruck - it really is not a design made for mainstream tastes.
If you owned a company and announced a product that 2 million people went and paid you $100 each for to preorder it, Im pretty sure you would think differently.
The design looks much better rendered on screen than in real life.
I thought the early images looked amazing but I see them all the time in real life (a few people in my neighborhood own them) and they just look so stupid on the road.
Agreed, but this thread is duscussing the original popularity and whether Elon was wrong to believe it or not.
With false but great looking renders and false but great sounding promises, the hype and interest was real. It was only when the real product became apparent that it became a joke and interest was lost.
You would think maybe Musk would learn something about overpromising from this fiasco, but judging by things like DOGE I guess not!
A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper.
A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.
Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.
Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.
Same. Initially I was optimistic about the Cybertruck because I though “flat metal panels and no paint is going to make both manufacturing and repairs so much easier and cheaper”.
Paint has been well studied. We know how to do it really cheap and automated these days. Cheap is relative. I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed. But on a scale of factory and for how long it will last, that's cheap.
Flat metal is more expensive than curved metal. Curved metal, you design the curves to help support the stress points: you can get by with thinner sheets. Flat metal requires thicker heavier more expensive sheets of sheet metal in order to be strong enough.
Curved metal also lets you design the whole thing to be more aerodynamic. which is an important consideration even with something as un-aerodynamic as a truck.
> I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed.
Painting cars really is a hugely optimised process that materially affects performance characteristics such as weight.
Its very difficult to appreciate just how many cars are made worldwide wide, but just think if a completely optimised fully robot optimised line cost a billion dollars, in only needs to process a few million cars to fully pay itself off. Just look at how much a “paint option” costs. Enough people paying for a premium colour would completely pay for the entire production painting line.
Painting cars is also a process that scales. If you want to do a great job on one car everything you need can be had for less than $3000 (inflatable spray booth, large air compressor, a paint gun, and lots of sand paper). A good job can be done for less (a cheap air compressor and paint outside can still get good results), and most people who want to paint a car already have most of the tools so the cost goes down. The above setup will also handle a small auto body shop that is painting a couple cars per month, and you can upgrade equipment as needed (I'd start with a spray building instead of an inflatable booth).
At the scale of Tesla the millions of dollars on a fully automated setup is cheap because amortize the cost of so many cars
Painting actually introduces some scaling issues in manufacturing. Any painting step prevents you from haphazardly mixing all the parts produced on a line. Most vehicles will have multiple lines that eventually converge across multiple suppliers. Painting forces you to either coordinate the production of each individual component so that they're all painted the correct color during final assembly (which becomes difficult if any parts fail QA), or buffer painted parts in a giant warehouse. There's other advantages to the warehouse, but I wouldn't call it cheap.
Very common to use a mix of both strategies in practice.
They built that truck backwards and upside down. The single-piece forged aluminum frame was basically impossible to repair and brittle. Typical truck frames flex, they're part of the suspension. For small accidents, the frame can be bent back. The CT would just crack, requiring extensive aluminum welding to fix which is waay harder than welding a steel frame.
Either you have a modern expensive car and insurance which knows how to handle it properly, or it doesn't matter anymore and you got to a cheap car doctor.
There were no flat panels. That was a sales pitch. In reality, a slight curve to a panel adds so much strength that it can be made considerably lighter/cheaper than a flat panel of sufficient strength. Flat panels also tend to dent inwards very easily, which is not a good look for a car. Then there is the issue of thermal expansion. A pre-bent bit of metal will expand in a predictable way. A dead-flat panel could buckle in multiple unexpected ways.
I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.
how you repair steel panel and also make it look nice ?
...you don't. You replace it in whole. You can't use filler to mask small dents and paint over it, if you want it to look as before, you have to pretty much replace it.
That original process was what should have led to lower prices. Instead, they couldn't do it and had to resort to gluing steel panels onto a body-on-frame design which is much more expensive. They still managed to keep it just as hideous, so kudos there I guess.
I doubt that replacing painted regular steel with fancy stainless steel is going to be cheap. Paint is expensive, but so is stainless steel. I also can't imagine the "origami" technique to be cheaper than stamping, the reason they suggested that is because their fancy stainless steel can't be stamped. And in the end, Tesla couldn't even do it, so they glued the parts on...
I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.
Two-person taxi is actually reasonable for the modal journey, but absolutely doesn't cover all use cases or accessibility.
The cybertruck was an early example of what someone on bsky called the "everyone is twelve now" theory: it looks like it was drawn by a small boy's idea of "cool", with zero further thought.
There's a comparison that's been making the rounds on social media for a while.
In once panel, there's the Cybertruck whose owner bragged about it carrying a large round hay bale (weighs around 1,500lbs) with the suspension looking like it was about to die. Next to it is a shot of a circa-1980 Ford F250 carrying three of the same bales and sitting perfectly level. TBF, the F250 probably had air bags in the rear suspension, but still...
That thing is only a "truck" because they decided to call it that.
Even modern trucks have turned into giant "luxury" vehicles that can't haul much more than the smaller trucks of 30 years ago. For most trucks bought by families, the heaviest thing they lug around is cat litter.
Somehow everything turns into a misdirection with Elon, where failing to innovate yields ridiculous distractions. When the Cyberjunk was clearly a poor product, they pivoting to "doubling as a boat" and being bullet "proof". And also you can play shitty ports of video games, awkwardly, on your in-car screen.
At some point this gimmick misdirection nonsense has to stop working.
Oh look, if you have a transport-truck sized massive compressor in your garage and use 100kWh to spend a day filling a tank, your ComingSoonNow(TM wink) Roadster can do some silly stuff if you dedicate much of the interior to a giant explosion hazard.
Another prediction from the Simpsons comes true. The 1991 episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" where Homer designs a car with zero input from anybody besides himself. The result is an overpriced behemoth with random features nobody needs and nothing customers want (fuel efficiency, affordablility).
There's a pattern here: when an Elon Project is successful, he jumps in with Elon innovations, like cyber truck. The next example that will follow this pattern is building a rocket that's too big for orbital payloads, but takes 22 refueling flights to get beyond orbit.
What do you mean too big for orbital payloads? Mass to low earth orbit is what matters, which starship is well optimized for. You could always put a tiny third stage on there to go places, but that is back to the apollo style yeeting a tiny amount of mass somewhere else and would not help with getting serious tonnage to the moon and mars
For a company, matching products and services to demand is what matters. Being able to get more mass into orbit only matters if enough people are willing to pay to get stuff there. The analogy is that jumbo jets exist, but almost no passenger flights bother with jumbo jets because it's not economical. Unlike with civilian aviation we have yet to observe a natural experiment which would allow us to place an economically practical ceiling on rocket payload size, but it very much still remains plausible that something Falcon 9-sized is actually the sweet spot, especially given that Starlink is the only commercial offering that's pushing the existing Falcon 9 capacity. And yes, this completely ignores any mention of going to the moon or Mars, because although there may be incentives to do so (e.g. scientific incentives, political incentives, philosophical incentives), there is no economic incentive other than getting some government contracts which will be just as short-lived as Apollo was once the public loses interest.
Starlink is SpaceX's biggest revenue stream by far, and they are retiring Falcon 9 and quitting the contract / launch market, so they are matching very well with their own product, which is what they actually care about?
> And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.
At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.
The original wasn't what shipped. From what I read the cheaper easier process wasn't, which isn't unusual.
It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.
Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
Cheap hackable electric work truck (I imagine chassis with basic cabin that you can expand in various ways, like the EU van options have like half a dozen chassis) would be great but it's not something Tesla ever wants to make
>Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
95% of their cars sold have been in the $30k to $60k range. They have long been the best bang for the buck electric car (in the US, since BYD isn’t allowed.
Who are their customer base? Musk seems to have decided to fire his actual customer base, but getting a new one more ideologically aligned with him hasn't quite worked out.
I know its not fashionable to have such pesky concerns as priority in US, but pedestrian safety was simply non-present, hence it was banned all over Europe. Not missing it here, not missing that fugly ego whim of a sick man at all.
The good: someone trying a radically new design. Polarizing like the Fiat Multipla or Pontiac Aztek or even the first Chrysler minivan, but credit for trying.
The bad: didn't seem to be very good as a truck (eg build quality). That would not have been too bad, but it's dangerous when the design already alienates some buyers. Carmaker need time to get it right and that needs sales.
The terrible: Elon torching his reputation in all sorts of ways and essentially insulting his past and future customer base. The politics, the bait and switch over features, etc etc. Eventually people tire of it.
It's tragic, because for better or worse Americans love their trucks, so the team that solves the electric transition is doing the world a huge favor.
While I will happily admit, the initial Multipla looks awful both inside and out to my sensibilities, I have to defend it vs the Cybertruck. Purely from the practicality standpoint, it was ingenious, having three seats front and back while being small, light and cheap solved a real need and I do still see quite a few, especially compared to other Fiats from that time, because of it. It also has what I feel is the most impactful facelift of any vehicle ever.
Had the Cybertruck brought forward the manufacturing innovations that were alleged to cause the weirdness in its design, I could draw the comparison with the Multipla, but as it stands, it has all the visual appeal of one, with none of the reasons for it. Can't comment on the Pontiac, have never seen one outside Breaking Bad.
I would have liked a 3-row SUV based on the Cybertruck; but the Cybertruck was just too expensive to be competitive. At least the Model Y's price dropped (right after I bought one) to something more reasonable.
What's most frustrating is that I had to trade in my Model 3 for a 3-row SUV, and Tesla just didn't have anything competitive in that segment.
I'm not a fan, but I was hopeful that the direct sales model would drive others to confront the dealership tax. Ford floated the idea with the Lightning, but faced a mutiny.
I am the exact target audience of their new Fathom, but I abandoned my preorder sign up process when I saw the phrase "dealerships set the final price".
I legitimately would have bought it if they made it look more like a regular pickup truck, and if Elon didn't go full crazy.
I did buy a Model-Y shortly before his Trump endorsement, and then sold it for technical reasons.
On a cold January morning, I was pulling up to a stop-sign, didn't have any autopilot turned on, and the car accelerated.
I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car. They're honestly kind of dangerous vehicles. The average person can't handle the responsibility of a self-driving vehicle.
I told all of my friends and family that I would not recommend the vehicle yet to a non-technical person, even when I was myself driving it and loving it.
Setting your experience aside, my national transport agency in Denmark recently approved Tesla full self driving because the data confirmed that it’s safer than the average driver. I think it’s both true that these cars can fault, and that they’re safer on average than humans. To be clear, Denmark is not alone. Many European countries have approved it for the same reason, and many more are evaluating. Holland is the toughest to pass, and they passed.
"Safer than the average driver" is great if all the below-average drivers start buying Teslas. But if you're converting drivers on the other end of the spectrum then the roads become less safe overall.
I wish someone who had access to the data would address this.
I do know that there is not much better than average driver! There is much worse than average: people who drive drunk, and a few other classes of people who shouldn't drive at all. However the vast majority are all about equal: in reasonable mental health and limited to the same eye and reaction times. A few people have and follow better training and so are slightly safer - but this is slight. Most people think they are better than average because they excuse their mistakes as a "one time mistake", while confusing "the other guy's" mistakes with the other guy must be a bad driver.
Yeah same. It was too strange looking for me and Elon’s turn to the far right kind of ruined Tesla for me. I ended up getting a F-150 lightning instead and it’s been a great experience. Unfortunately they stopped making those too.
> I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car.
There's a shit ton of software between the gas pedal and the machinery of just about every car on the road today whether that be an ICE, hybrid, or EV. We're a long ways away from the go-go pedal directly pulling a cable opening the throttle plate.
The Cybertruck wasn't really designed as a volume item, it was designed as the testbed for Tesla's next gen tech (ethernet-based fieldbus, 48V tech). You can do only so much in the lab, and sometimes you have to push your tech into production to find the last few% of failures, which will cost you dearly if you actually put them into your volume sellers.
I mean it's probably not that comforting for owners to unknowingly have signed up for a beta test, but that was the plan for Tesla for a while with the Cybertruck.
This was also the reason for sloppy stuff like steel panels glued to the aluminium frame, and not following up on their initial promises - the car morphed from a serious project into a low volume testbed sometime during its production.
Tesla seems to be killing its non volume cars the S and X are dead as well, I've heard rumors the Model 3 might be on its way out.
I think the cybertruck appeals to a very narrow market. It's too expensive for most people who just want a big vehicle to get groceries and run kids to around, and doesn't really have any qualities that make it useful for commercial use, outside of being a rolling billboard. Unless it just really appeals to you and you have cash to burn, I don't know why you'd buy a cybertruck over a Ram/Ford/GM. A RAM 1500 w/ etorque costs half a cyber truck and gets decent fuel mileage... If you need a work truck a RAM 3500 is cheaper and will reliably haul 30-40k loads 12 hours a day and the warranty isn't void the second your tires touch dirt.
People who buy trucks as a status symbol want to be "tough". And Tesla clearly intended to appeal to "tough guys", it is big, powerful, and supposedly indestructible. Elon even twitted at some point that it would destroy the other car in a collision, a morally questionable comment, but the implications are clear, a though vehicle for people who don't give a fuck about others.
And then, they managed to break the unbreakable window during the presentation, followed by the rusty trucks, and most importantly, the whole fiasco with glued panels that came off. So, you market a tough vehicle, but it falls appart. Who is going to buy that?
While we could quibble on the exact percentage, I think that's the point. Why spend $100K on an ugly status vehicle, when you could just get any half-ton pickup quad-cab short bed and prove to the world how big of a truck you have, but only spend $50-60K?!
The Cybertruck is weird and a "status" symbol, but most people want to fit in, but also have the "nicest" looking status symbol, so they convince themselves that "this particular truck" is really nice. (And also if I own it, it's clear I do lots of hard physical things.)
I think the Fathom will outsell the Slate 10 to 1 despite costing more, because U.S. buyers have adapted to "luxury" in every trim level of vehicle. I mean, yes base level Corollas still sell quite well (but these days even those have features you dreamt about in a luxury sedan not too many decades ago.)
The Slate represents an ideology that combines the nostalgia of what trucks used to be (especially the Ford Ranger) with a modern EV powertrain, but most people don't actually want the stripped down basic vehicle, even if their eyes light up over the idea.
> The Slate represents an ideology that combines the nostalgia of what trucks used to be (especially the Ford Ranger) with a modern EV powertrain, but most people don't actually want the stripped down basic vehicle, even if their eyes light up over the idea.
I have debated this extensively with some friends. I *jumped* at the slate pre-order precisely because it doesn't have any 'luxury' trim options. I don't want to pay out the nose for a fancy infotainment system that will use the cheapest possible under powered electronics from a decade ago, run a 10 year old version of android that spies on me, gets no useful updates...etc.
I certainly have my biases but I suspect that most people only _tolerate_ most of the painpoints w/ the various 'luxury' items in their cars and if given the opportunity to start simple and upgrade they would.
> but most people don't actually want the stripped down basic vehicle
Perhaps. But if you put two options side-by-side and show people what they get at the two different price points, I'd bet that the ~30k slate compared to the ~ 50k typical new car price will get a decent chunk of people thinking about what _else_ they could do with 20k in savings.
Maximizing shareholder value is not the most important consideration. The most important consideration is don't go bankrupt. Once you have a product that sells, you can start asking, well how can I maximize shareholder value? But you have to make those sales in the first place or you're going to go bankrupt and that is far worse for shareholders than not getting maximum value.
Successful companies well understand they don't know exactly what maximizing shareholder value requires. They are always making small experiments to see what really works in the market. Many of those they know will fail and in turn cost shareholder value because of a bad investment. But you have to try bad investments in order to find one that is good.
It’s also important to remember that while some people talk like there’s a legal responsibility to maximize shareholders value which forces businesses to make decisions focused on short-term profits, those people are simply wrong. There’s an extraordinary level of deference given to executive discretion which means it’s quite rare to see successful lawsuits for anything plausibly good-faith. For example, right now there’s a fad to lay people off but any business which chooses instead to invest in their capacity is unlikely to even be threatened with a shareholder lawsuit because no court in the country is going to say that “we are investing in long-term capacity” was clearly wrong.
I have a slate preorder but it's a niche vehicle. It's a small 2 door 2wd pickup that can't meaningfully tow and has a 200 mi range.
It's not going to appeal to people who want a truck as a symptom of fragile insecurities around their masculinity and that's a biiiig part of the US truck market
Look at the F150 lightening to see the failure of electric trucks. Chevy, Dodge and Ford all have, and it shows. Chevy's electric Silverado has a lot more range because more people want a truck for towing than the 1% that hacker news claims, and so range became and issue. Ford and Dodge are instead looking at plug in hybrids for the future: use an engine when towing, and battery for acceleration and shorter trips.
Trucks are a status symbol in the USA. EVs were becoming acceptable in the mainstram, hence the initial surge in sales, but that has cooled off since 2024. Now very few outside of the big tech cities are spending money on EVs. Hence the fate of the electric F-150 as well.
Most vehicles are used to get one person to and from work every day. There are a lot of people who don't have kids or only have one kids and so they don't need use passenger space or hauling capacity. The Cybertruck is aerodynamically terrible, but if people are not using it as a truck, well I guess it's transport that works for them.
However, people are talking about the same truck as if it is a truck. And it's a terrible truck for people who need a truck. On the other hand, a lot of other trucks are also terrible at being a truck for the people who need a truck. You have to go into the three-quarter ton or one-ton range to find a decent truck these days, even though a modern half-ton probably has more power and weight carrying capacity than a 30-year-old three-quarter ton truck. The way it's set up means it's not going to work as well as a truck. The 30-year-old truck is going to have a longer bed, which is something that someone who needs a truck is going to want in the truck.
Very frustrating that trucks have morphed into tank-like SUVs with small beds tacked on back. Expensive and has every fancy feature one could want ... except the thing that makes it a pick-up truck
I love that they took a swing for the fences. Car makers are so fucking safe these days. Sadly it didn’t land, but it’s awesome that it exists. I think if it had used a more conventional design it would have done so much better. Owners report an incredible driving experience. I also think battery technology held it back. It was originally advertised as having much better towing range, and production came in very underwhelming. This made it much less appealing as a utility vehicle. It ended up being used for picking up groceries and this wasn’t broad enough a market.
Not every swing is a home run. You can win with a few home runs or a lot of singles.
The only guaranteed way to lose is if you stop swinging. And Tesla has stopped swinging. They haven't revealed a mass market consumer vehicle since 2019.
There is some incredible technology in the Cybercab that allows them to be built cheaply in high volume. Instead Ford looks like they are going to be the first Western consumer vehicle out of the gate with the unboxed production method with their Ford Fathom. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese are ahead here too.
Hasn’t Musk been clear that he’s abandoning traditional passenger vehicles? He’s retooling for Cybercab and Optimus. Model Y and 3 are selling too well to abandon but there won’t be new models. We’d be lucky for refreshes.
Agreed, I love to see long shots even if they don't land, and in this case the price/performance fundamentals were likely the biggest problem. The "limited TAM for a bold stand-out design" was probably another, but Elon also didn't do any favors by vigorously adopting the opposite politics of his customers at the same time he was trying to launch a bold/iconic design.
I disagree. Teslas used to be nice designs and pleasant to see on the street. Cybertruck and Cybercab designs are an affront. Intentionally ugly. I’m glad we don’t see a lot of trucks on the street, and I despair at the thought of millions of Cybercabs about.
The 3/Y and the screens had lots of design and product innovations. Iterating on those lines would’ve been quite nice.
Reading through some of the comments in this thread feels like being in the Twilight Zone. This is the company of a man who poured almost half a billion dollars into the US election to try to buy favor in Texas. He tried basically bribing voters in Wisconsin before. Weeks ago, he used Starlink for political retribution against Ukraine. He’s unelected, unaccountable and has repeatedly and brazenly tried to undermine US democracy and insert himself in international affairs.
And yet some of the comments talk about this like these cars exist in a vacuum, detached from the realities of the person behind them. Some of them even praise this hideous, low quality, overpriced, impractical abomination of a truck. Parts of the tech world really do live in a bubble.
This is the world that the Supreme Court dreamed up for us in their Citizen's United ruling. Now that money is equivalent to speech, we all have to carefully weigh if our purchases will be used against us in our political system.
To anyone who is/was a crusader against cancel culture, recognize the source of it. Become a crusader against Citizen's United instead. It would be a much more productive coalition.
Try leaving your bubble sometime, and live somewhere where people generally have good lives and don’t care about politics. Orange County, for me. Lots of teslas and cybertrucks everywhere, mostly owned by first generation immigrants who don’t care about the political noise, just want a practical electric car.
Ah yes when I want to escape my insular, ivory tower life, when I want to connect to common, everyday Americans, the first place that comes to mind is Orange County, CA. These salt of the earth people don’t worry about frivolous little concerns such as the cost of living. Unaffected by petty concerns, Joe Mainstreet of Orange County, CA looks at a line up of electric car options for him and his family, and every the pragmatist says “give me the $80k giant toe nail clipper”.
>Weeks ago, he used Starlink for political retribution against Ukraine. He’s unelected, unaccountable and has repeatedly and brazenly tried to undermine US democracy and insert himself in international affairs.
You are deeply, utterly misinformed and loudly ignorant.
Ukraine uses StarShield, which is owned/operated by the USGov. Starlink is a civilian service not for military use.
If you can't be bothered to perform a simple google search to educate yourself about basic matters such as this in a few seconds, why should anyone listen to any of your other (ridiculous) points?
Behold the Toyota Hilux [1], a truck so reliable that it is the truck of choice in many developed nations and even less developed ones. It's so cheap and reliable it became the platform for a war [2]. It also has a truck bed equivalent to a Ford F150, a vehicle significantly larger. But you can't buy a new Hilux or equivalent in the US because cars younger than 25 years cannot legally be imported [3] (to stop grey imports on Mercedes in the 1980s, originally) and because of CAFE standards [4].
Electric vehicles obviously don't have the hurdle of meeting emissions standards so Tesla, or any other company really, had (and has) the opportunity to create a small, cheap, mass market utility truck that no gas-powered vehicle can compete with. This is what the Cybertruck should've been.
There have been breakdowns of the Cybertruck and it is such an incredibly bad design. Things like the weight of stainless steel panels but with an aluminum frame. Why is that a problem? Because aluminum is prone to catastrophic failure with the up and down motion of towing a heavy load than stainless steel simply isn't [5].
The rumor has been that the only thing propping up Cybertruck demand is Elon forcing his own companies like SpaceX to buy them [6]. Other than that, the Cybertruck became a weird political statement [7]. Those people are getting crucified on resale. It's even a trend on Tiktok and elsewhere to watch these trade in videos. People who paid $150k+ are getting <$70k less than 2 years later.
Anyway, I'm shocked no US manufacturer is tackling the EV small utility truck market. Yes there was the F150 Lightning but it's still too big (and thus expensive).
The Tacoma is more like the modern Hilux. I should've been more specific. The 1980s and 1990s Hilux weighed in at 1000-1200kg. Now it's 1700-2100kg. It's a lot bigger truck. Those 1980s and 1990s trucks were indestructible and so easy to service.
Now I get why the gas powered Hilux has changed. Emissions standards have changed. Fuel efficiency is more important. Modern cars are full of computers and microcontrollers. But an EV is relatively simple. It's one of the big advantages. Yes you have an OS and it's not just turning the ignition but the drive system itself is fairly simple, the thing that turns battery power into movement (compared to ICEs). No moving parts (in the engine), basically.
You could absolutely make a small EV utility truck. Remember that part of the reason why people were excited about the Cybertruck when it was announced was the price point (~$35k). Of course it turned out to be 3 times that.
Look at what BYD is doing [1]. Now these are PHEVs rather than pure EVs. Other automakers are making smaller pure EV trucks.
Oh man, I was wondering if anyone was gonna bring up Slate.
I try not to get excited about stuff, but the idea of The Next Big Thing in Cars being a total lack of garbage nonsense screens and giving us back CRANK CRANK WINDOWS -- this is pure joy.
Wheels. Seats. Motor[1]. Box to keep rain off. Done.
Oh you attached a bed to that? Double awesome.
[1] Enough top end cruise speed for American interstates.
I mean as much as I love thd idea of actually doing something bonkers, the lack of sales seemed inevitable to most I assume, so that should come as no surprise. Should have stayed a concept car.
I wouldn’t be surprised if cost were the only reason its sales weren’t even lower. If it’s expensive it’s at least a plausible status symbol. At a reasonable price it’s just an incompetently designed utility vehicle.
Musk was a fool to mistake the hollering of a small group of enthusiasts for that of the truck-buying U.S. population. Nobody was actually wanting for the CyberTruck. He should've listened to his marketing people and not be guided by social media and his right-wing instinct.
Then again, he's a con-man who's now quietly distancing himself from CyberTruck ("I had nothing to do with it") and moving on to the next con-trick: the CyberCab.
Well, if you're dreaming, instead of a cyber truck at 40K, wouldn't you want instead a Chauffeured Rolls-Royce and the Swedish bikini team to keep it maintained?
When I want to go to the symphony I want a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. I don't care how it is maintained, that is the chauffeurs job. If I want to see under dressed girls I'll go to a strip club after if, or maybe hire an escort to sit next to me.
When I want a truck to "go mudding", the fun is driving it through the mud. Maybe my chauffeur is tows the truck to the mud pit, but I'm getting it stuck in the mud myself. Sometimes the local cheerleaders are holding a fund raiser and I'll pay them to clean the truck after I'm done.
When I want a truck because I need to haul things - I want to pay someone else to take care of it when I'm not around.
In reality I'm not rich enough for the above. I do a lot of maintenance myself because I can't afford to pay someone. I have one vehicle that is a bad compromise for everything because I can't afford more.
In reality I have moral objections to under dressed girls and so I'm not going to the strip club or hiring escorts. But if I was that type I wouldn't be paying them to maintain my car. I have had the cheerleaders clean my car while I watched, but I wasn't paying them to be "eye candy" even though I did enjoy looking, and the next week is was the boys wrestling team (which I don't enjoy looking at) that got paid just as much for the same job.
In reality I'd prefer public transportation, but that is a different story.
No, Id like a cyber truck with 500 mile range for $40k which also is a boat and is bulletproof, all as originally promised. That would be awesome. The product we got in reality is a terrible shadow of the original idea.
I was replying to the parent comment where they said:
> Musk was a fool to mistake the hollering of a small group of enthusiasts for that of the truck-buying U.S. population. Nobody was actually wanting for the CyberTruck. He should've listened to his marketing people and not be guided by social media and his right-wing instinct.
It wasnt social media and his 'right wing instinct' whatever that is. It was massive amounts of paid pre-orders feeding their opinions that it was going to be popular.
EDIT: Oh I see you have edited your comment since I wrote mine. The massive amounts of pre order cancellation came after it was released, so how does that factor into their initial opinions that it would be popular during development?
Based on the lie about how much it would cost, how many they could produce, and how soon they would be delivered...
Even very ugly cars will sell if they give you a really good deal for the money. The Cybertruck at $39,999 was a shockingly good deal. It was just a lie.
No one is arguing that, but in turn you cant argue there was real buzz and popularity of the product on announcement. Whether that was caused by a lie or not is irrelevant, it was popular big time before anyone knew what the real product was going to be like.
It's called Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD) and that is an accurate name given it controls every aspect of the vehicle's operation, only requiring the driver to pay attention as a supervisor. And, essentially, the same software and hardware available on a Model 3 and Model Y is present on the CyberCabs that are driving people around a few cities, now, without input mechanisms. Elon is a PoS, and it took a decade longer than he said, but the cars are driving themselves.
Yes thankyou for confirming my point.
How did I know you would come and be pedantic about it?
I live in Europe, and here its not called Full Self Driving because regulators disagree with you that the car is driving itself. Therefore your original statement of "It's called Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD) and that is an accurate name given it controls every aspect of the vehicle's operation" is not true here at all.
If the US is happy with Elon lying about his cars abilities then thats on them. Not surprising really judging by the mess that is the USA in recent years.
Trumps current mess with huge increases of cost of living, and subsequent popularity decline is an example of what happens when you let business run free.
This isn’t news to anyone following the business. I’m pretty sure it was announced months ago that model X and Cybertruck (and maybe Model S too) were being discontinued.
And Model 3 and Y have always been 95%+ of the cars Tesla delivered.
I recently had a Tesla service call at my house (routine maintenance for my Y). He showed up in a darkly wrapped Cybertruck. It didn’t occur to me that they’re just dogfooding their own vehicles to use them up.
Hilarious but a logical end state option for them.
The cybertruck was announced like a bad meme and now dies as one too. What we see is the logical and long overdue conclusion of a story that lasted longer than it should have.
Someone knows the government infinite money machine, which Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City, and many other Musk companies took advantage of, is about to get cut off.
side-topic: why trucks are so popular (especially USA)? Is it all in the fake testosterone virtue signalling and pretending to be hard working country people?
To me trucks are the most useless type of vehicle apart from niche utilitarian cases in farming or construction. Super heavy, gas guzzling, open bed, compromised handling, pedestrian crushing death machine.
If you want big family hauler, grocery getter: mini-vans, wagons.
If you are in trades: van, box truck or flatbed box truck (where bed is useful shape and size, and all sides can be removed if needed).
No, you don't need 3 tonne vehicle with bajillion horsepower as a daily, because you may need to pull a trailer with your inflatable dinghy once in a two years.
If you want truck adjacent vehicle, get Toyota 4runner or Highlander. Humongous cars, vast and closed cargo space. It will pull a trailer, it will haul all your stuff and family.
Because vehicles are a compromise. A truck can do everything a sedan can. A sedan cannot do everything a truck can. A flatbed truck can do more than a smaller truck - but it also is bigger and not easy to drive because of the size. The costs to own extra vehicles is very high and so people won't own different a vehicle for each use (renting is not a good answer - too often I've gone to rent something and it was sold out. Also most rentals have restrictions on use)
> To me trucks are the most useless type of vehicle apart from niche utilitarian cases in farming or construction. Super heavy, gas guzzling, open bed, compromised handling, pedestrian crushing death machine. If you want big family hauler, grocery getter: mini-vans, wagons.
Minivans and trucks get similar fuel mileage. For the average family there are not enough kids to need a minivan.
> If you are in trades: van, box truck or flatbed box truck (where bed is useful shape and size, and all sides can be removed if needed).
Obviously you are not in the trades and don't know anyone in them. I've heard plenty of people in the trades debate the merits of truck vs van. They are compromises and there is no clear winner.
> you don't need 3 tonne vehicle with bajillion horsepower as a daily, because you may need to pull a trailer with your inflatable dinghy once in a two years.
If I need to tow something even once every two years then I need to own a truck. I've tried to rent a truck to tow something - turns out most rental contracts don't allow towing. There are exceptions, but the cost is so high, and finding a place to rent is so inconvenient that I will just own my own truck instead - it is worth it.
I wasn't pro truck until I lived on an island with limited infrastructure. Once you need to take care of some of your own infra, a truck is a great tool, beating your full list. That said, a beater truck is generally preferred -- you want reliable, cheap and something that you don't care if it gets banged up.
Not a “truck guy” but I have a cybertruck because it’s the only self-driving electric car that has enough room to carry my family’s stuff when we go to the lake, ocean, camping, etc. My ideal car is a van or large SUV but there aren’t electric self-driving versions of those yet.
Car companies have long been on a cycle for their vehicles. It varies but generally we could say every seven years they're going to do a major redesign of a car. So I think it's safe to say the Model Y and Model 3 won't be sold in seven years. The question is, in seven years, will they have a different model, loosely based on the current Model Y and Model 3, that carry those same names? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Tesla goes bankrupt and the cars aren't for sale. Maybe Tesla continues and the names exist.
They may try a bigger refresh than they did at the six year point, but I imagine they will keep the model names in any case.
But with such strong sales, the incentive is not to rock the boat. Incumbents refresh more often because they have a lot of competition.
Tesla does not have any meaningful competition for the Model Y. The closest competitor is the Ford MME, and just behind it the Ioniq 5. But Tesla still sells like 3-4x as many Model Ys as both of those combined.
The Model 3 has even less direct competition. But that's probably because the sedan market as a whole is not as strong as crossovers. The biggest competitor to the Model 3 is probably the Model Y. And to put some context on this -- even as a sedan, the Model 3 outsells the Subaru Outback. Anybody wondering whether Subaru will stop selling Outbacks?
I just imagine what an incredible success Tesla would have had just making a "boring" Tesla branded competition to the F150. "Just" a model 3 with a standard pickup body.
Americans, for whatever reason, only buy SUVs and trucks. They've left the whole truck market untapped by creating a vehicle only a very small niche could/would want.
I don't understand what product marketing was up to, or if they just completely lacked the spine to stand up to Elon.
The Zeekr with sliding doors that Waymo is using seems like a way better concept for a robotaxi. Still fits in a standard parking space but can carry a group at need without being terribly inefficient for a single person.
> A people mover that moves the minimum of people (2)
You meant maximum? Though minimum would be fun, too: taxi won’t start unless you agree to socialize and chat with a random stranger. As soon as silence is detected it pulls over and the ride ends.
Ah yes. That makes sense now. But I guess the minimum of people for taxis would be one in general. A small taxi for one person is plausible. Zero won’t work as it would be a delivery vehicle only then.
90% of taxi rides are 1 person 95% 2 so its based on, you know, business intelligence rather than your hot take which is anti Elon rhetoric like most of this thread or any for that matter here (keep thinking this is reddit)
Outside of certain kinds of construction contractors, I rarely if ever see pickup trucks used for this purpose.
This anecdote might indicate why: We recently had a bunch of work done on our house. The siding crew had a pickup truck, and every morning the very first thing they did was unload the entire contents of the truck into our back yard. The plumbers and electricians would just get the stuff they were actually using and then lock the van.
Surprise: a car that can only be legally sold and used on mainstream roads in the US makes poor sales, even in the US, after its design was widely ridiculed.
The Model 3 was a masterpiece of design, the Cybertruck is more like Cybercuck.
Even if one assumes all tesla trucks.. share of electric trucks in USA is 0.3%.
Tesla cyber truck sales are going down from 38k a year to 20k a year. The Chinese net sales of electric trucks is massively more than Tesla's production if you look at the data that I posted.
The DeLorean wasn't taken seriously when Back to the Future was released either... it looks like a cool car now, mostly because of the movie, but back then it was considered a joke of a car and the company went bankrupt less than two years after it began production.
Yeah I could totally see a similar trajectory for the cybertruck. I think it will be more popular in its death than it was in its life. Every elementary aged boy I know thinks it's really cool.
The Cybertruck will never be looked back on as a cool car, since it's existence is inextricably linked to doomed social and political movements. Like the ideology it represents, it's presence is impossible to ignore, but in the worst way possible. Plus it's a shitty truck.
It can never shake the "Ugh, get a load of this guy" factor.
- Federal EV tax credits are over.
- The emissions credit market (where Tesla made most of its money) is dead due to lowered standards.
- Manufacturing costs haven't come down.
- EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter).
- Chinese EVs are dominating every market outside the US.
- All the overhyped moonshots (sub-$30K car, unsupervised autopilot, autonomous robots) are nowhere to be seen.
It's hard to see where Tesla goes from here as a company. The stock is still surviving on Elon hype but has been stagnant for 5 years. The day he gets bored and decides to resign to focus on SpaceX full time the company is basically done.
> EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter).
It's not every quarter, but it's steady and that spells absolute disaster for US car manufacturers:
https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/q3-2026-ev-sales-report-...
US car companies have been protected and bailed out too many times and are now not only completely uncompetitive on the global market, but set up to be completely demolished as EVs take over.
Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency mean that either investors are going to pay a massive price, or US consumers are going to pay a massive price. If we keep on pushing up consumer costs by propping up bad manufacturers with protectionism and bail outs, the US's entire economy is drug down by that.
There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.
I hadn't followed just how bad US manufacturers were failing at EVs the past two years, what with all the other disasters unfolding, thanks for the wake up call. Two years of wasted time, of the US falling even farther behind... such a massive fail and yet not the most massive.
> Two years of wasted time
Try two generations. I think it was obvious since the oil shocks that fossil fuels were not a good bedrock of the economy.
It's interesting to try to work out what the civ-style "dependency tree" of viable electric cars has been. It requires at the bare minimum high energy density light batteries, which were a spinoff of the cellphone revolution. As well as high efficiency digital power control, which while not impossible in 1970 would have been larger and heavier without modern SiC semiconductors.
Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.
Well, perhaps, but the time for the followers in the field to push on EV manufacturing capability has been the past 5-10 years. And the US majors are all followers, not leaders. About two years ago they all put out press releases saying "we are not seeing EV sales so we are pulling back on manufacturing" meaning "we couldn't figure it out and are scared so we are abandoning our future."
With the strangle hold that these industries have on getting the government to bail them out, we are in a really bad position on the national level. We have let bad politics and weak management override good economic decision making.
> - Chinese EVs are dominating every market outside the US.
Not so in Europe, where the top 10 EVs sold in 2025 [1] has not a single Chinese car.
[1] https://autorai.nl/tesla-van-de-troon-gestoten-als-populairs...
Hundreds of Cybercabs are driving around cities right now with no steering wheel or pedal making money and growing 20% a week, Model Y is the best selling car (of any type) in the planet. European sales are going through the roof, they are doubling production.
Cybertruck was a mistake but rest of the business is printing cash hand over fist.
> European sales are going through the roof
A side effect of Trump's war with Iran is that every country which doesn't have sufficient domestic oil production, which is most countries especially in Europe, has accelerated their EV transition. Buyers are grabbing every EV they can get their hands on, and yes Tesla are the leader there.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-electric-car-registratio...
"Tesla (TSLA.O), led the UK BEV market year-to-date, with registrations up 25.4% from a year earlier and a 9.53% market share South Korea's Kia (000270.KS), and China's BYD (002594.SZ), continued to compete for second place, with market shares of 6.9% and 6.8%, respectively"
The Kia model breakdown: https://www.kiapressoffice.com/releases/1975 (mostly Niro, now withdrawn, then EV6)
That ain’t a good thing. Europe continues to deindustrialize themselves. How is that a good thing?
Do you know that Europe is not just the UK? How odd to present that quote to support your claim that Tesla leads in Europe.
It's actually 4th in ev sales in Europe.... https://cleantechnica.com/2026/10/03/europe-ev-sales-report-...
And that's when ranked by manufacturer, which is only slightly less arbitrary than by model as auto groups just use it for market segmentation. If you rank them as groups (e.g. VW group), then Tesla isn't even in the top 5.
> Model Y is the best selling car (of any type) in the planet.
Depends on the year. It and the RAV4 switch places now and then.
It's also a meaningless metric because most manufacturers sell multiple models of the same type. Toyota has Corolla, Prius, Camry, Crown, Mirai, Ativ, Century, Belta - all small-mid sized sedans. Add them up and they outsell every Tesla model put together.
BYD has 61 different models in its lineup compared to Tesla's 2.
Not sure what numbers you are looking at but Tesla vehicle sales peaked in 2023 and have been falling every year since then. The "sales going through the roof" narrative exists on Twitter, not their balance sheet.
> Hundreds of Cybercabs are driving around cities right now with no steering wheel or pedal making money and growing 20% a week
Huh? The cybercab with no steering wheel is only operating in Austin, in tiny premapped areas. There are 45 registered in Texas, and they have only been operating since September.
This isn’t Twitter, you’re generally expected to at least attempt to provide factual information here.
https://www.fox7austin.com/news/tesla-launches-cybercab-aust...
“Printing money hand over fist” is an interesting way to frame the dramatic drop in their margin on every vehicle sold.
I think they have a future as a "normal" car company, but in order to do that they'd have to manage to deliver a new "normal car" model at some point, and accept normal stock prices.
That EV market share direction in the US, though .. really bad compared to non-petrostates (except Norway)
They’ve never been a normal car company. And that’s the problem.
They don’t do a good job at the car company part. They make nice cars, but the company part has issues. Quick example… I was very happy to drive a model 3 for many years. But the constant changes in price of their new cars destroyed any resale value mine had. Every time Tesla was having a bad quarter, the value of my car dropped. That’s not the way to get me to buy another one.
There are certainly other areas where they could improve too. But my point being - they’ve never been all that good at (or interested in) what it takes to drive long term success in selling cars. It’s just too long of a time horizon for them.
The problem is that transition would require a ~95% drop in stock price, and the company isn't going to survive that.
GM - $74.5B market cap (6.2M cars sold annually)
Ford - $50.2B (4.6M)
Volkswagen - $40B (9M)
BYD - $100B (4.6M)
Toyota - $256B (11.3M)
Hyundai - $57B (7.3M)
Tesla - $1.4T (1.6M)
The numbers simply don't add up.
A stock drop does not in and of itself kill a company which has positive cashflow, although it may give the executives heart attacks and leave it vulnerable to takeover.
Oooh, normal cars. Now there's a concept. Can we get a real EV minivan? Not a gimmick like the Buzz. I've got kids and go on long road trips to visit family. Seats, cargo capacity, range, and 800V charging speed.
Closest thing is like the Ioniq 9 but the cargo space really sucks.
For a polished product that ticks all the boxes, I would pay a premium for this.
Wikipedia maintains a list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
It’s slightly amazing how persistent the Elon hype is. Quite a few of those problems are at least partially due to own goals that Musk himself has been scoring.
I realize that some of it is just a cult of personality, and that part will be unusually sticky because of things like cognitive dissonance. But that can’t be all of it. My next best guess is a bunch of it is a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky, but keep it to themselves because it’s not their money they’re putting on the line and taking a contrarian position would risk angering a presumably vocal subset of clients of unknown size. Which isn’t a great way to make yourself popular with your boss.
If he had delivered Neuralink alone, the hype would be valid. Doing that...plus SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, etc.
The biggest knock on him is that he says something will happen at a certain time and then it comes later. Even the sub-$30k EV. Cybercabs cost < $30k.
There’s a severe lack of focus and the only endgame that still makes sense to me for Tesla is basically turning into a cab service like Waymo. Perhaps you own the car perhaps not.
> unsupervised autopilot
They are running a fleet of taxis around the Bay Area. It's kind of scary because they aren't that safe, given the lack of LIDAR. But they are doing it anyway.
They all have someone behind the wheel. Tesla doesn't have a driverless permit in the Bay Area.
Yes, they have safety drivers for now, but they are still running them as an autonomous fleet.
And also, they are driving fully autonomous in Texas and Florida.
> for now
So let me guess, fully unsupervised self driving is rolling out "next year" right?
Photogrammetry + AI has developed to the degree, that there are 3D scanning apps on iPhone that don't even use the Lidar when available, so you can certainly make do without and get comparable results.
What makes you say they aren't safe? The numbers say they are about 4-6x safer than a car with a human driver.
I don’t see why it’s scary. Most cars on the road have a driver and no LIDAR. The cybercab is no different.
For now, their goal is to have no driver and no lidar. That is what said the commenter is scared of.
They intend to take the driver out, and they are already running them without a driver in Texas and Florida.
Yep, very safely https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety
He seems to suggest that the future is Cybercabs and Optimus.
But if Optimus ends up with a HW3 problem (current manufactured Optimus bots aren't autonomus yet because the software isn't finished) he'll have a pile of Cybertrucks and early-model Optimus units rotting in a field.
Personally, I just don't see it. If he merges Tesla and SpaceX it won't really be about cars or vehicle autonomy.
Their current stock valuation can't ride this uncertainty forever. At some point he has to have new products that work, no caveats.
He'll just fold Tesla into SpaceX to cover up the ashes.
This is the most realistic scenario. Hide the stock losses by folding it into SpaceX. Dare the US government to nationalize it. Walk away a “business martyr”.
> It's hard to see where Tesla goes from here as a company.
Probably will get acquired by SpaceX to hide the poor financials
Also, the truck was ugly, awkward, and not good at being a truck.
Not sure why you didn't mention Elon Musk zeig heiling at the inauguration he helped buy which led to a mass boycott.
Elon resigning from Tesla and just letting it run as a reasonable car company making just regular incremental quality and price and new model improvements on normal vehicles people want to drive could be the best thing for the company. The Model 3 is a huge success. That they didn't follow that up with just a regular pickup truck in a similar niche, and instead got distracted by this cybertruck nonsense is an indictment of Musk's poor leadership at this point.
They should just be the Toyota of EVs -- mass produce quality vehicles people want to drive -- instead he's trying to be Tony Stark and keep pumping it as a meme stock.
Tesla remains excellent at engineering and manufacturing. They need not seek the exotic.
He's a liability to that company, not an asset, at this point. And his name has become a brand liability.
Elon's honestly their biggest problem. Can't focus on finishing one thing to save his life and alienated the shit out of the European market with his fascist beliefs.
I get so much joy from seeing these on the road. They are not to my taste, but it’s so nice to see something new on the road.
I still remember years ago seeing one in a grocery store parking lot, with a banana yellow wrap and the Zelda unlock sound as its lock chime. A brief moment of inconsequential joy.
Lastly, having the cyber truck drag race a Porsche 911, while towing a Porsche 911 (and win) has to be one of the best marketing stunts of all time.
I feel so much anger seeing these on the road.
A bad design that costs too much, the only people who bought these were ideologues committed to the vision of a man responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths, the gutting of the American state, and some of the most destructive politics of hate in living memory.
I celebrate their passing.
Some of us just got one because it’s a fantastic self driving electric family car. I have a family and live somewhere nice, life’s too short to get so wound up about politics. And you’ll still be seeing them on the roads for many years to come :)
Life is certainly too short to support nazis
Anyone who says that he is a nazi is an idiot, frankly. You’re just dismissing someone with different ideas by calling them a name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvgZtdmyKlI
The guy literally tweets and retweets neo-nazis and white nationalist content on a regular basis. He celebrates an election win with a literal nazi salute. He openly supports fascist parties and politicians. Being aghast at someone calling him a nazi is ridiculous.
His brain is damaged from all the ketamine use
If someone’s “different ideas” involve literally praising hitler then it is logical to call them a nazi. The only way someone believe what you said is if they have not listened to a word Elon has uttered for the last 8 years.
I pity the family of someone who cannot get “wound up” about a man who gleefully dismantled USAID at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives,[^1] ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into far right politics, and did a fucking nazi salute.
Outside of Mad Max it’s hard to conceive of a more dangerous car to be involved in a pedestrian collision. The cybertruck is a symbol of staggering ignorance and selfishness.
We’ll probably still see them on the roads for many years to come—and laugh at the lickspittle Elon toadies who gleefully bought them, knowing full well what they symbolize.
[^1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
This is a pretty heartless thing to say when one person's politics are repsonsible for making many lives so much shorter and more miserable.
Yeah, why worry about the politics you’re supporting with your money? Presumably you believe you aren’t a likely target for the hate and violence Musk spends that money you gave him advocating for. Must be nice not to have to worry about your or your family’s personal safety or emotional well-being. Thanks for the advice about “getting wound up” over politics.
Life's a lot easier when you just close your eyes and pretend the problem disappears, huh?
Have fun driving a Scarlet Letter, bro.
You...you do know who the "bad guys" were in the Scarlet Letter, right?
Hahaha. This is too good. These hateful people are so caught up in their outrage that they don’t realize they’ve become the bad guys.
Probably a better question for Elon's harem of birth-mothers
Again, I'm begging you to go look up a plot summary. Hester is the hero protagonist!
Congratulations, you've rewired the metaphor.
Probably every third car in my area is a Tesla.
The drivers are like 98% East Asian or Indian. Like half the cars have a "new driver" or "baby on board" sticker.
Teslas are unpopular in rural areas.
So ironically I think the ideologues (on either side) are the only people NOT buying Teslas.
They're not driving cybertrucks, is the point.
I own one. I hate Elon and everything that he has become. I wanted an EV truck that can drive itself on my road trips.
What you do matters more than what you say.
Agreed, so please spare us the virtue signaling and go start an EV company that makes better cars than Tesla
> ideologues committed to the vision of a man responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths
Utterly insane take. Your media sources have filled your mind with poison.
You sound very ideologue yourself.
As a pedestrian I certainly don’t enjoy being around them, or any of the absurdly oversized American trucks.
As a pedestrian a tesla is the least likely vehicle to actually hit you.
The best collision is no collision.
I get that.
I'm not an Elon fan in the least, but it does feel like most cars are designed by committee and converge on a few well-defined shapes and segments. And they sell a ton of them, so sure, of course.
But there's certainly some charm when you see a weirdmobile that doesn't conform and somehow got by the bean counters and into existence. The MINI Clubvan, for people who needed something compact and cargo-focused. The Cadillac CTS-V wagon, for people who wanted to haul ass ... and the family. The Toyota MR2, which felt like Toyota engineers decided "let's take these Corolla parts and build them in the shape of a Ferrari".
With the high costs of certifying a new car for sale it seems like we see fewer and fewer of these oddballs, and that feels like a shame.
So even though I'd never personally consider driving a poorly rendered dumpster from a 1980s video game, perhaps the world is a bit more interesting due to its existence.
I agree. I was personally getting really sad on how all design appeared to be converging on one 'allowed' shape without considering any other possible -- ah ha - angles. I posted on this before, but I will repeat it here, because it is relevant.
Those cars did have uses, but those uses revolved around drawing attention ( think advertising ). Whenever I saw one in my neck of the woods, they were selling something.
> Lastly, having the cyber truck drag race a Porsche 911, while towing a Porsche 911 (and win) has to be one of the best marketing stunts of all time.
I suppose, if you don't really like cars much, this was interesting. No one debates the ability for EVs to have absurd 0-60, 0-100 times, but there's almost no overlap between why you'd buy a Cybertruck versus a 911 besides status symbol, which gets back to... maybe it's neat, if you don't really care about cars much.
Agreed. Even if the design is polarizing, has quality issues, whatever about elon and politics, it is refreshing to see something different and distinctive on the road in a sea of blobby SUVs and extended cab trucks.
Can we just make the world a better place by bringing back dopey, happy cars like the Cube?
Oh, what could have been. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tesla-electric-pickup-truck-...
I want an electric El Camino.
Isn't that kind of the dream of Slate? I reserved two, btw, hard agree.
Who wouldn't?
I can't find the post where the guy wanted something like Uber, but the driver shows up in a beat up pickup truck, and just agrees with everything you say, "Hell yeah, brother!"
It can be, if you let it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_T90 (EV version)
Yet again I consider the disparities between the US market, as described by commentors, and the UK market. Cybertrucks never made it to road legality here, and would probably have required an HGV license (if the maximum manufacturer permitted vehicle+load weight is over 3500kg).
The US style pickup is pretty rare. There are some Ford Ranger/Raptors, which look comically large but are apparently smaller than the common F150 (??). People who need a truck bed get a Ford Transit or similar with the bed variant.
Agricultural use cases are handled with actual tractors (who can use the cheaper "red" diesel!)
The pickup in the US is a staple of the plumber, roofer and other tradesmen, and as you say; this use case as a tradesman’s tool is broadly filled by the panel van in Europe.
To some extent you even see this in New York too. Certainly there’s a need for these vehicles in rural areas where road conditions may be poor or absent altogether and the work needs done regardless.
The cybertruck on the other hand isn’t a work vehicle, it’s bought by the same people who buy the super kitted out models and who have no interest in using it for work, let alone taking the thing off road.
Ultimately I think of it as the modern Delorean, but I don’t think it will engender the same level of good will when it ages out and becomes less common due to the increasingly negative profile of Musk and his connections to the politics in which the vehicle was created.
Could be: https://www.slate.auto/en
If their range was better this would be my next vehicle purchase…
If you would be using it just locally, as opposed for road trips, note that it has an LFP battery. LFP batteries are perfectly happy to be always charged to 100% and discharged down to 10% (lower is OK but most people want to keep some spare in case they aren't able to charge when they expected to).
Lithium nickel batteries suffer accelerated aging at high charge and at low charge, so it is usually recommended to stay in the 80-20% range, only going to 100% shortly before a road trip.
A Slate with a 200 mile range operated 100-10% would give you 180 miles between charges. That would be the same range as a lithium nickel battery EV with a 300 mile range operated 80-20%.
I only have one car at a time (not married). I frequently visit family that lives about 80 miles away that live in a charger desert. I used to own a Chevy Bolt and it could get me to those family and back on one 100% charge with a little bit for grocery runs etc. while there. Even that I wish had like maybe another 20 miles of range lol.
Exactly. 200mi EPA is essentially 130-150 highway in winter, which is stopping for charging every 2hrs going 65 - not feasible for anyone living in the midwest.
What are your use cases that need more range than 200 miles? I used to drive a nissan leaf with 90mi range in southern california and only had to stop to charge outside the home a few times for days where I went between LA and Orange County. Otherwise I never really cut it close - and this was with the slowest wall outlet charging at home.
Personally I live in the Midwest. I make fairly frequent drives of around 200 miles to visit friends and family. I drive a pluggable hybrid. EV charging stations exist at both destinations, but are very spotty in between.
During the winter, range plummets. That 200 isn't getting me all the way from A to B. Having a hybrid fueling option is just much more practical for me.
I'm not saying I couldn't get it done, I could, but sitting for hours waiting for some slow-ass EV charging station in the middle of winter is not bullshit I'm signing up for.
Not that I am trying to argue with you, I'm not, but people have a "gas station mindset" about EVs and it leads to confusion, so let me spell out how this trip would look with a "charging station" mindset:
Leave home at 100%/200mi
Drive to destination (approx 3 hours) arrive with ~0%/0mi
Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi
Begin driving back home with a 20%/40mi deficit of range.
Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
Charge for 20%/40mi (~10 minutes)
Complete drive home and fully charge again.
Total extra time on 400 mile trip vs gas (assuming 300 mi tank range, so 1 fill-up): ~5 minutes (or 8 minutes if you stop for a quick charge on the way so you don't have to white knuckle down to 0%).
For cold driving in the winter, it would probably be closer to an extra 20 minutes.
I love my EV, but you're really not being at all realistic here. That's more of a perfect possible case scenario based on numbers from a website, not a real world scenario. I take a ~350 mile drive to Milwaukee in our 300 mile range car (2025 Ioniq 5) and we have to stop three times on the trip in each direction.
You're not actually going to get 200mi from 100% when you have 2 people and baggage loaded and traffic exists, and no one sane would be comfortable arriving with literally 0% battery. Charging stops take minimum 10 minutes just accounting for getting off & back on the freeway; usually more like 30-40 minutes because why would you not just charge back up to 80% since you're stopped anyway? Your destination hotel almost certainly does not have a charger, or if they do they charge an idle fee, so you can't just leave it overnight, so really that has to count as another charging stop.
For a 200mi each way trip, realistically you're talking probably two 30 minute charge stops in each direction. That's not completely unacceptable (eg just have some lunch at one of the stops) but your 5-8 minute quote is absolutely not realistic. A bump up to 300mi range would drop that down to one stop in each direction, which would be a real benefit.
Sorry to be blunt, but if you need to stop 3 times to charge to go 350 miles in an 300 mile range EV, you are doing something severely wrong or there is a problem with your car.
The only way I can make this happen in my head is the combination of driving in freezing temperatures, with the heat blasting the whole time, while doing ~80mph.
Mind you we do trips to Maine in the winter and only have seen ~20% range loss. Heated seats, cruise control at 65, heat on only as needed (about 5-10 minute an hour).
I occasionally drive 300 miles in an EV rated for ~319 miles, and I have to stop once in each direction, but I also have to charge at my destination. There's a Tesla station near there, and the rates are fantastic if you get there before 7 AM.
I keep it at 65 and let the heater do whatever it wants to do so that people are comfortable. Temperature, elevation differences, and wind definitely change things.
There's a section of the drive where I average something like 1.3 mi/kWh on the way up the mountain, but something like 6 mi/kWh on the way down. On the return trip, it's kind of fun to see the guess-o-meter show 110 miles remaining over the course of 25 miles, or have it actually increase.
I'm sure that gas vehicles follow a similar pattern, but I don't pay attention to usage like I do in an EV.
A drop from 80% to 20% in a 300mi car is 0.6 * 300 = 180 miles. It's a 350 mile trip. 350 / 180 = 2 80-to-20 discharges, and that's assuming no little detours for stopping at a cheese store or whatever. So we could do it in 2 stops if we were OK arriving with 20%, but we need some charge at the destination for getting around MKE, so it's three stops. And yeah, we drive 75 because that's the speed of traffic and the HVAC does whatever it does to make us comfortable.
A few things -- I am not op, but I do drive an EV and sometimes drive it through some rural areas.
> Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
This is the aspect which isn't really possible in very rural areas. There is nowhere to stop at to charge, or the options are very limited. It's getting better, but it's the reason why people want more range.
Plus, in the midwest, the ranges tank in the dead of winter, due to sub-zero temperatures and headwinds.
> Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi
If you can. I have some family that doesn't have any power near where I park when I visit. I'm also there for less than the _many, many_ hours it would take to get an EV from ~0 to ~80% on a standard 15A/120v outlet.
In one case, they have a pretty big tesla super-charger something like 40 miles from them so I can top all the way up just before I get there if I go slightly out of my way. In the US, we still have a long ways to go in the US before _high current_ charging options are as ubiquitous as gas.
Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes and it has 300+ mile range and 135kWh battery. And its still a 400v architecture
> Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes
Unfortunately a lot of people only really have a level1 class charger at home and that's a 10+ hour charge on a F150. Probably somewhere around 5-7 hours for a level 2 charger but that's only a "given" on new construction.
If you live close to a level3 charger than you can get topped up in under an hour but that also isn't as convenient as plugging in when you get home and forgetting about it since you have to drive to the charger.
It's pretty perfect as a 2nd family car (and I may buy it for exactly that if the production model reviews are good) but yeah, it's a tough sell for a primary car with that range. Assuming they manage to meet their sales targets and stay in business, I bet it'll improve rapidly over the next couple of model years.
Sort of glad I wasn't tempted to buy a Tesla yute.
EV trucks sound good but you can't haul anything heavy or your range plumments. Unless the battery is huge but that is weight. A truck that can't haul is just for show.
Even gasoline trucks are stupid no low end torque, you need to rev it. I had a 6 cylinder Cummins diesel and at 500rpm idle on a hill it could move the 10,000 pound truck up the hill.
I feel like this is less true nowadays. Or at least, less of a concern.
I have a Rivian and my 400mi range gets cut significantly (down to 200 or 300, depending on the trip) when I have 7k lbs on the back, but never enough to stop me from towing. And with good charging in the area, it's a non issue. And waaaaayyyyy cheaper than diesel.
Maybe if I was towing daily, I'd feel different. Your mileage may vary. (Couldn't resist the closer!)
Edit: btw instant torque is a game changer. You can't beat an EV on that front
I used to think this way, but it turns out that EV trucks hold up on range better than one would expect thanks to regenerative breaking. The added weight of cargo requires more energy to get up to speed, but you get most of that back when breaking, so it's not lost energy. Meanwhile, a gas or diesel truck's range plummets when hauling since all the energy used to accelerate the load is lost in breaking. I'm not saying that EV hauling is perfect or a solved problem, but that the trades offs aren't as intuitive as they might seem.
I think regen braking only helps if the load is on the bed. If it's on a trailer, the trailer will have normal breaks and a lot is lost. (Edit: spelling)
It also doesn't help if you have a long freeway trip where you don't brake.
Trailers may not have regenerative braking today, but that's a chicken-and-egg problem; trailers already have wiring hookups, and once EVs become the default for personal vehicles, it's easy to imagine that regenerative braking will become standard.
braking
You should watch this video - aero dominates vs weight (factors very little), especially with strong regen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA
+1 recommendation for this video. Also the owner of the channel participated in an EV cannonball run several times. I don't think they made it in one go, but still very cool how they had to plan for the trip and modify the vehicle.
Some gas engines have low end torque, big block V8s and anything turbo. But yeah if hauling uphill is your thing diesel is a no brainer. It would be great if our half ton and midsize trucks had diesel options but as usual other countries have better options.
Personally I'm going hybrid truck next time. The advantages of electric (torque, 240V inverter) with the flexibility of gas. Payload is lower but I'm hoping they fix that by the time I need a new truck
First, the intended customers of the Cybertruck don’t need to haul anything; it’s a lifestyle vehicle. Second, EVs have solved the torque problem.
Are you from 2010?
My EV has 470PS, it can hauul plenty heavy for long range. Weights 2.2 tons.
Even the Ford F-150 Lightning was already able to pull 4.5t and has a range of 300 miles.
I think you’re missing the second half: or your range plummets.
Theres been plenty of F150L towing tests and the results are… bad. Maybe 100mi of range if you’re towing something big?
I have an f150 lightning. Weight isn't a problem for range you barely notice it. Towing though matters mostly about the number of axels and aerodynamics. I have a small trailer I occasionally tow and it knocks the range to just under half which is... Not great but not terrible either. Running around town towing is fine, but if we were doing long distance (hundreds of miles) I'd probably rent a ice vehicle for it.
But I've done a 600 mile each way trip with the bed fully loaded and it's completely fine
I might be ignorant here as a german but how often are people towing something big 100 miles and more were they do not have time to just charge? I would have said 2-4 times a year (lakelife location far away twice a year?).
I mean for sure, if you are the person who constantly need this, EVs might need a little bit more advantages, but what does an avg F150 owner would tow 100mi every day / regularly?
I would put it like this: many many truck drivers in the US go years without towing a thing. Even work trucks (eg plumbers rarely need to tow anything). But, for the people that do tow, they tow a lot. And the US is an incredibly large place. West of the Rockies it's essentially empty until you get to the coastal cities. So if you do anything agricultural, or your business is located in the rural places because of local resources (wood, minerals, whatever) you will be towing heavy things long distances. Fun example of distance: last week I was in Tonopah, Nevada. My spouse wanted to try McDonald's. No problem, the sign on the billboard says there is one nearby (that exact word). It was in Hawthorne. 150km away. Americans, especially rural Americans in the Western states, have a different view of driving distance than Europeans. Bill Bryson was not really joking when he wrote that Americans will drive 60 miles for a taco.
For towing, 75% of truck owners claim to use this feature once a year or never.
More than 60% of truck owners use the bed to haul at least once per month; but it's difficult to determine the percentage who could have used a car instead. A small car can fit quite a few bags of soil in the trunk, for example.
I'm looking foward to the arrival later this month of my 280PS ""compact"" EV (Abarth 600E), which will be roughly as much power as every other car I've owned put together.
A huge fraction of the truck owners barely (if ever) haul anything, so that's not a dealbreaker for an EV truck.
It just has to look manly and rugged, any actual offroad or hauling capabilities are at best a nice-to-have.
> A truck that can't haul is just for show.
I borrow my brother’s truck all the time to transport various DIY supplies. I could probably get a roof rack for my car for things like plywood and drywall, but borrowing the truck is easier.
Edge Trucks starting next year
I think about this a lot
It looks so smol IRL
most people don’t use the capacity of the pickup trucks on the road today. I’m not going to tell people what to drive, but I know personally a smaller pickup with occasional bed use and better efficiency and parking the rest of the time would be an easy sell.
My '96 Toyota T100 is exactly that. I would never want to downgrade to a modern monster-pickup.
I don't really see the point of them. They can't carry anything, because the back is exposed.
> I don't really see the point of them.
Then you need to get our and do more real work of lots of different types. Exposed bed is often an advantage!
I have a welder, the safety instructions include "Never carry the gas tanks in an enclosed vehicle" -if there is a leak the gas tanks (nitrogen, argon, helium) can quickly displace the oxygen inside and I'll die before I know what happened.
Most things I carry don't need to be inside constantly. A little rain won't hurt anything, I wouldn't want to store anything outside but just a couple hours won't harm most things.
Also it is a lot easier to load things in a truck than a van. I can lift it over the sides (perhaps with a forklift). I can stand up in the back while arranging things - even when it is full I can stand upright.
I have used both trucks and vans to carry things over the years. Both are a compromise - and like all compromises there are negatives where something else would be better. Overall I fall on the truck is better side for what I do most often - but that is overall and I recognize there are good reasons some will choose something else.
Every Saturday I fill my truck bed with garbage cans and dump them at a transfer station across the highway from where I live. (We have no trash service in this rural area). I used to cram bags of trash into the back of my Honda CRV, which worked, but was often messy and stinky. You can hose out the back of a truck bed.
I used to think trucks were mostly useless, but have found that many people have weekly uses that make a lot of sense.
I do question the logic of lifting your truck so high you can't reach into the bed.
The rear being exposed makes them bad at carrying things that need to be inside, but it makes them good at carrying things that should be outside.
Also they are much easier to load items with heavy machinery.
Tonneau covers on the bed work well.
Not going to load manure into the back of a minivan.
Even a minivan wins in most categories, but they don't have the towing or hauling capabilities that live in the imaginations of many men.
I keep a minivan as a secondary vehicle / "work truck". It tows, I can fit 4x8 plywood or drywall sheets flat on the floor, and drive them around in the rain. Then put the seats back in and take 6 kids to a movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_truck
I live in a rural agricultural area and these are all over the place. Replacing crazy expensive side-by-sides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j76f6E0oOW4
I bought one in the US for $8k for hauling equipment around. I love it. 40mpg, gets the job done.
I’ve been seeing complaints on the internet about how all cars look the same nowadays. I think the cybertruck proves why. A lot of design has coalesced around the same thing, not just for cars but for websites and apps, logos, furniture, etc. because people like that stuff.
Something new and fresh can be accepted and loved, but it still needs to be familiar and somewhat iterative. A radical change like the cybertruck is hated for that reason. (People also hate it because of Elon, but they don’t hate the other Teslas nearly as much as they hate the cybertruck)
When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.
By the time of its delayed release, Musk had become deeply unpopular with many of that original coalition of fans and buyers, the truck was more expensive than originally promised, his new ‘base’ probably couldn’t afford to buy many of them, and it was structurally a fairly normal car underneath the steel panels. It also suffered plenty of embarrassing issues, which people were of course gleeful to publicise.
It could have been a cool funky status symbol, but Musk screwed it all up.
> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.
People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.
Not universally. Your tech office and online spaces may have disliked it, but I also saw a lot of excitement and positivity about it, both online and IRL.
From my memory, a lot of the excitement was directed at what the design was trying to achieve: a structural body made from easy to make pressed steel panels. This was meant to enable a much cheaper car while also removing the bottlenecks plagueing Tesla's production lines at the time
None of this materialized. The truck that ended up in production was a traditional body construction, but with unpainted steel panels so it looks like the truck Musk presented. It ended up with all the drawbacks of a steel body, while being expensive and hard to manufacture
Agreed. When it was first announced, I was kind of interested. I laughed at imagining it as a screenshot from an N64 game.
But it didn't live up to the selling points, it is very expensive, has design issues that weren't necessary for the aesthetic, and the company's owner turned out to be a really horrible person contributing meaningfully to changes in my country that are dangerous.
> Musk was still the darling of the left
I can assure you he was not.
The design isn't what led to its demise, the $80K-100K sticker price did.
I think a lot of the reason most cars look the same is they all have to pass similar pedestrian crash standards. Once you account for all of that, the basic shape of the vehicle is set and there is only so much unique styling you can attach.
Have you seen any of the videos where they push fake kids in front of Teslas versus other cars?
I don't think the safety argument holds up here when you're comparing Teslas with standard automobiles.
Agreed. That's why its a pickup truck, which I believe is exempted from a lot of those pedestrian protection standards in the US
People don't just hate it because it looks different. They hate it because it's ugly, unreliable, and a symbol of the modern idolatry of the billionaire class.
Exactly so.
It's a massive, gaudy symbol of unfathomable decadence, and every purchase was made to visibly support the passion project of the world's most influential white supremacist.
It's one thing for a vehicle to be "ugly," but this one stands for so much more.
There’s a school of thought that anything is better than blandly conformative design. In that school, the Cybertruck counts as progress.
To me, it’s more like answering a complaint about the blandness of pop music with electric bagpipes and nails on chalkboard: if you can’t be different and good, maybe don’t try so hard to be different.
I really thought it would have had a lot of potential for cheaper manufacturing. No paint process is huge. And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
The steel exoskeleton idea didn't survive to production. The production truck has a mix of aluminum castings and welded steel unibody, with the stainless panels just acting as the skin. Maybe they bring some structural rigidity, but not like the origami plan that was originally discussed.
The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.
It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.
It’s staggering how much money they wasted because Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts. It was years late because stainless steel is so much harder to work with, especially when it has so many complicated geometries, and every one of those delays was a chance for him to say “maybe the people I hired for their expertise know something I don’t” rather than “I’m the boss, make it work”.
They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
Part of the delay was also the 48V architecture. So in addition to the obvious new things like stainless steel panels they also had to redesign mundane parts like window motors and interior lighting. The Cybercab is also using a 48V architecture so even though they've never talked about it being an R&D platform maybe they'll retcon it that way.
That forces a redesign of all the car electronics. While it might well be a good idea anyway from an R&D point of view it's undeniably expensive.
(I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)
> They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
They could have Roadstered it.
Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter.
The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
Arguably the longest lived successful British vehicle, the Transit. https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/eur/en/articles/2025/transi...
Real experts said reusable rockets were impossible ...
Did they?
A real expert told Elon that self landing rockets were possible over chutes. The retconning to build the myth of Elon is ridiculous.
Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.
Yes. Is my comment ambiguous or something?
Seems to me like a sentence that's quite easy to understand.
Lots of false sentences are easy to understand.
No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).
Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.
Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.
So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.
Btw. the cybertruck he announced, never came.
> Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
How much money have Americans gifted NASA to pay Russia for launching payloads ton Soyuz rockets?
Do you frame all government funding as "gifting"?
> Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts
"real experts" are not always correct. A bet a lot of people told him that the original Teslas were a bad idea or SpaceX would never...wait for it...take off.
But sometimes people win when they push the boundary of what might work, push the problems to the surface and then solve them.
I don't like the guy but you can't really deny his ethusiasm and single-mindedness.
An engineers isn’t going to say “EVs will never work” or “reusable rockets are impossible”. They’d say things like “we’re really going to need to minimize weight and try to build better batteries to hit that range goal” or “it’s going to require a lot of money to do the R&D for reusable boosters, you need to land a NASA contract so we can afford dozens of tests”. Engineers express tradeoffs far more than absolutes.
Musk has enthusiasm, yes, but he’s let his luck at PayPal and successfully buying Tesla from the original founders go to his head. Nobody is right all of the time, and no serious project goes perfectly according to the original vision without adjustments. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an electric truck — companies with better engineering culture are making great ones — but the Cybertruck failed exactly the way everyone who isn’t a superfan expected: it’s designed in a way which guarantees high costs and it just doesn’t deliver corresponding benefits for most people. Diving into the culture wars against a large chunk of potential Tesla buyers was a bad idea but even if he hadn’t, there just aren’t that many people who have that kind of money to spend and the ones who do usually won’t accept so many limitations and flaws.
That’s a little bit revisionist. I don’t like Musk much either but to be fair:
- no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible. Sure, there may have been individuals, but it didn’t make it into corporate strategy or product delivery. The Model S plus the Supercharger network changed the face of the car industry.
- none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality. They had an infinite head start vs. SpaceX and failed to innovate. Even now, having their lunch money regularly stolen by SpaceX, where is the reusable competition?
> no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible
No executive in the established "expert" car companies had any reason to rock the boat. Establishing EVs as a credible alternative to ICEs required a build-out of charging infrastructure that none of them were willing to commit to. But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existed.
> none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality
All of them would have told you that there's nothing impossible about a reusable rocket, only that their customers were happily served by their current offerings. Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
The clever brains at JPL worked on self landing rockets before they went to spacex. Your tax dollars at work.
https://www.alphaxiv.org/@lars-blackmore
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Blackmore
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xZvK9z0AAAAJ&hl=en
It's not just high costs, its high costs that are only there to appease one man. The stainless steel sheets don't provide features that the average consumer even considers and has more than a few drawbacks
I can deny it because he overpromises on everything just like Elizabeth Holmes. Only difference in space isn’t something new the us government did it in 1960’s and didn’t destroy nearly as many rockets. Elon isn’t smart enough to try an interfere with production rockets. His distance from decision making is what made it a success.
You invented a fictional group of people, got mad at them, then declared what you imagined they did was wrong.
I want you to know that.
Musk came into Tesla as funding. People were trying to make the cars.
With regards to SpaceX, he was looking for people to build rockets to go to Mars. But no one wanted to sell to him. So he hired rocket scientists to build the rockets.
And yes, while there will always be some asshole who says "That won't work", there were plenty of ""real experts"" who were working at those companies.
And the "real experts" left us dependent on Russia for launching a couple capsules a year to the space station.
They could have done what Musk did with Falcon 9 in the 90's. Instead they chose to mess around more with solid fueled heavy lift vehicles, all the while proclaiming that they were the experts/science.
The fallacy you are committing here is making all the non-spacex experts a homogeneous straw people.
not always, but usually!
> "real experts" are not always correct
That's why you should always hire someone unqualified.
Found Elizabeth Holmes's alt.
(I don't necessarily disagree with you, but there's a difference between thinking outside the box and trying new ideas, and literally ignoring factual reality and repeated clear feedback from people who actually know what they're talking about.)
I mean once you buy the tooling, it’s still probably cheaper to produce stainless steel trucks than paint normal steel. I agree on everything else though
If that’s true it would only be the case if you could amortize that tooling across enough vehicles. Selling 10k-20k per year from a production line planned with a capacity of 125k per year won’t get you there.
Why?
Steel is heavy, you have to paint the frame anyway, people like cars with colors, the steel has to be maintained too (scratches etc.).
Not really. Stainless is expensive and brittle. It's a lot more work to form complex panels out of stainless, and then they're essentially scrap if there's even a tiny amount of damage. A small dent will start a crack.
At least it delivered on being bulletproof unless you shoot it.
It's 100% bulletproof except for the parts it's made out of.
Would be interesting to know how much the useless steel body detracts from the range compared to a lighter material.
Even more interesting would be how much the steel hurts the tons-to-orbit in the Starship.
Painted piece of plastic gonna be cheaper than sheet of stainless steel. Stainless is significantly more expensive than typical materials used on car, which would be normal steel or plastic depending on panel.
Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).
Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper
"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about
They developed, at great cost, the process used for the cars with the giga press and the plastic. It would've been a fine process for an inexpensive truck.
Speaking out of my ass here, but I would not be surprised if it's much cheaper to paint cheap stamped steel, compared to using more expensive stainless steel that's treated to remove all surface marring/scarring from the stamping process. Those panels don't come out all brushed from the metal presses...
Stainless steel is far harder to work than regular steel. There is no way that process was cheaper.
What happens if you scrape your fridge getting it into the kitchen?
You go to the DIY shop and buy a tin of white spray paint.
What happens if you scrape your brushed stainless fridge getting it into the kitchen?
Well, now you get to either live with it, or come up with some really clever ideas on polishing out the scratch and then sanding it back to disguise it with the rest of the surface which will never really look right.
Stainless would be standard on economy cars, and the Cybertruck would be painted so as not to look like a Ford Pinto.
Wait, not sure I understand you. Where are stainless panels used on economy cars?
Not sure I follow your ford pinto comment either.
If unpainted stainless were actually cheaper then it would be the standard on cheap cars.
I don't think the poor sales is primarily due to the cost - it's just a design with limited appeal.
The original design is what gave them millions of pre-orders, it was the reduction in range and increase in cost that made most people cancel those pre-orders.
A $100 fully refundable deposit is not a very high bar of commitment. I suspect many of those reservations were non-serious.
$100 is a fair chunk of money for the average person. I agree some preorders were probably half hearted, but the $100 commitment definitely weeded out some the jokers for sure.
$100 is a fair chunk of money for anyone who would have never been a buyer anyway.
$100 is also a trivial amount of money for a larper with half the budget required to complete the purchase. Or someone with plenty of money who just put in a reservation "just in case" they wanted one.
Thats not really fair, the $40k promised price is not that much higher than your average middle class car purchase. I think anyone willing to go to the site, sign up, and hand over $100 would be willing to to take on a payment plan for a $40k car.
The average buyer in the US can't afford a new car of any kind. The average car sale is a used car. Used cars outsell new cars 3 to 1. And the average used car sells for $27k.
Entertaining the idea of a new car purchase is an upper-middle class thing, and a fully-refundable $100 is impulse buy territory for most of them. Yes, many of them would have been capable of taking on a $40K purchase, but $100 is not a serious indicator that they were serious about doing it. People who have this money are doing relatively well and blow $100 on much more inane things that aren't refundable.
A traditional dealer would ask someone with much less money looking at a used Nissan Sentra to put down $500 to hold a car.
> $100 is not a serious indicator that they were serious about doing it
OK, but I think it is. So can we agree to disagree, is that ok with you that I have a differing opinion?
You are fully entitled to your opinion but the data shows very little overlap between the groups of people who buy new cars and the groups of people for which $100 is a significant amount of money.
If you want to hold reserve a damn Toyota the dealer is going to ask you to show up in person, put down $500-1000 and fill out a credit app.
Tesla knew the $100 reservation was too low to show serious commitment, and this was intentional for two reasons:
1. to float an interest free loan
2. to manipulate investors
> You are fully entitled to your opinion
Thanks very much, have a great day! (Didnt read anymore of the post as it was unnecessary)
I wonder how many people liked the design vs tolerated it? If Ford offered a cybertruck trim on the F-150 without changing the price would people buy it?
No doubt there is some demand for an "out there" design, but I'd have to guess that the projected $40K price was itself a large part of the attraction.
Possibly, but as it cost $100 to put down a deposit I would be surprised if that many people were willing to actually pay for something they only tolerated.
It was a refundable deposit (and small), so I wonder how many people were even that serious - no real commitment.
2019 USA annual car/pickup sales were ~17M. I find it very hard to believe that 10% (2M cybertruck pre-orders) of those purchasers were seriously interested in a cybertruck - it really is not a design made for mainstream tastes.
If you owned a company and announced a product that 2 million people went and paid you $100 each for to preorder it, Im pretty sure you would think differently.
The design looks much better rendered on screen than in real life.
I thought the early images looked amazing but I see them all the time in real life (a few people in my neighborhood own them) and they just look so stupid on the road.
Agreed, but this thread is duscussing the original popularity and whether Elon was wrong to believe it or not.
With false but great looking renders and false but great sounding promises, the hype and interest was real. It was only when the real product became apparent that it became a joke and interest was lost.
You would think maybe Musk would learn something about overpromising from this fiasco, but judging by things like DOGE I guess not!
A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper.
A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.
Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.
Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.
This idea was never going to work out. In my opinion Slate have got a far more sensible approach with their replaceable body panels.
I live in the UK so I'll likely never be able to get one, but I'd love a car I can just buy new panels for and wrap them with minimal tools.
Same. Initially I was optimistic about the Cybertruck because I though “flat metal panels and no paint is going to make both manufacturing and repairs so much easier and cheaper”.
Paint has been well studied. We know how to do it really cheap and automated these days. Cheap is relative. I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed. But on a scale of factory and for how long it will last, that's cheap.
Flat metal is more expensive than curved metal. Curved metal, you design the curves to help support the stress points: you can get by with thinner sheets. Flat metal requires thicker heavier more expensive sheets of sheet metal in order to be strong enough.
Curved metal also lets you design the whole thing to be more aerodynamic. which is an important consideration even with something as un-aerodynamic as a truck.
> I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed.
Painting cars really is a hugely optimised process that materially affects performance characteristics such as weight.
Its very difficult to appreciate just how many cars are made worldwide wide, but just think if a completely optimised fully robot optimised line cost a billion dollars, in only needs to process a few million cars to fully pay itself off. Just look at how much a “paint option” costs. Enough people paying for a premium colour would completely pay for the entire production painting line.
Painting cars is also a process that scales. If you want to do a great job on one car everything you need can be had for less than $3000 (inflatable spray booth, large air compressor, a paint gun, and lots of sand paper). A good job can be done for less (a cheap air compressor and paint outside can still get good results), and most people who want to paint a car already have most of the tools so the cost goes down. The above setup will also handle a small auto body shop that is painting a couple cars per month, and you can upgrade equipment as needed (I'd start with a spray building instead of an inflatable booth).
At the scale of Tesla the millions of dollars on a fully automated setup is cheap because amortize the cost of so many cars
Painting actually introduces some scaling issues in manufacturing. Any painting step prevents you from haphazardly mixing all the parts produced on a line. Most vehicles will have multiple lines that eventually converge across multiple suppliers. Painting forces you to either coordinate the production of each individual component so that they're all painted the correct color during final assembly (which becomes difficult if any parts fail QA), or buffer painted parts in a giant warehouse. There's other advantages to the warehouse, but I wouldn't call it cheap.
Very common to use a mix of both strategies in practice.
They built that truck backwards and upside down. The single-piece forged aluminum frame was basically impossible to repair and brittle. Typical truck frames flex, they're part of the suspension. For small accidents, the frame can be bent back. The CT would just crack, requiring extensive aluminum welding to fix which is waay harder than welding a steel frame.
I thought this is not relevant tbh.
Either you have a modern expensive car and insurance which knows how to handle it properly, or it doesn't matter anymore and you got to a cheap car doctor.
There were no flat panels. That was a sales pitch. In reality, a slight curve to a panel adds so much strength that it can be made considerably lighter/cheaper than a flat panel of sufficient strength. Flat panels also tend to dent inwards very easily, which is not a good look for a car. Then there is the issue of thermal expansion. A pre-bent bit of metal will expand in a predictable way. A dead-flat panel could buckle in multiple unexpected ways.
I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.
Repair will be easier and cheaper? :D
As the DeLorean community will tell you, repairing unfinished stainless steel to aesthetically pleasing levels is almost impossible.
Take a piece of tinfoil, crumple it, then try to uncrumple it to its factory finish.
Repairing painted bodywork is easy and cheap: hammer it to get a rough shape, apply fillers, then paint & polish to factory finish. Simple as.
how you repair steel panel and also make it look nice ?
...you don't. You replace it in whole. You can't use filler to mask small dents and paint over it, if you want it to look as before, you have to pretty much replace it.
A steel panel would we repairable with the same tools a curved panel is. You can pull out dents without filler - filler is for fiberglass.
I think they are mostly not doing paint going forward. CyberCab also doesn't use paint, but uses cheaper materials than stainless steel.
That original process was what should have led to lower prices. Instead, they couldn't do it and had to resort to gluing steel panels onto a body-on-frame design which is much more expensive. They still managed to keep it just as hideous, so kudos there I guess.
I doubt that replacing painted regular steel with fancy stainless steel is going to be cheap. Paint is expensive, but so is stainless steel. I also can't imagine the "origami" technique to be cheaper than stamping, the reason they suggested that is because their fancy stainless steel can't be stamped. And in the end, Tesla couldn't even do it, so they glued the parts on...
I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.
In that way the Slate pickup seems to be the truck Cybertruck promised to be
Slate hasn’t made a single delivery yet, so in that sense it’s definitely the truck Cybertruck promised to be.
> originally they were talking about
Elon talks about a lot of things. Consider if you might be part of the media ecosystem that enables that strategy.
They were also talking about how it could become a boat. All the hype in the world eventually has to meet reality.
Elon promised a lot but delivered almost nothing when it comes to the Cybertruck.
A “truck” that’s can’t haul, tow, or offroad is a very interesting product decision. Right up there with a two-person taxi.
It’s like they completely forgot the “what do people need” phase of product management.
Two-person taxi is actually reasonable for the modal journey, but absolutely doesn't cover all use cases or accessibility.
The cybertruck was an early example of what someone on bsky called the "everyone is twelve now" theory: it looks like it was drawn by a small boy's idea of "cool", with zero further thought.
There's a comparison that's been making the rounds on social media for a while.
In once panel, there's the Cybertruck whose owner bragged about it carrying a large round hay bale (weighs around 1,500lbs) with the suspension looking like it was about to die. Next to it is a shot of a circa-1980 Ford F250 carrying three of the same bales and sitting perfectly level. TBF, the F250 probably had air bags in the rear suspension, but still...
That thing is only a "truck" because they decided to call it that.
Even modern trucks have turned into giant "luxury" vehicles that can't haul much more than the smaller trucks of 30 years ago. For most trucks bought by families, the heaviest thing they lug around is cat litter.
Most people should just buy a sedan. :-/
Somehow everything turns into a misdirection with Elon, where failing to innovate yields ridiculous distractions. When the Cyberjunk was clearly a poor product, they pivoting to "doubling as a boat" and being bullet "proof". And also you can play shitty ports of video games, awkwardly, on your in-car screen.
At some point this gimmick misdirection nonsense has to stop working.
Oh look, if you have a transport-truck sized massive compressor in your garage and use 100kWh to spend a day filling a tank, your ComingSoonNow(TM wink) Roadster can do some silly stuff if you dedicate much of the interior to a giant explosion hazard.
I think they wanted to make SpaceX and Tesla somehow look "related".
Another prediction from the Simpsons comes true. The 1991 episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" where Homer designs a car with zero input from anybody besides himself. The result is an overpriced behemoth with random features nobody needs and nothing customers want (fuel efficiency, affordablility).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gRBDLE06qNY
Today, we'd called "founder mode".
There's a pattern here: when an Elon Project is successful, he jumps in with Elon innovations, like cyber truck. The next example that will follow this pattern is building a rocket that's too big for orbital payloads, but takes 22 refueling flights to get beyond orbit.
What do you mean too big for orbital payloads? Mass to low earth orbit is what matters, which starship is well optimized for. You could always put a tiny third stage on there to go places, but that is back to the apollo style yeeting a tiny amount of mass somewhere else and would not help with getting serious tonnage to the moon and mars
> Mass to low earth orbit is what matters
For a company, matching products and services to demand is what matters. Being able to get more mass into orbit only matters if enough people are willing to pay to get stuff there. The analogy is that jumbo jets exist, but almost no passenger flights bother with jumbo jets because it's not economical. Unlike with civilian aviation we have yet to observe a natural experiment which would allow us to place an economically practical ceiling on rocket payload size, but it very much still remains plausible that something Falcon 9-sized is actually the sweet spot, especially given that Starlink is the only commercial offering that's pushing the existing Falcon 9 capacity. And yes, this completely ignores any mention of going to the moon or Mars, because although there may be incentives to do so (e.g. scientific incentives, political incentives, philosophical incentives), there is no economic incentive other than getting some government contracts which will be just as short-lived as Apollo was once the public loses interest.
Starlink is SpaceX's biggest revenue stream by far, and they are retiring Falcon 9 and quitting the contract / launch market, so they are matching very well with their own product, which is what they actually care about?
> And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.
At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.
The original wasn't what shipped. From what I read the cheaper easier process wasn't, which isn't unusual.
It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.
Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
Cheap hackable electric work truck (I imagine chassis with basic cabin that you can expand in various ways, like the EU van options have like half a dozen chassis) would be great but it's not something Tesla ever wants to make
>Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
95% of their cars sold have been in the $30k to $60k range. They have long been the best bang for the buck electric car (in the US, since BYD isn’t allowed.
Isn't "hackable electric work truck" a bit of an oxymoron?
Just because the big batteries are so dangerous?
Who are their customer base? Musk seems to have decided to fire his actual customer base, but getting a new one more ideologically aligned with him hasn't quite worked out.
Based on my casual observation, middle school boys :)
I'm curious to see how the Slate trucks work out: https://www.slate.auto/en
https://www.xkcd.com/37/
I know its not fashionable to have such pesky concerns as priority in US, but pedestrian safety was simply non-present, hence it was banned all over Europe. Not missing it here, not missing that fugly ego whim of a sick man at all.
I kinda like that it existed. It was ridiculous, like a production concept car. I just saw one the other day with a pink wrap.
I don't understand why anyone ever bought one of these in the first place. Fads are a crazy thing.
The good: someone trying a radically new design. Polarizing like the Fiat Multipla or Pontiac Aztek or even the first Chrysler minivan, but credit for trying.
The bad: didn't seem to be very good as a truck (eg build quality). That would not have been too bad, but it's dangerous when the design already alienates some buyers. Carmaker need time to get it right and that needs sales.
The terrible: Elon torching his reputation in all sorts of ways and essentially insulting his past and future customer base. The politics, the bait and switch over features, etc etc. Eventually people tire of it.
It's tragic, because for better or worse Americans love their trucks, so the team that solves the electric transition is doing the world a huge favor.
While I will happily admit, the initial Multipla looks awful both inside and out to my sensibilities, I have to defend it vs the Cybertruck. Purely from the practicality standpoint, it was ingenious, having three seats front and back while being small, light and cheap solved a real need and I do still see quite a few, especially compared to other Fiats from that time, because of it. It also has what I feel is the most impactful facelift of any vehicle ever.
Had the Cybertruck brought forward the manufacturing innovations that were alleged to cause the weirdness in its design, I could draw the comparison with the Multipla, but as it stands, it has all the visual appeal of one, with none of the reasons for it. Can't comment on the Pontiac, have never seen one outside Breaking Bad.
I would have liked a 3-row SUV based on the Cybertruck; but the Cybertruck was just too expensive to be competitive. At least the Model Y's price dropped (right after I bought one) to something more reasonable.
What's most frustrating is that I had to trade in my Model 3 for a 3-row SUV, and Tesla just didn't have anything competitive in that segment.
I'm not a fan, but I was hopeful that the direct sales model would drive others to confront the dealership tax. Ford floated the idea with the Lightning, but faced a mutiny.
I am the exact target audience of their new Fathom, but I abandoned my preorder sign up process when I saw the phrase "dealerships set the final price".
48v and other tech lives on in Semi and Cab https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-cybercab-48v-system-4...
Wow, its real! I just looked it up on iPhone.
I legitimately would have bought it if they made it look more like a regular pickup truck, and if Elon didn't go full crazy.
I did buy a Model-Y shortly before his Trump endorsement, and then sold it for technical reasons.
On a cold January morning, I was pulling up to a stop-sign, didn't have any autopilot turned on, and the car accelerated.
I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car. They're honestly kind of dangerous vehicles. The average person can't handle the responsibility of a self-driving vehicle.
I told all of my friends and family that I would not recommend the vehicle yet to a non-technical person, even when I was myself driving it and loving it.
Setting your experience aside, my national transport agency in Denmark recently approved Tesla full self driving because the data confirmed that it’s safer than the average driver. I think it’s both true that these cars can fault, and that they’re safer on average than humans. To be clear, Denmark is not alone. Many European countries have approved it for the same reason, and many more are evaluating. Holland is the toughest to pass, and they passed.
I assume you meant full self driving supervised, not actual full self driving.
No points for the nomenclature. Tesla calls it “Full Self Driving,” but it is supervised.
"Safer than the average driver" is great if all the below-average drivers start buying Teslas. But if you're converting drivers on the other end of the spectrum then the roads become less safe overall.
Denmark compared FSD data to national incident rates for regular passenger vehicles. So it’s a true average across all passenger vehicles.
I wish someone who had access to the data would address this.
I do know that there is not much better than average driver! There is much worse than average: people who drive drunk, and a few other classes of people who shouldn't drive at all. However the vast majority are all about equal: in reasonable mental health and limited to the same eye and reaction times. A few people have and follow better training and so are slightly safer - but this is slight. Most people think they are better than average because they excuse their mistakes as a "one time mistake", while confusing "the other guy's" mistakes with the other guy must be a bad driver.
Why would you assume that the group of people would be anything other than the average driver?
That's if you ignore the ability to look everywhere all at once which even the best human driver has trouble doing.
It will be interesting to see if the substantial safety margin decreases as more people buy in.
Yeah same. It was too strange looking for me and Elon’s turn to the far right kind of ruined Tesla for me. I ended up getting a F-150 lightning instead and it’s been a great experience. Unfortunately they stopped making those too.
> I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car.
There's a shit ton of software between the gas pedal and the machinery of just about every car on the road today whether that be an ICE, hybrid, or EV. We're a long ways away from the go-go pedal directly pulling a cable opening the throttle plate.
Archive link
https://archive.is/Q8NSx
For posterity, the HN thread of the Cybertruck's announcement from 2019 (1765 points, 1943 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
The Cybertruck wasn't really designed as a volume item, it was designed as the testbed for Tesla's next gen tech (ethernet-based fieldbus, 48V tech). You can do only so much in the lab, and sometimes you have to push your tech into production to find the last few% of failures, which will cost you dearly if you actually put them into your volume sellers.
I mean it's probably not that comforting for owners to unknowingly have signed up for a beta test, but that was the plan for Tesla for a while with the Cybertruck.
This was also the reason for sloppy stuff like steel panels glued to the aluminium frame, and not following up on their initial promises - the car morphed from a serious project into a low volume testbed sometime during its production.
Tesla seems to be killing its non volume cars the S and X are dead as well, I've heard rumors the Model 3 might be on its way out.
but electric trucks are very successful in China. Why not in the rest of the market?
I think the cybertruck appeals to a very narrow market. It's too expensive for most people who just want a big vehicle to get groceries and run kids to around, and doesn't really have any qualities that make it useful for commercial use, outside of being a rolling billboard. Unless it just really appeals to you and you have cash to burn, I don't know why you'd buy a cybertruck over a Ram/Ford/GM. A RAM 1500 w/ etorque costs half a cyber truck and gets decent fuel mileage... If you need a work truck a RAM 3500 is cheaper and will reliably haul 30-40k loads 12 hours a day and the warranty isn't void the second your tires touch dirt.
It’s a status symbol masquerading as a utility vehicle.
And it failed at it too.
People who buy trucks as a status symbol want to be "tough". And Tesla clearly intended to appeal to "tough guys", it is big, powerful, and supposedly indestructible. Elon even twitted at some point that it would destroy the other car in a collision, a morally questionable comment, but the implications are clear, a though vehicle for people who don't give a fuck about others.
And then, they managed to break the unbreakable window during the presentation, followed by the rusty trucks, and most importantly, the whole fiasco with glued panels that came off. So, you market a tough vehicle, but it falls appart. Who is going to buy that?
also a status symbol inextricably linked to elon's "brand" which doesnt help
Aka 99% of trucks.
While we could quibble on the exact percentage, I think that's the point. Why spend $100K on an ugly status vehicle, when you could just get any half-ton pickup quad-cab short bed and prove to the world how big of a truck you have, but only spend $50-60K?!
The Cybertruck is weird and a "status" symbol, but most people want to fit in, but also have the "nicest" looking status symbol, so they convince themselves that "this particular truck" is really nice. (And also if I own it, it's clear I do lots of hard physical things.)
The Slate and Fathom are going to sell like hotcakes in the US.
I think the Fathom will outsell the Slate 10 to 1 despite costing more, because U.S. buyers have adapted to "luxury" in every trim level of vehicle. I mean, yes base level Corollas still sell quite well (but these days even those have features you dreamt about in a luxury sedan not too many decades ago.)
The Slate represents an ideology that combines the nostalgia of what trucks used to be (especially the Ford Ranger) with a modern EV powertrain, but most people don't actually want the stripped down basic vehicle, even if their eyes light up over the idea.
> The Slate represents an ideology that combines the nostalgia of what trucks used to be (especially the Ford Ranger) with a modern EV powertrain, but most people don't actually want the stripped down basic vehicle, even if their eyes light up over the idea.
I have debated this extensively with some friends. I *jumped* at the slate pre-order precisely because it doesn't have any 'luxury' trim options. I don't want to pay out the nose for a fancy infotainment system that will use the cheapest possible under powered electronics from a decade ago, run a 10 year old version of android that spies on me, gets no useful updates...etc.
I certainly have my biases but I suspect that most people only _tolerate_ most of the painpoints w/ the various 'luxury' items in their cars and if given the opportunity to start simple and upgrade they would.
> but most people don't actually want the stripped down basic vehicle
Perhaps. But if you put two options side-by-side and show people what they get at the two different price points, I'd bet that the ~30k slate compared to the ~ 50k typical new car price will get a decent chunk of people thinking about what _else_ they could do with 20k in savings.
Everything that's cheap will sell like hotcakes, but that doesn't mean the companies selling them will make much profit from them.
There is more than one definition of "very successful". Maximizing shareholder value isn't everything.
Maximizing shareholder value is not the most important consideration. The most important consideration is don't go bankrupt. Once you have a product that sells, you can start asking, well how can I maximize shareholder value? But you have to make those sales in the first place or you're going to go bankrupt and that is far worse for shareholders than not getting maximum value.
Successful companies well understand they don't know exactly what maximizing shareholder value requires. They are always making small experiments to see what really works in the market. Many of those they know will fail and in turn cost shareholder value because of a bad investment. But you have to try bad investments in order to find one that is good.
It’s also important to remember that while some people talk like there’s a legal responsibility to maximize shareholders value which forces businesses to make decisions focused on short-term profits, those people are simply wrong. There’s an extraordinary level of deference given to executive discretion which means it’s quite rare to see successful lawsuits for anything plausibly good-faith. For example, right now there’s a fad to lay people off but any business which chooses instead to invest in their capacity is unlikely to even be threatened with a shareholder lawsuit because no court in the country is going to say that “we are investing in long-term capacity” was clearly wrong.
Constant growth is capitalism and it's so damned flawed.
I wonder if anybody wrote about this problem, like, a century and a half ago.
High volume, low margin is a completely legit strategy.
That works for foodstuffs but not the manufacturing industry. Because you know people need to eat, always. They don't need a new truck all the time.
I have a slate preorder but it's a niche vehicle. It's a small 2 door 2wd pickup that can't meaningfully tow and has a 200 mi range.
It's not going to appeal to people who want a truck as a symptom of fragile insecurities around their masculinity and that's a biiiig part of the US truck market
I don't think this is a failure of electric trucks, it's a failure of this specific design.
Look at the F150 lightening to see the failure of electric trucks. Chevy, Dodge and Ford all have, and it shows. Chevy's electric Silverado has a lot more range because more people want a truck for towing than the 1% that hacker news claims, and so range became and issue. Ford and Dodge are instead looking at plug in hybrids for the future: use an engine when towing, and battery for acceleration and shorter trips.
Trucks are a status symbol in the USA. EVs were becoming acceptable in the mainstram, hence the initial surge in sales, but that has cooled off since 2024. Now very few outside of the big tech cities are spending money on EVs. Hence the fate of the electric F-150 as well.
That's electric semi trucks. The market for pickup trucks in general in China would be pretty small.
Cybertruck is only available in countries that don't want EVs.
The Cybertruck is not very good at being a truck, but it is very good at being a social signifier.
This isn't about the idea of electric trucks.
This is specifically about the Tesla Cybertruck, which has been shown to be fairly shoddy in construction AND is tied to a very, very divisive figure.
Overpriced, not good at being a truck, eDong, yep.
Because cybertruck is a bad truck.
It's also illegal to sell in EU because of how bad it is for pedestrian safety.
bad truck suggests it's bad at being truck not just... at everything related to transport
Most vehicles are used to get one person to and from work every day. There are a lot of people who don't have kids or only have one kids and so they don't need use passenger space or hauling capacity. The Cybertruck is aerodynamically terrible, but if people are not using it as a truck, well I guess it's transport that works for them.
However, people are talking about the same truck as if it is a truck. And it's a terrible truck for people who need a truck. On the other hand, a lot of other trucks are also terrible at being a truck for the people who need a truck. You have to go into the three-quarter ton or one-ton range to find a decent truck these days, even though a modern half-ton probably has more power and weight carrying capacity than a 30-year-old three-quarter ton truck. The way it's set up means it's not going to work as well as a truck. The 30-year-old truck is going to have a longer bed, which is something that someone who needs a truck is going to want in the truck.
Very frustrating that trucks have morphed into tank-like SUVs with small beds tacked on back. Expensive and has every fancy feature one could want ... except the thing that makes it a pick-up truck
As this is a thread of its discontinuation, might be worth looking at the thread of its announcement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
Haven’t explored it yet, but it might be interesting to see how the sentiment shifted.
I imagine we will see it reincarnated into a moon rover variant.
I love that they took a swing for the fences. Car makers are so fucking safe these days. Sadly it didn’t land, but it’s awesome that it exists. I think if it had used a more conventional design it would have done so much better. Owners report an incredible driving experience. I also think battery technology held it back. It was originally advertised as having much better towing range, and production came in very underwhelming. This made it much less appealing as a utility vehicle. It ended up being used for picking up groceries and this wasn’t broad enough a market.
Not every swing is a home run. You can win with a few home runs or a lot of singles.
The only guaranteed way to lose is if you stop swinging. And Tesla has stopped swinging. They haven't revealed a mass market consumer vehicle since 2019.
There is some incredible technology in the Cybercab that allows them to be built cheaply in high volume. Instead Ford looks like they are going to be the first Western consumer vehicle out of the gate with the unboxed production method with their Ford Fathom. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese are ahead here too.
Hasn’t Musk been clear that he’s abandoning traditional passenger vehicles? He’s retooling for Cybercab and Optimus. Model Y and 3 are selling too well to abandon but there won’t be new models. We’d be lucky for refreshes.
Agreed, I love to see long shots even if they don't land, and in this case the price/performance fundamentals were likely the biggest problem. The "limited TAM for a bold stand-out design" was probably another, but Elon also didn't do any favors by vigorously adopting the opposite politics of his customers at the same time he was trying to launch a bold/iconic design.
Was the unusual design a "swing at the fences" or was it just a vanity project?
I disagree. Teslas used to be nice designs and pleasant to see on the street. Cybertruck and Cybercab designs are an affront. Intentionally ugly. I’m glad we don’t see a lot of trucks on the street, and I despair at the thought of millions of Cybercabs about.
The 3/Y and the screens had lots of design and product innovations. Iterating on those lines would’ve been quite nice.
The Y redesign to adopt more of the "Cyber" ethos is such a mistake. It won't age well, but then again neither will the brand.
Agree. I'm still quite fond of my earlier Model Y design.
For better "swing for the fences", have a look at Renault.
It's not admirable to "swing for the fences" if you're holding the bat upside-down
Reading through some of the comments in this thread feels like being in the Twilight Zone. This is the company of a man who poured almost half a billion dollars into the US election to try to buy favor in Texas. He tried basically bribing voters in Wisconsin before. Weeks ago, he used Starlink for political retribution against Ukraine. He’s unelected, unaccountable and has repeatedly and brazenly tried to undermine US democracy and insert himself in international affairs.
And yet some of the comments talk about this like these cars exist in a vacuum, detached from the realities of the person behind them. Some of them even praise this hideous, low quality, overpriced, impractical abomination of a truck. Parts of the tech world really do live in a bubble.
This is the world that the Supreme Court dreamed up for us in their Citizen's United ruling. Now that money is equivalent to speech, we all have to carefully weigh if our purchases will be used against us in our political system.
To anyone who is/was a crusader against cancel culture, recognize the source of it. Become a crusader against Citizen's United instead. It would be a much more productive coalition.
Yeah I find myself in the same boat. I don't know if it's a thing with just Bay area tech folks or what.
(btw dope earthbound reference in your username if that's what it is)
Try leaving your bubble sometime, and live somewhere where people generally have good lives and don’t care about politics. Orange County, for me. Lots of teslas and cybertrucks everywhere, mostly owned by first generation immigrants who don’t care about the political noise, just want a practical electric car.
it sounds like the bubble is in Orange County. Not everyone is able to ignore the side effects of "political noise"
Ah yes when I want to escape my insular, ivory tower life, when I want to connect to common, everyday Americans, the first place that comes to mind is Orange County, CA. These salt of the earth people don’t worry about frivolous little concerns such as the cost of living. Unaffected by petty concerns, Joe Mainstreet of Orange County, CA looks at a line up of electric car options for him and his family, and every the pragmatist says “give me the $80k giant toe nail clipper”.
>Weeks ago, he used Starlink for political retribution against Ukraine. He’s unelected, unaccountable and has repeatedly and brazenly tried to undermine US democracy and insert himself in international affairs.
You are deeply, utterly misinformed and loudly ignorant.
Ukraine uses StarShield, which is owned/operated by the USGov. Starlink is a civilian service not for military use.
If you can't be bothered to perform a simple google search to educate yourself about basic matters such as this in a few seconds, why should anyone listen to any of your other (ridiculous) points?
We know. A lot of people want him dead. Let's talk about the car instead.
Behold the Toyota Hilux [1], a truck so reliable that it is the truck of choice in many developed nations and even less developed ones. It's so cheap and reliable it became the platform for a war [2]. It also has a truck bed equivalent to a Ford F150, a vehicle significantly larger. But you can't buy a new Hilux or equivalent in the US because cars younger than 25 years cannot legally be imported [3] (to stop grey imports on Mercedes in the 1980s, originally) and because of CAFE standards [4].
Electric vehicles obviously don't have the hurdle of meeting emissions standards so Tesla, or any other company really, had (and has) the opportunity to create a small, cheap, mass market utility truck that no gas-powered vehicle can compete with. This is what the Cybertruck should've been.
There have been breakdowns of the Cybertruck and it is such an incredibly bad design. Things like the weight of stainless steel panels but with an aluminum frame. Why is that a problem? Because aluminum is prone to catastrophic failure with the up and down motion of towing a heavy load than stainless steel simply isn't [5].
The rumor has been that the only thing propping up Cybertruck demand is Elon forcing his own companies like SpaceX to buy them [6]. Other than that, the Cybertruck became a weird political statement [7]. Those people are getting crucified on resale. It's even a trend on Tiktok and elsewhere to watch these trade in videos. People who paid $150k+ are getting <$70k less than 2 years later.
Anyway, I'm shocked no US manufacturer is tackling the EV small utility truck market. Yes there was the F150 Lightning but it's still too big (and thus expensive).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Hilux
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
[3]: https://www.octane-magazine.com/articles/features/usa-25-yea...
[4]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-how-regulations-accident...
[5]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nZcb9TTyneFbxiDav/the-giga-p...
[6]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/tesla-lea...
[7]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/12/tesla-...
> But you can't buy a new Hilux or equivalent in the US
A Tacoma is basically the US model of the Hilux.
The Tacoma is more like the modern Hilux. I should've been more specific. The 1980s and 1990s Hilux weighed in at 1000-1200kg. Now it's 1700-2100kg. It's a lot bigger truck. Those 1980s and 1990s trucks were indestructible and so easy to service.
Now I get why the gas powered Hilux has changed. Emissions standards have changed. Fuel efficiency is more important. Modern cars are full of computers and microcontrollers. But an EV is relatively simple. It's one of the big advantages. Yes you have an OS and it's not just turning the ignition but the drive system itself is fairly simple, the thing that turns battery power into movement (compared to ICEs). No moving parts (in the engine), basically.
You could absolutely make a small EV utility truck. Remember that part of the reason why people were excited about the Cybertruck when it was announced was the price point (~$35k). Of course it turned out to be 3 times that.
Look at what BYD is doing [1]. Now these are PHEVs rather than pure EVs. Other automakers are making smaller pure EV trucks.
[1]: https://www.carscoops.com/2025/12/byd-new-compact-pickup-pro...
https://www.slate.auto/ ?
Oh man, I was wondering if anyone was gonna bring up Slate.
I try not to get excited about stuff, but the idea of The Next Big Thing in Cars being a total lack of garbage nonsense screens and giving us back CRANK CRANK WINDOWS -- this is pure joy.
Wheels. Seats. Motor[1]. Box to keep rain off. Done.
Oh you attached a bed to that? Double awesome.
[1] Enough top end cruise speed for American interstates.
I mean as much as I love thd idea of actually doing something bonkers, the lack of sales seemed inevitable to most I assume, so that should come as no surprise. Should have stayed a concept car.
Like most things it came down to price most of all. Cars are way too expensive in North America.
Even if it was half the cost, say $40K rather than $80K, I think most people in the market for a vehicle would choose something else!
I wouldn’t be surprised if cost were the only reason its sales weren’t even lower. If it’s expensive it’s at least a plausible status symbol. At a reasonable price it’s just an incompetently designed utility vehicle.
My five year old nephew will be devastated.
My kid loves these things too and I have to keep the eye-rolling to myself.
Future collectible market will be willing to pay good money for these! Big future nostalgia factor amongst 3-9 yos.
Musk was a fool to mistake the hollering of a small group of enthusiasts for that of the truck-buying U.S. population. Nobody was actually wanting for the CyberTruck. He should've listened to his marketing people and not be guided by social media and his right-wing instinct.
Then again, he's a con-man who's now quietly distancing himself from CyberTruck ("I had nothing to do with it") and moving on to the next con-trick: the CyberCab.
Tons of people wanted (and still want) a CyberTruck, but at something like a $40k price point.
Those people are just as loud as others, but never actually buy, because a $40k CyberTruck never existed.
I would want one for $40k in Europe.
thank god that's not happening.
Well, if you're dreaming, instead of a cyber truck at 40K, wouldn't you want instead a Chauffeured Rolls-Royce and the Swedish bikini team to keep it maintained?
That depends.
When I want to go to the symphony I want a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. I don't care how it is maintained, that is the chauffeurs job. If I want to see under dressed girls I'll go to a strip club after if, or maybe hire an escort to sit next to me.
When I want a truck to "go mudding", the fun is driving it through the mud. Maybe my chauffeur is tows the truck to the mud pit, but I'm getting it stuck in the mud myself. Sometimes the local cheerleaders are holding a fund raiser and I'll pay them to clean the truck after I'm done.
When I want a truck because I need to haul things - I want to pay someone else to take care of it when I'm not around.
In reality I'm not rich enough for the above. I do a lot of maintenance myself because I can't afford to pay someone. I have one vehicle that is a bad compromise for everything because I can't afford more.
In reality I have moral objections to under dressed girls and so I'm not going to the strip club or hiring escorts. But if I was that type I wouldn't be paying them to maintain my car. I have had the cheerleaders clean my car while I watched, but I wasn't paying them to be "eye candy" even though I did enjoy looking, and the next week is was the boys wrestling team (which I don't enjoy looking at) that got paid just as much for the same job.
In reality I'd prefer public transportation, but that is a different story.
No, Id like a cyber truck with 500 mile range for $40k which also is a boat and is bulletproof, all as originally promised. That would be awesome. The product we got in reality is a terrible shadow of the original idea.
Small group of enthusiasts?
Tesla took over 2 million preorders for the Cybertruck before they closed the program due to high demand.
And sold 70,000 total. The fact that ~96.5% (likely more) of preorders were cancelled should tell you all you need to know about popularity.
I was replying to the parent comment where they said:
> Musk was a fool to mistake the hollering of a small group of enthusiasts for that of the truck-buying U.S. population. Nobody was actually wanting for the CyberTruck. He should've listened to his marketing people and not be guided by social media and his right-wing instinct.
It wasnt social media and his 'right wing instinct' whatever that is. It was massive amounts of paid pre-orders feeding their opinions that it was going to be popular.
EDIT: Oh I see you have edited your comment since I wrote mine. The massive amounts of pre order cancellation came after it was released, so how does that factor into their initial opinions that it would be popular during development?
Based on the lie about how much it would cost, how many they could produce, and how soon they would be delivered...
Even very ugly cars will sell if they give you a really good deal for the money. The Cybertruck at $39,999 was a shockingly good deal. It was just a lie.
No one is arguing that, but in turn you cant argue there was real buzz and popularity of the product on announcement. Whether that was caused by a lie or not is irrelevant, it was popular big time before anyone knew what the real product was going to be like.
That would have been antithetical to his existence.
I’m sure we can trust a sharp business man like Musk to learn from his mistakes and come up with better ideas
Btw have you seen the roadster??
This ugly piece of shit doesn't belong on the roads.
It's a little extreme to want to deny Elon a driver's license over his looks...
Im curious about the timing of this announcement.
On the surface, it seems to take the wind out of their sails.
They told us the cybertruck was awesome.
They told us flying cars soon.
Now we see the fate of the first promise.
I would have delayed this announcement for as long as possible after the flying car show from a PR perspective.
Which makes me think this announcement is throwing a bone to the financial bean counters ahead of the potential merger with SpaceX.
Cleaning the companies books of fat before the big game.
They have also renamed the 'Full Auto Driving' feature to 'Driving Assist'.
Literally nothing Tesla promised is coming true.
It's called Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD) and that is an accurate name given it controls every aspect of the vehicle's operation, only requiring the driver to pay attention as a supervisor. And, essentially, the same software and hardware available on a Model 3 and Model Y is present on the CyberCabs that are driving people around a few cities, now, without input mechanisms. Elon is a PoS, and it took a decade longer than he said, but the cars are driving themselves.
> It's called Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD)
Not anymore, now its "Assisted Driving"
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
It's Tesla Assisted Driving in Europe. In the US, it's still FSD.
Yes thankyou for confirming my point. How did I know you would come and be pedantic about it?
I live in Europe, and here its not called Full Self Driving because regulators disagree with you that the car is driving itself. Therefore your original statement of "It's called Supervised Full Self Driving (FSD) and that is an accurate name given it controls every aspect of the vehicle's operation" is not true here at all.
If the US is happy with Elon lying about his cars abilities then thats on them. Not surprising really judging by the mess that is the USA in recent years.
European regulation is a joke, that why they are failing, look at the riots in France, businesses strangled by regulation.
> businesses strangled by regulation
Trumps current mess with huge increases of cost of living, and subsequent popularity decline is an example of what happens when you let business run free.
This isn’t news to anyone following the business. I’m pretty sure it was announced months ago that model X and Cybertruck (and maybe Model S too) were being discontinued.
And Model 3 and Y have always been 95%+ of the cars Tesla delivered.
It was also mentioned in the Roadster presentation that the Roadster would be the only nonautonomous car produced by Tesla long-term.
Not everyone may have seen Robby Roadster's famous presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/31x-4YJUBNE
*flying car shaped air tank and thrusters
Ugliest car ever screaming insecure and politically controversial owner who can't shut his mouth, what could go wrong
Good riddance from the taped on glued on pump and dump scheme for fElon.
I recently had a Tesla service call at my house (routine maintenance for my Y). He showed up in a darkly wrapped Cybertruck. It didn’t occur to me that they’re just dogfooding their own vehicles to use them up.
Hilarious but a logical end state option for them.
The cybertruck was announced like a bad meme and now dies as one too. What we see is the logical and long overdue conclusion of a story that lasted longer than it should have.
Good riddance.
Someone knows the government infinite money machine, which Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City, and many other Musk companies took advantage of, is about to get cut off.
What government money do you think Tesla gets? Consumer tax credits went away a long time ago, and that benefit went to customers, not Tesla.
A government credit still means Tesla gets paid the full price from a sale. So yes, Tesla got government money.
But yes, those credits have been vanishing for a while.
side-topic: why trucks are so popular (especially USA)? Is it all in the fake testosterone virtue signalling and pretending to be hard working country people?
To me trucks are the most useless type of vehicle apart from niche utilitarian cases in farming or construction. Super heavy, gas guzzling, open bed, compromised handling, pedestrian crushing death machine.
If you want big family hauler, grocery getter: mini-vans, wagons.
If you are in trades: van, box truck or flatbed box truck (where bed is useful shape and size, and all sides can be removed if needed).
No, you don't need 3 tonne vehicle with bajillion horsepower as a daily, because you may need to pull a trailer with your inflatable dinghy once in a two years.
If you want truck adjacent vehicle, get Toyota 4runner or Highlander. Humongous cars, vast and closed cargo space. It will pull a trailer, it will haul all your stuff and family.
Because vehicles are a compromise. A truck can do everything a sedan can. A sedan cannot do everything a truck can. A flatbed truck can do more than a smaller truck - but it also is bigger and not easy to drive because of the size. The costs to own extra vehicles is very high and so people won't own different a vehicle for each use (renting is not a good answer - too often I've gone to rent something and it was sold out. Also most rentals have restrictions on use)
> To me trucks are the most useless type of vehicle apart from niche utilitarian cases in farming or construction. Super heavy, gas guzzling, open bed, compromised handling, pedestrian crushing death machine. If you want big family hauler, grocery getter: mini-vans, wagons.
Minivans and trucks get similar fuel mileage. For the average family there are not enough kids to need a minivan.
> If you are in trades: van, box truck or flatbed box truck (where bed is useful shape and size, and all sides can be removed if needed).
Obviously you are not in the trades and don't know anyone in them. I've heard plenty of people in the trades debate the merits of truck vs van. They are compromises and there is no clear winner.
> you don't need 3 tonne vehicle with bajillion horsepower as a daily, because you may need to pull a trailer with your inflatable dinghy once in a two years.
If I need to tow something even once every two years then I need to own a truck. I've tried to rent a truck to tow something - turns out most rental contracts don't allow towing. There are exceptions, but the cost is so high, and finding a place to rent is so inconvenient that I will just own my own truck instead - it is worth it.
I wasn't pro truck until I lived on an island with limited infrastructure. Once you need to take care of some of your own infra, a truck is a great tool, beating your full list. That said, a beater truck is generally preferred -- you want reliable, cheap and something that you don't care if it gets banged up.
Not a “truck guy” but I have a cybertruck because it’s the only self-driving electric car that has enough room to carry my family’s stuff when we go to the lake, ocean, camping, etc. My ideal car is a van or large SUV but there aren’t electric self-driving versions of those yet.
The Delorean of our times…
They are probably the ugliest vehicles ever produced. They're an eyesore. Good riddance.
Yeah the Roadster is never getting mass produced …
Also i wonder whether in 5-7 years Model 3 and Y will be around
Isn’t the Model Y consistently leading the sales charts? I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. The Model 3 is also selling reasonably well.
Car companies have long been on a cycle for their vehicles. It varies but generally we could say every seven years they're going to do a major redesign of a car. So I think it's safe to say the Model Y and Model 3 won't be sold in seven years. The question is, in seven years, will they have a different model, loosely based on the current Model Y and Model 3, that carry those same names? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Tesla goes bankrupt and the cars aren't for sale. Maybe Tesla continues and the names exist.
They may try a bigger refresh than they did at the six year point, but I imagine they will keep the model names in any case.
But with such strong sales, the incentive is not to rock the boat. Incumbents refresh more often because they have a lot of competition.
Tesla does not have any meaningful competition for the Model Y. The closest competitor is the Ford MME, and just behind it the Ioniq 5. But Tesla still sells like 3-4x as many Model Ys as both of those combined.
The Model 3 has even less direct competition. But that's probably because the sedan market as a whole is not as strong as crossovers. The biggest competitor to the Model 3 is probably the Model Y. And to put some context on this -- even as a sedan, the Model 3 outsells the Subaru Outback. Anybody wondering whether Subaru will stop selling Outbacks?
Following the DeLorean example in more than just body surfaces.
I just imagine what an incredible success Tesla would have had just making a "boring" Tesla branded competition to the F150. "Just" a model 3 with a standard pickup body.
Americans, for whatever reason, only buy SUVs and trucks. They've left the whole truck market untapped by creating a vehicle only a very small niche could/would want.
I don't understand what product marketing was up to, or if they just completely lacked the spine to stand up to Elon.
I can't help but laugh at the number of people on HN that kept trying to convince everyone this wasn't a terrible product.
The original promise wasnt terrible. The reality was!
I'm actually talking about the people defending the reality of what was released.
...and Im replying saying the original promise was good. Its a shame it wasnt kept otherwise what you are saying might not be true.
... in order to free up production capacity for the Cybercab.
Hah, feels like when someone says they're going to stop dating the unemployed slob to focus on dating the alcoholic.
A taxi with only 2 doors, what an improvement!
The Zeekr with sliding doors that Waymo is using seems like a way better concept for a robotaxi. Still fits in a standard parking space but can carry a group at need without being terribly inefficient for a single person.
how come waymo can buy Chinese cars but i cant?
How many billions do your close friends and family have?
Seems like that might have something to do with it.
Without a steering wheel which guarantees it won't be road legal in most countries anytime soon.
A people mover that moves the minimum of people (2)
> A people mover that moves the minimum of people (2)
You meant maximum? Though minimum would be fun, too: taxi won’t start unless you agree to socialize and chat with a random stranger. As soon as silence is detected it pulls over and the ride ends.
Minimum to qualify as "people" rather than "person".
Ah yes. That makes sense now. But I guess the minimum of people for taxis would be one in general. A small taxi for one person is plausible. Zero won’t work as it would be a delivery vehicle only then.
90% of taxi rides are 1 person 95% 2 so its based on, you know, business intelligence rather than your hot take which is anti Elon rhetoric like most of this thread or any for that matter here (keep thinking this is reddit)
Reminder that the INFINITELY MORE PRACTICAL Model S and X lines died for this boondoggle. Still upset over that one.
Thank goodness. What an eyesore. Of course, it does have the instrumental benefit of acting as a shibboleth.
As a small-business utility vehicle designed specifically to be wrapped in advertising, I thought it was brilliant. For other uses, eh.
Outside of certain kinds of construction contractors, I rarely if ever see pickup trucks used for this purpose.
This anecdote might indicate why: We recently had a bunch of work done on our house. The siding crew had a pickup truck, and every morning the very first thing they did was unload the entire contents of the truck into our back yard. The plumbers and electricians would just get the stuff they were actually using and then lock the van.
A ford Transit van fits that requirement much better - much more useful as a utility vehicle, much more space for advertising, much cheaper...
Surprise: a car that can only be legally sold and used on mainstream roads in the US makes poor sales, even in the US, after its design was widely ridiculed.
The Model 3 was a masterpiece of design, the Cybertruck is more like Cybercuck.
"Oh, no! Anyway..."
They are not selling in USA. Chinese are buying the Chinese made ones..
https://evwire.com/etrucks/market-share
This seems to be about a totally different class of trucks.
> Zero-emission trucks over 12 t ·
(Cybertruck is still in the <3.5t class afaik)
> Zero-emission Class 7–8 trucks
These seem to be the classical cargo carrying trucks, not the pickup trucks.
These aren't pickup trucks.
No mention of Tesla on that page?
Even if one assumes all tesla trucks.. share of electric trucks in USA is 0.3%.
Tesla cyber truck sales are going down from 38k a year to 20k a year. The Chinese net sales of electric trucks is massively more than Tesla's production if you look at the data that I posted.
https://www.centraloregondaily.com/news/consumer/tesla-to-pu...
Original announcement by Elon: https://xnotme.com/elonmusk/status/2118591788701421573#m
Not worth clicking.
No added information, with a thread full of ad hominem attacks
The Cybertruck is today’s DeLorean
However, if it showed up in a movie as a supposed “cool car” it wouldn’t be taken seriously
The DeLorean wasn't taken seriously when Back to the Future was released either... it looks like a cool car now, mostly because of the movie, but back then it was considered a joke of a car and the company went bankrupt less than two years after it began production.
Yeah I could totally see a similar trajectory for the cybertruck. I think it will be more popular in its death than it was in its life. Every elementary aged boy I know thinks it's really cool.
The Cybertruck will never be looked back on as a cool car, since it's existence is inextricably linked to doomed social and political movements. Like the ideology it represents, it's presence is impossible to ignore, but in the worst way possible. Plus it's a shitty truck.
It can never shake the "Ugh, get a load of this guy" factor.
The owner has not (yet) been arrested for cocaine trafficking, though.
(The history of John DeLorean is quite the read!)
The DeLorean was yesterday's Tucker Torpedo.
Yusssss!