It's pretty perfect as a 2nd family car (and I may buy it for exactly that) but yeah, it's a tough sell for a primary car with that range. Assuming they manage to meet their sales expectations and stay in business, I bet it'll improve rapidly over the next couple of model years.
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.
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 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 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 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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
(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
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 then the roads become less safe overall.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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 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 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.
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.
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. Is was massive amounts of paid pre-orders feeding their opinions that it was going to be popular.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ok ok, i get the message- never try anything new, never follow your passion! you all took the easy bet and now you’re gloating. look at all the comments and ask if you’re adding to the conversation?
recognize that your subjective tastes are not universal.
recognize that, like one decent commentator mentioned, no paint is genuinely good in many regards.
recognize the cybercab is probably already good enough and is rapidly getting better.
some minor panels were glued on the cybertruck while while most were not- be fair.
let me repeat, be fair!
There was nothing "new" in cybertruck. Delorean had bare metal panels!
It wasn't a good truck, vehicle, EV, anything. It was Elon's crayon drawing turned car. That's not "innovation" we should applaud
It was the first fully drive-by-wire production car, and it was the first car with steerable rear wheels. That's an innovation, on one of the worst vehicle of all time.
Not even close - there are probably at least a dozen 4 wheel steering cars going back to the mid 80's starting with things like Nissan Skyline, Honda Prelude, etc.
Rear wheel steering has been pioneered long before the Cybertruck. Tesla hyped the feature, sure, and it worked really well with steer-by-wire. But they were far from the first.
This isn't really true either, there have been a few production steer by wire cars before and quite a lot more with steerable rear wheels - there were Porsches with rear steerable wheels in the 1980s.
Oh, what could have been. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tesla-electric-pickup-truck-...
I want an electric El Camino.
Who wouldn't?
Edge Trucks starting next year
Could be: https://www.slate.auto/en
If their range was better this would be my next vehicle purchase…
It's pretty perfect as a 2nd family car (and I may buy it for exactly that) but yeah, it's a tough sell for a primary car with that range. Assuming they manage to meet their sales expectations and stay in business, I bet it'll improve rapidly over the next couple of model years.
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.
I don't really see the point of them. They can't carry anything, because the back is exposed.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_truck
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 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.
You should watch this video - aero dominates vs weight (factors very little), especially with strong regen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmKf8smvGsA
[delayed]
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
not always, but usually!
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.)
> "real experts" are not always correct
That's why you should always hire someone unqualified.
Real experts said reusable rockets were impossible ...
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
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.
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.
At least it delivered on being bulletproof unless you shoot it.
It's 100% bulletproof except for the parts it's made out of.
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 if 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In that way the Slate pickup seems to be the truck Cybertruck promised to be
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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
Isn't "hackable electric work truck" a bit of an oxymoron?
Just because the big batteries are so dangerous?
>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'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 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.
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 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 then the roads become less safe overall.
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.
but electric trucks are very successful in China. Why not in the rest of the market?
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.
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?
Aka 99% of trucks.
also a status symbol inextricably linked to elon's "brand" which doesnt help
The Slate and Fathom are going to sell like hotcakes in the US.
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.
High volume, low margin is a completely legit strategy.
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
Because cybertruck is a bad truck.
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
Cybertruck is only available in countries that don't want EVs.
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.
For posterity, the HN thread of the Cybertruck's announcement from 2019 (1765 points, 1943 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
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 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-...
https://www.slate.auto/ ?
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.
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.
The DeLorean was yesterday's Tucker Torpedo.
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.
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% 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. Is was massive amounts of paid pre-orders feeding their opinions that it was going to be popular.
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??
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.
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...
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.
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
They are probably the ugliest vehicles ever produced. They're an eyesore. Good riddance.
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.
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.
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
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.
Following the DeLorean example in more than just body surfaces.
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.
Thank goodness. What an eyesore. Of course, it does have the instrumental benefit of acting as a shibboleth.
... 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.
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.
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..."
ok ok, i get the message- never try anything new, never follow your passion! you all took the easy bet and now you’re gloating. look at all the comments and ask if you’re adding to the conversation? recognize that your subjective tastes are not universal. recognize that, like one decent commentator mentioned, no paint is genuinely good in many regards. recognize the cybercab is probably already good enough and is rapidly getting better. some minor panels were glued on the cybertruck while while most were not- be fair. let me repeat, be fair!
found the cybertruck buyer lmao.
There was nothing "new" in cybertruck. Delorean had bare metal panels! It wasn't a good truck, vehicle, EV, anything. It was Elon's crayon drawing turned car. That's not "innovation" we should applaud
It was the first fully drive-by-wire production car, and it was the first car with steerable rear wheels. That's an innovation, on one of the worst vehicle of all time.
> it was the first car with steerable rear wheels
Not even close - there are probably at least a dozen 4 wheel steering cars going back to the mid 80's starting with things like Nissan Skyline, Honda Prelude, etc.
Rear wheel steering has been pioneered long before the Cybertruck. Tesla hyped the feature, sure, and it worked really well with steer-by-wire. But they were far from the first.
I am pretty sure that I have seen cars with steerable rear wheels already a half of century ago, when I was a child.
However, I do not know if any of those was series-produced.
They may have been only demonstration prototypes.
This isn't really true either, there have been a few production steer by wire cars before and quite a lot more with steerable rear wheels - there were Porsches with rear steerable wheels in the 1980s.
Yusssss!