The weird thing I’ve seen is in almost all the online forums I visit, like Reddit, YouTube comment sections, parts of twitter, hacker news, the cybertruck is universally panned. Yet when I drove a cybertruck, the number of onlookers who approached me inquiring about the car with excitement is unmatched with even a Lamborghini that I once rented. Shows how much of a bubble the internet alone is. MKBHD got the ratio’s right in his review, 75% of all approaching population are excited about the car and when asked to guess its price, they all wildly overestimate it, guessing close to a million than a 100k. This car is probably a hit, it would be a bigger hit if it were a gas car, it’s low range and really low range when towing make it impractical for any actual truck work.
The thing is, the people most likely to complain that the Cybertruck is a bad vehicle are the people who are informed about it. The wider public doesn't know about things like the tonneau cover leaking, wheel bearings failing, the suspension being stuck down and causing tire rub, the aerodynamic wheel covers that were causing tire failures because they were puncturing the sidewalls, the upper control arms that bend like an empty aluminum can, the door edges that will cut your finger off, the tailgate that will also cut your finger off, the fact that it's got even worse sight lines than the Hummer H1, or that the bed effectively loses twenty percent of it's space because of the backwards angled bulkhead where the bed and the cab meet.
Someone who is an enthusiast will most likely know about those things because they were widely reported in the automotive news sphere, and thus they will have a much higher chance of being against the Cybertruck. The wider public doesn't know, and so the novelty factor draws them in.
I think a simpler explanation is that terminally online people just don't like the politics of the CEO and like to take any chance to dunk on him.
In a world that has been stagnant for decades in terms of design and doing things out the box, it's something at least trying to be different. Don't get all the hate
People were dunking on the Cybertruck before Musk made that sharp turn into a political lightning rod around when COVID hit. I recall seeing discussion about how silly the car is, even during the height of his popularity.
I think that no matter who makes an off-road vehicle that rusts when wet, people that are aware of that issue (there's many more, that's just the first one that comes to mind) are going to cast shade on the product.
What's your definition of a car person? I don't care for the guy, but having multiple modified super cars and building several custom trucks in the past -- he seems like a car [truck] person to me?
I prefer Sarah-n-tuned but something tells me that folks who want to purity test folks on if they are a “car person” or not will really dislike the idea of a trans female appearing person knowing more about cars than 99% of the “car people” of YouTube.
It feels a lot like rotten tomatoes adience vs critic rating deviations. Here, just like there, the critic scores are irrelevant because they arent the buyer
Elon Musk made it too easy to dunk on him with the CyberTruck, similar to the last Tesla event, it was kinda hilarious how bad that was, even if you agree with his political ideas, I don't know how you would have a different opinion about it.
A goal not some metric that has to be met. It’s a goal, an aspiration to do something, not a deadline.
Most businesses ran by people who use goals as deadlines fail horridly.
This is one thing many of the major companies that are ultra successful have in common. They are ran by people who set goals, failed to meet the goal - and continued to move forward.
It's always about making impossible promises and talking about the future they hope to achieve, not things that will be available soon. Also, much of the talk made little sense, such as "individualized mass transit", it doesn't seem to solve any problem they were talking about.
Also, the robots that are controlled remotely by humans without disclosuring it is hilarious.
Elon Musk should dump Trump, support Kamala, perma-ban the right-wing and whoever the White House wants from Twitter. Then his popularity on HN will increase by 100x and HN commenters will start loving the Cybertrucks and start (re)liking X.
> tonneau cover leaking, wheel bearings failing, the suspension being stuck down and causing tire rub, the aerodynamic wheel covers that were causing tire failures because they were puncturing the sidewalls
I think unless you're the kind of person who specifically spends time online looking for reasons not to buy a Cybertruck, you probably wouldn't know _any_ of that.
Savage Geese, The Autopian, The Drive, Road & Track, and Motor Trend all individually reported on some or all of these issues. The tonneau cover leaks became a meme that people reposted on places like TikTok and Instagram. It's not those terminally online, it's that in the first year of the Cybertruck's release a bunch of outlets were documenting it because it brings in readers.
As someone who doesn’t own a car, every single time the cyber truck shows up 50-90% of the info is about these issues. Why would you trust individuals who already bought one more than auto reviewers?
I think most of these people don't notice because they aren't pushing it. They're using it like most people use an SUV these days--as a normal car on roads and highways without any cargo. It's an overpriced status symbol to them.
But I don't see it a whole lot worse than a forum of users listing all the problem they without having any kind of statistic on exactly how frequent these issues are, per vehicle, per mile driven etc.
People who have problems with their cybertruck will go and post about it. Understandably, they are also frustrated, the posts sound angry, and then any journalist can repost/compile all those to make it sound like these are just dumpster fires on wheels. But just as in the lottery case, we never get to hear from every loser, only from the winners; here we don't get to hear from the "winners", only the "losers".
I mean they may well be dumpster fires on wheels but without solid statistics it's hard to be sure exactly so any kind of story can be made up about it.
Agreed! More objectively I’m pretttty sure Cybertruck has had an abnormal number of recalls since its introduction, but yeah: we need statistics to make any confident claims.
I'm sure they do have sufficient data to answer this question, but it's not in what you linked and I'm not going to be diving in to do the analysis myself.
The temporal component doesn't matter at all, the point is that an individual's experience is pretty meaningless when trying to understand statistical phenomena. Which is why we invented statistics and do things like "collect data"
I... Don't know how. The wheel cover issue had a service bulletin sent out to owners, and the suspension being stuck in the lowest position got an over the air update with a big notification. Those at least should've been known to you.
No, it’s a thread about car sales and cybertrucks position in that list.
Also, I’m sure we are all familiar with the value of anecdotal evidence vs data, the response of “I’m a ____ and I don’t _____” is limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate
The value of anecdotal reports that "I experienced ______ failure" is similarly limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate,
but somehow they're taken as gospel.
The problem with Teslas almost universally is with lemons. Which is to say if you get lucky your experience will be great. The problem is that there are a fuck ton of lemons and cars that have no problems turn into lemons right around the time that the first few problems show up (which means more lemons as they age).
That's essentially just a QA and reliability design failure which is indicative of broader issues with Tesla but it also means that until someone's vehicle starts having problems they will have nothing but a positive experience which can leave them blindsided by said problems.
Some markets could have more lemons that other. An insurance adjuster tell me that most of his interventions with towed Teslas were for cars refusing to start by electric issues and that a lot of the Teslas seen by him were second hand vehicles imported from other countries. The guy disliked the brand a lot. I assume that those weren't the best models if the first owner get rid of them.
For a number of years, a friend of mine has had a '99 Plymouth Prowler. If I were to base car popularity based solely on people coming up to ask about the car, his would win hands down and you'd assume (naturally) that Plymouth just couldn't manufacture enough to keep up with demand. There's a huge difference between attention-grabbing looks to a vehicle that will have people stop you and ask about it and what people will actually buy when it comes time to buy their next car. It's tempting to point to its position as #3 overall as an overwhelming success but the EV market is comparatively small still so I'm not sure it's useful to put much stock in it.
In terms of the negativity, I'd say that unlike other cars of similar design (like the Aztek) -- a way higher percentage of the panning I see online is about it not living up to its promised capabilities. There's loads of videos of Cybertrucks needing to be towed out of bad spots by other trucks, problems even when it isn't stuck because of how little its frame flexes, the additional torque wearing away tread on the tires much faster, etc. Some of those things can be engineered around and I'm sure Tesla engineers are working on it.
I'd hazard a guess that the market share the Cybertruck is taking isn't any existing trucks but rather more "luxury-class" SUVs like Mercedes, Land Rover, and BMW.
> For a number of years, a friend of mine has had a '99 Plymouth Prowler. If I were to base car popularity based solely on people coming up to ask about the car, his would win hands down and you'd assume (naturally) that Plymouth just couldn't manufacture enough to keep up with demand. There's a huge difference between attention-grabbing looks to a vehicle that will have people stop you and ask about it and what people will actually buy when it comes time to buy their next car.
You should give sashank_1509 enough credit to be able to distinguish between the jokey/mocking questions your friend's Prowler gets, and the enthusiastic ones he reports receiving.
>It's tempting to point to its position as #3 overall as an overwhelming success
There is no other way to spin a $100K car being the #3 overall EV vehicle of any type other than a success, especially given that a) #1 and #2 are also Tesla vehicles, and b) one of them was the world's best-selling car of any kind, EV or not, in 2023.
I doubt the prowler was getting mocking comments… they are a cool looking unique vehicle. People didn’t buy many for the same reason most people don’t buy an actual 1930s roadster they’re based on: they’re expensive and impractical- even as a sports car you can get a Porsche for much less money that will outperform it and can still fit a bag of groceries.
People keep assuming China is only successful because they're dumping, and miss the elephant in the room: China went all-in on EVs over a decade ago, while we were fucking about with hybrids and maybe-just-stick-with-ICE. They have world-class batteries and insatiable domestic demand and it's been that way since before Tesla, what if China is undercutting us because their cars are just better?
In that case our tarrifs are just protectionism, is what.
>They have world-class batteries and insatiable domestic demand
Excellent, then they won't have an issue with losing their export markets to tariffs, because they can just sell their EVs to the "insatiable demand" of the local consumers.
>what if China is undercutting us because their cars are just better
Price/performance they ARE better, China can produce cheaper because of their years of (government aided) investments and economies of scale. Of course, we aren't obligated to buy from belligerent states engaging in strategic mercantilism producing the goods of the future. We aren't obligated to prop up the Chinese export-oriented economic model in pursuit of one generation of cheap EV cars.
> excellent, then they won't have an issue with losing their export markets to tariffs, because they can just sell their EVs to the "insatiable demand" of the local consumers.
that’s what happened but the point in discussion here is why Tesla does not have competition in the US and the answer is simple
The answer above was apparently 'protectionism'. If we're only putting tariffs on EV cars from one country, then how is protectionism the simple answer?
Indeed, plenty of countries engage in a bit of strategic development. Plenty of countries aren't belligerent communists though. Communism brings the state direction of industry to another level and with Xi as the new leader for life means they'll be extra implacable.
Idk. I’d imagine it has more to do with the preorders and how they can stuff shipments.
I got to drive one… it’s an objectively terrible car. I would imagine that as the look gets let’s novel that attention will wane quickly. When they get the inevitable prominent pedestrian collision on video, it has Pinto potential.
It’s weird because the last “new” Tesla was the Model Y I think, and that is an incredibly well thought out car — probably the 2020s equivalent of the 1980s Taurus or Camry.
That's my thought too. Cybertruck had an enormous number of preorders and apparently lots of them are backing out rather than taking delivery, but those that do take delivery still mean that Tesla can deliver cybertrucks as fast as they can produce them until the backlog is gone.
It was pretty hilarious to watch some toolbag driving a Cybertruck around Santana Row (a fake-fancy outdoor mall made to look like a European downtown area out here in Silicon Valley) blasting music at all the people trying to enjoy dinner outdoors. I was there picking something up and he was doing laps around the place from before I got there until after I left, a good 30+ minutes, just driving around in circles desperately trying to get attention.
To be fair, it’s very typical to hear people revving up their crappy SRT Chargers or sport bikes constantly there all day and night. I’m not sure who’d be interested in the extremely-overpriced apartments that they have, given the noise and lack of proximity to anything else outside of the malls there. I believe there used to be Cars and Coffee events hosted there but I’ve heard they got kicked out due to too many incidents of bad behavior.
Is there some tax data about the amount of Clean Vehicle/CA and Federal EV credits issued for Cybertruck?
The income cap on getting the clean vehicle rebates is $135k ($200k joint filers). And I'm not sure about the federal rebates. Tesla doesn't offer 0% financing, current Cybertruck APR deal is reported to be 5.29% for up to 72 months. So I don't see how someone with the income under the rebate cutoff can afford that $100k car or the financing option. The delta between the number of rebates (Federal EV vs Clean Vehicle/CA) may allow to estimate, how many of these are corporate (pre-income tax + rebate?) purchases.
And these "Cox Automotive estimates", are these reliable numbers that had been confirmed by Tesla earnings, or it is a "best guess by influencers" type of information?
One fun loophole to get the tax credit is through a lease. A lot of leasing companies pass the full credit on as a straight deduction on the capitalized cost, and you can stack that with other incentives. Lucid had some really ridiculous deal going that was supposedly leasing the >$100k sticker Air GT for $849/mo : https://www.autoblog.com/news/2024-lucid-air-available-from-...
I looked into that and there was exactly one vehicle available and it was something like $7500 due at signing to get that $849/mo payment, IIRC on a 36-mo term, so really it’s more like ~$1058/mo, which makes more sense.
Still a lot of discounts on EVs if you know where to look. Definitely lease; these will depreciate like bricks after the batteries get used up and are down below 70% capacity. I’m not sure how financing companies are doing the math but their expected values at the end of lease terms feel wildly optimistic. My guess is some degree of mfg incentives to push EVs combined with models that took too much pandemic pricing into account for used vehicles. If you can get a good money factor on the lease, go for it.
Yup, I leased the new Honda with a trade incentive for $250/mo. When you net out the gas savings, it’s like $190/mo. Ended up getting about $2500 more for my 10 year old trade than Carvana.
The business model is weird, it’s almost like you’re capitalizing the cost of gas, except the gas tank leaks after a few years.
I figure they’ll either deal on a buyout at the end of the lease, I’ll turn it in, or gas prices will go nuts and I’ll be able to flip the car. My brother did that with a Volt - bought it for $18k pre-pandemic sold for $23k in 2021!
Cox Automotive is one of the biggest auto conglomerates for remarketing/etc. Autotrader, Manheim, cox rail, and a bunch of other fingers in the pie. They get a lot of data for both new and used vehicle sales as a result.
Kind of. They're what I would call a ute. They're still car based vehicles with beds. But that doesn't mean they can't do 90% of what the average person uses a truck for. They just aren't as stout as a body on frame truck and won't take as much abuse. But use them for their intended purpose and they'll do just fine.
Unibody car is misleading because the materials are very different. I don’t think it is comparable to either a body on frame construction or the type of unibody a typical sedan or crossover has.
similar things were said about the Honda Ridgeline and the Chevrolet Avalanche; they ended up having the same long-tern issues that they were predicted to have; torn mounting points and reduced repair-ability when the inevitable occurs.
>similar things were said about the Honda Ridgeline and the Chevrolet Avalanche; they ended up having the same long-tern issues that they were predicted to have; torn mounting points and reduced repair-ability when the inevitable occurs.
The fact that you think the Chevy Avalanche[1] has unibody problems says everything I need to know about your opinion
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with unibody construction for a vehicle like this some work vans have been that way basically forever (though it makes me want to go postal when the OEMs graft a really shitty frame onto the back of a unibody van and call it a "cab and chassis").
"Yet when I drove a cybertruck, the number of onlookers who approached me inquiring about the car with excitement is unmatched with even a Lamborghini that I once rented".
Your sampling method is flawed. Only Cybertruck fans are approaching you. Most people aren't going to come up and tell you they think your car is ugly.
TBF when I got a Mach E and they were still really new I did get a bunch of onlookers come up just to complain to me about how Ford is destroying the Mustang name and EVs are actually way worse for the environment than ICE cars and that I should be ashamed of myself for buying into the globalist lies and it's just a symbol of everything in the world going to hell. Happened about half a dozen times or so.
I did also get many positive interactions when it was new as well. But boy did those random negative encounters stick out!
Right, it’s kind of known as the incel mobile I think by most people. In the same way when you see a MAGA hat on the street, you already know a lot about the person before they a a single word and you do your best to avoid them but other people with MAGA hats will give each other the wink and nod.
In my experience that’s the closest thing I could describe to the cyber truck experience and how most people look at it.
They know exactly what it is when they see it even if they don’t have a word for it. We could call it the loser mobile if it makes things clearer I guess.
But honestly, I don’t know what point you’re trying to make here but I’m not talking about language, I’m talking about the reaction people have when they see people in cyber trucks.
People are much more likely to approach you to say something positive than to say something negative.
There’s almost no precedent for a “hit” vehicle at that price point. Toyota stopped selling real Landcruisers in the US because Americans won’t pay that much for something with a Toyota Badge (hence the current real Landcruiser is sold as a Lexus in very low volume).
Tesla are claiming a hit after making people wait 5 years for a vehicle they couldn’t see and then shipping preorders. The preorders have been massively less than they claimed and now the vehicle is with people it is being shown to be of low quality and low capability. Unable to manage tasks Subarus and much cheaper vehicles can.
The proof of its success will be in the coming year. Now buyers are walking in to buy a real vehicle at a real price. The current owners bought a paper spec sheet at a fantasy price and are a self selecting group happy to pay 2-3x over what they were promised.
For the longest time, the Lx variant of the Land Cruiser was cheaper than the Land Cruiser in used markets because average car buyers don’t know that the LX is a Land Cruiser with leather.
There are tons of deals like this in the car world. While peons paid insane markups on the RAV4 prime, intelligent people were getting the Lexus variant for MSRP and they had an actually good interior on top of it!!!
I actually saw one in person for the first time a couple days ago. I had a great laugh at the owner's expense. He could better serve his desperate need for attention at a fraction of the price by hosting a block party or driving a 70s F150 or similar (aka an actual truck). Unlike many folks who think these things are trash I'm delighted they're on the market. Characterless voids trying to trowel over their emptiness with expensive consumer goods should absolutely be able to advertise loudly as a warning to the rest of us. Imagine what would have been possible if they'd spent that money on a combination of therapy and developing actual interests.
CT driver here. I didn't even get one for the attention. I thought it was cool-looking, useful, and could make for a good family car. I was right!
I'm an introvert so the constant attention (almost all positive, even in the Seattle area, surprisingly) was definitely an adjustment for me. Trust me, I'd be perfectly fine without the constant attention but people just keep giving it! Now I actually kind of enjoy it. My son waves at people from the back seat, I get asked questions by curious people all the time, and I get the occasional thumbs up randomly.
I'm quite certain there's a contingent that are salving their egos with some flavor of narrative around that idea. Thing is I'm reminded of a particular gaping chasm of a human being that used to work for Epic Games. Around the time Gears of War bonus checks started dropping he flipped out and bought a Lamborghini. Shortly after taking delivery he was overheard complaining loudly about not being able to "pull" at the local club and expressing frustration that the car wasn't getting him enough attention. He decided having the car painted radium green would fix everything. We can, of course, pretend folks like him aren't common as grass but then you're stuck having to explain away things like the Hummer H2, or the rando on here that was bragging about dropping five figures on overpriced kitchen appliances until someone pointed out he could have gotten an actual restaurant walk-in for an order of magnitude less...
I think the truck is like dating an exciting but shallow person who doesn't care about you.
The truck is extremely fast, with excellent steering, suspension and lots of other groundbreaking technology.
But it is basically user-hostile. No dashboard, no stalks for turn signals or gear selection, and everything is on the central touchscreen. And that is super cluttered and impossible to do important things without looking away from your driving and jabbing at a moving touch point.
It makes you a worse driver, and you're spending 100k.
Honestly, give it a dashboard. Add stalks for turn signals, wiper, headlight, gear selection. Give it a few dedicated buttons for things you need to reach by touch (defrost, mute/volume, internal/external lights) and lots of animosity would go away. Make it an option for $5k! people will pay.
EDIT: they are learning. The wrapped black ones don't look terrible.
If you drive the weenermobile you'll get a similar reaction, but it doesn't mean people want to buy it. It's an oddity, a curiosity they're excited to see in person.
Years ago I got a rental that was some new hideous looking 4-door Fiat model. Maybe a 500L or something. They were taking off the plastic wrap when I got it.
It was a week of beating off people approaching me and asking about it. It looked weird, I thought people wanted to beat me up but they were genuinely curious about it.
That some weird truck with a formerly 3 year waiting list is at the top of the charts a couple months into shipping should be surprising? Wait a year. Nobody is looking at the 500L now.
I went through this with my Model 3 back in 2018, when they were still rare in my area. Random people would approach me in super market parking lots, everyone at my gym wanted a ride in it. Now it's like driving a Toyota or a BMW, there are tons on the road and nobody bats an eyelid.
People used to do the same thing to me after we bought one of the first Nissan Leafs. So much that a friend expressed displeasure with going with me to pick up food because he knew we would very likely be delayed by someone asking about the car.
I agree... I also think that for people with specific use cases, the rapid depreciation means that there are great deals available for used LEAFs. I wouldn't buy one new now.
PT Cruiser and New Beetle were also incredible attention-getters when new and eventual unexciting flops. The new VW ID Buzz van will be the same due to the subpar mileage. What good is a road trip car that you must stop to charge every 200 miles?
Some pickup truck work is high mileage, but a surprising amount of it is low mileage. It varies a lot, there are lots of trucks that do less than 100 miles a day.
Work trucks are also usually much more predictable than consumer vehicles. Most of them do the same thing every day. The predictability should make buying an EV easier.
That's true of the range, but the Cybertruck is also terrible in terms of torque, horsepower, and suspension compared to the Rivian truck or the F150 Lightning. Those EV trucks are very practical. The Cybertruck, not so much. As others in this comment section have pointed out, it's more of a luxury SUV than anything else.
Are you talking about the debunking videos that highlight that the Cybertruck only beat the Porsche in the 1/8 mile and not the whole quarter mile? And that Cybertruck is still basically a 10 second truck?
It's honestly a absurd and funny to me how fast the truck is. It's like seeing an elephant fly. It's even funnier to see people get angry at it.
I definitely don't like marketing and ads, but that's literally how all ads work. It doesn't debunk some of the insane performance characteristics.
> Are you talking about the debunking videos that highlight that the Cybertruck only beat the Porsche in the 1/8 mile
No, I'm talking about the debunking videos and articles that show:
"We ran six quarter-mile drag races, and each one had the same outcome: The Porsche 911 Carrera T wins and the Tesla Cybertruck Beast loses... it’s not a particularly close race, either."
Re the 1/8: "We can say confidently that Tesla didn’t show the Porsche 911 Carrera T’s quickest possible run. In four out of six MotorTrend drag races, the Porsche 911 Carrera T beat the Cybertruck to the eighth-mile mark."
"The manual-transmission Carrera T has a 3,500-rpm limiter at standstill, and on a sticky, prepped drag strip, launching quickly requires getting off the line without letting the revs fall. Drop the clutch too fast, and the engine will bog, falling out of its powerband. It takes a slow, carefully modulated clutch release to get the perfect launch, which keeps the engine on boil and extracts a small amount of slip from the tires."
I'm sure Tesla was quite eager to make sure that they launched the Porsche optimally.
Yes. I get it. EVs have amazing acceleration. My brother in law has worked for, and owned, both Teslas and Rivians, so I'm no stranger to this.
But this was just another Tesla self-congratulatory event that needed "simulation" and "we didn't actually do it but we think it would go this way" puffery.
Hilarious that they used the base 911 as well, the one with slightly less horsepower than a BMW 340i. We’re talking Golf-R-with-a-chip-tune / stage 2 WRX levels of power here. Not exactly impressive in terms of actual sports cars.
Then you get to lateral grip and uhh, yeah 0.76G is worse than the average minivan.
911s are not designed for drag, especially the base model. If they wanted to compare it to something that’s good in a straight line but no good in corners, a Dodge Demon 170 stickers for under $100k. Comparable horsepower, too.
The F-150 is the most sold car in the US. How many of those ever see any “real truck work” versus driving from the suburbs to the grocery store or the office ? Probably less than 10%?
And the ones that do are white only, single cab full beds with no options. The fleet / contractor special. A Cybertruck is not that and was never meant to be.
> MKBHD got the ratio’s right in his review, 75% of all approaching population are excited about the car and when asked to guess its price, they all wildly overestimate it, guessing close to a million than a 100k
This has to be hyperbole. There are many in the middle class areas I spend a lot of time in, and even $100K cars are a rarity here. No-one is thinking "oh, wow, sure are a lot of people who just bought million dollar cars, here where the median home price is $500-600K!"
The only good thing about the CyberTruck is the steer-by-wire system. It makes steering suck in all other cars. But every other aspect of the thing is a complete failure. Selling a car with such terrible terrible visibility should not be legal.
And yet, trucks and SUVs are the best-selling cars in the US, and have been for a long time. There is a weird loophole for fuel efficiency in mileage standards for large vehicles, but obviously that doesn’t apply to the Cybertruck. There is definitely some psychological appeal to having a very dominant-looking vehicle.
So just as a business move, the Cybertruck makes sense. But there’s more overlap with Musk’s politics than you might think.
I read a book a long time ago by this very weird product marketer Clotaire Rapaille, who, several decades ago, was trying to convince executives to put a gun mount on an SUV. His argument was his research showed that the people who loved big cars saw the world as dangerous, and had fantasies of cutting through the hordes with a powerful vehicle. Rapaille’s methods are somewhere between the usual consumer panel interviews and guided meditation, so it’s hardly scientific, maybe more like poetry, but I found it compelling.
Musk actually tried to demonstrate the Cybertruck’s resistance to guns and sledgehammers. Its actual durability is, I gather, more debatable, but he was definitely trying to reach people’s darkest fears and impulses.
I can understand being curious about it since it is one of the most unusual looking vehicles. But, I mean, I saw one on Main Street recently and it was ugly as heck. I'd be curious about it too, without ever having any wish to buy one.
There is an anti-musk campaign on-going and anything Musk does is being criticized. That being said, from my Youtube observations it seems that the biggest issue is the build quality. They clearly rushed this through.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see this thing in small alleys and especially with the crazy speeds you can accelerate with. But it's definitively an interesting model.
I feel Tesla is a US bubble. Despite all the disproportionate media this brand and it’s CEO gets, in my country I haven’t even seen one in the street yet, but I see EV Volvo, Renault, Fiat, BYD, GWM and others daily.
The DeLorean DMC-12 is the car guy version of "never meet your heroes." So fucking cool, absolutely iconic design, and genuinely one of the worst cars ever manufactured. Criminally under-powered, no power steering, the only part of the window that would open was the part inside the plastic frame of it, issues with overheating, 0-60 in about 2 years, and the transmission was an utterly garbage Lotus one that was chosen because it was the only one that would fit in the frame.
Honestly one of my lottery dreams would be buying a DMC-12 and converting it to electric.
I've not driven a DMC-12, but lack of power steering doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me? All the vehicles I've driven without power steering have been ok; usually the steering wheel is much larger to give you the leverage you need; it's not as bad as you'd think if you've used a car with inoperative power steering.
But yeah, I had a nice conversation with a guy who kitted his out as a movie replica at a outdoor showing of the film. He said it was fun to go to events, but it's terrible as a car. And some of the parts are unobtanium, like the flux capacitor. Not that that's unique for cars in that era, try finding a federal EGR filter for an early Vanagon; just gotta hack around it.
The only car I've driven without power steering was my grandma's 1996 Fleetwood, and I recall turning that absolute aircraft carrier felt like I was trying to close a door on the Red October. Maybe others feel better, I'm honestly not sure.
I'd be surprised if a 1996 Cadillac was available without power steering? That's a big luxury car, and not having power steering doesn't feel very luxurious. I see there is a power steering pump on parts searches, but reviews don't mention it, and the steering wheel in pictures doesn't look too big.
If the power steering on that was inoperative (maybe the pump died or the fluid level was empty, etc), I'm sure it would be a beast to turn in a parking lot though.
I also fell for this online bashing of the cybertruck. And since I had a model S but skipped the model 3 for a taycan and was aware of the poor quality of the model 3, I thought it made sense.
However if people are buying the cybertruck despite all its faults, then I'm glad to be proven wrong.
I feel this is also selection bias. People approaching owners in public are unlikely to be aware of what an engineering disaster the thing is, what with all the issues with quality control, slow delivery, and very slow repairs/maintenance from Tesla, or the funnier stories where owners have had their trucks brick entirely due to getting the thing washed, whereas in the comment sections you're referencing, those topics are usually the topic of conversation. And, I mean, even if the people approaching owners do know about that stuff... I dunno, I find it hard to picture myself walking up to a complete stranger and shit-talking their new toy to their face. And not just because I'm a nice person, but because too many people in this country are emotionally unstable and armed, and as funny as I think Cybertrucks and their owners are, I'm not prepared to get killed for a joke.
And to put this even further: most people even in America are not "car people" and therefore don't know shit about cars, where they come from, what goes into them, etc. My parents are great examples of this. They've owned something like 4 of the 10 worst cars of the new millennium list put out by Forbes, but like, an awful car in 2024 is still generally fine for an undemanding casual user. Sure, people buy tons of trucks here, but the vast majority of them aren't used for anything more strenuous than hauling a dozen bags of fertilizer, and my Corvette can handle that. A Cybertruck is a terrible truck, but most people don't do truck shit with the trucks they buy, and it's a perfectly middle-of-the-road SUEV. I think it's a bad option if that's what you're after, chiefly because you're gonna spend a LOT of money on tires you don't really need to, and the panels aren't aligned right, and if anything goes wrong with it you're liable to spend months playing vehicular ping-pong with your Tesla dealership, and it's (IMO) ugly as sin... but you do you. Assuming it doesn't have some kind of catastrophic failure that an unfortunate number do, you'll probably have a fine experience.
The videos of it struggling to move in snow and "bravely" fording a creek of 5 inch deep water are funny as hell to see, because it's shocking what Cybertruck owners think "hard going" in a truck is. They'd probably lose their minds seeing some of what I've seen modified trucks crawl up, through, and across in the course of off-road competition if they think driving through a fast stream makes the Cybertruck a feat of engineering, but again, most people who buy these things aren't driving through a blizzard at 90mph to get medicine to the good children of the village so they live to see Santa come Christmas morning. They're going across town to the Good Denny's, or to the local mall for shopping, or to their kids soccer game. And on that journey, a Cybertruck and virtually any vehicle you can buy new right now, will suffice. Just don't get it wet.
There was a Cybertruck at the Paris Games Week (there was a Tesla corner in the con for some reason). That was my first time seeing one in person.
The most striking thing was how tall it was. Half the kids attending the PGW were smaller than its front bumper. I hope these things never, ever get allowed in France.
Not just Merica. People prioritize flashing their status via a large, expensive impractical cars than the greater good everywhere. Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
The market share for American car brands remains relatively low, typically below 5% in Europe. Notable American manufacturers like Ford and Tesla have struggled to capture a substantial portion of the European market compared to their Asian and European counterparts
Ford has gone pretty much entirely native in Europe. though. Their line up for decades has been pretty indistinguishable from German or French carmakers.
Their European division was a bit similar to what GM/Opel had going.
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
Not in the part of Europe I'm in. I can't recall the last time I've seen an American car here in the streets of Vienna. Also: Don't large American SUVs consume a lot of petrol? Considering the gas prices I'd assume not many people can/want to afford them.
Don't change the meaning please. Obvious not teeming like in the US but the traditional European family station wagon is being replaced by large SUVs everywhere in Europe.
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
If they were truly “flying off the shelves,” I’d expect the frequency to be so obvious that it would be unmistakable. So I’m asking you to support your claim with data or at least more detailed anecdotes. Which city? Which models?
That’s strange since the Cybertruck doesn’t meet European regulations (at the very least UN-R26) due to pedestrian safety. Not sure if there is a workaround if someone imports it as their personal vehicle though.
Obviously it's legal to own and display road-illegal vehicles. Just think about open-wheel racing, including go-karts. Just can't drive them on the road. The truck will have been transported inside a bigger truck or on top of a car transporter.
Perhaps there's some sort of exception if it's just for exhibition? If there wasn't, I suppose it would be difficult to have things like museums, auto shows, etc
There is an exemption for formal road legality for vehicle development and sales in all countries I've been working in with vehicle development and testing.
It’s not strictly about height, that is only one of the factors. Modern cars usually have pedestrian safety systems that the cybertruck does not have by design.
What are these? Have you seen a hummer or a ford F2 or f350? What about a Lexus LS or GX? Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator?
What about a Camry other than its size specifically is for pedestrians when hit?
Then we have the smart car. A small bubble designed to not crush. Fairly sure if that thing hits somebody they are not going to be “gee I am glad that the car makers made this car so safe for me being hit by it”
I can think very hard what a car would look like that would be pedestrian safe, and what features it would have. And none of any cars today look like they would be safe.
As for features for safety only one comes in mind, automatic breaking for pedestrians.
As for the cyber truck. The bend up front looks a lot more safe than most of the other pointy cars.
A hood low enough to throw the pedestrian over the car. Enough space under the hood to allow enough deformation to prevent serious head injury (main reason the pedestrian is killed as I remember). Hood "airbags" that lift the hood up, adding even more space to decelerate the pedestrian (as I remember, this was optional but available to car manufacturers).
Normally new cars should come with emergency braking. As I remember, emergency braking is the only new technology to challenge the seat belt in efficiency. All the other safety features are almost marginal on how effective they are.
I don't know if the cybertruck has it, but I think the EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking.
> EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking
Emergency breaking system have been a mandatory assistance system for a while now (afaik it was introduced mid 2022). Admittedly, I don’t know how efficient they actually are in preventing injuries from pedestrians.
I just know that from my experience driving with these systems, they occasionally do seem not quite there. I’ve had my car warn me from hitting a guy that was happily walking on the sidewalk but completely ignore people taking a pedestrian crossing (maybe because I was already breaking myself).
So yeah, tech is great and all. But having design considerations as a completely passive system like your front bumper breaking off on colission still seems essential
TL;DR it’s about being low enough to not smack people of different heights in the head and cause massive acceleration of their brains against their skulls. Same with internal organs, and for legs it’s more about having some of that energy transferred into rotational energy, then having a soft-enough bumper and hood to again minimize acceleration forces and energy transfer.
There are also airbag-based solutions where it either inflates under the hood to give some cushion for the hit person to decelerate more gradually before stopping against something less forgiving, or kinda like a giant couch / Wacky Races cartoon catcher’s mitt inflating on the hood and front of the vehicle before they’re actually hit.
I just wish that the US would stop allowing people to build and operate killdozer pickups with bumpers well above where other vehicle bumpers are. When those crash into other vehicles, the other vehicle ends up with a differential, tires, and probably skid plates smacking into their vehicle, which it’s not designed to handle. Combined with how larger tires require more braking power to slow at the same rate, plus modified suspension geometry, higher CG, increased weight, and decreased driver intelligence, it makes for a much more dangerous vehicle for others to be around. Why do we continue to allow this, just like all the obnoxious modified exhausts and ECU tunes that massively increase the pollution being put out by one vehicle so they can feed their egos and intimidate other road users?
Stuff like this has no legitimate purpose off-road and no business being operated on public highways: https://www.tiktok.com/@leanqueen6.7 but it’s become some idiotic macho culture thing.
Interesting about height and fatality risk: (from the article)
> a 10cm increase in the front-end height of a vehicle led to a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk, most strongly affecting the survival chances of women, children, and older people.
Even if it were allowed on the roads of France, with its 4 tons, you would have to pass the specific driver license C1 [1], because over the 3.5 tons limit of a classical driver license B. More than that, the C1 must be renewed every 5 years at least.
It's basically the same size as an F-150. It has a crumple zone although it probabl only activates for hard car collisions. I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150. Which is not good at all, but it is still a bit pretentious to paint it as a horribly dangerous car when there is no evidence that it is worse than one of the most common cars in the US.
> I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150
Serious question: have you looked? Or is there any special reason you imagine that if such evidence existed, you would have seen it?
I say this because I spent 10-15 minutes looking for information and gave up because I’m not sure of any tests which I could use to compare the two, or any testing bodies that focus on pedestrian safety. If that information exists, I’d be interested to see a side by side comparison.
I originally thought that the nhtsa would perform some tests of this kind but I was disappointed to find out that this doesn't seem to be the case. Most focus on pedestrian safety seems to be on automatic emergency braking and other ADAS systems. In this regard I claim that by default one should expect the Cybertruck to be at least decent. Not the best but surely not terrible.
While the shape of the hood and the visibility obviously matter of course it seems to be the case that such evaluations are basically done by eyeballing it. Pedestrian dummy crash tests with collection of force data etc. seem to not at all be standard. Which sucks, but it again shows that the Cybertruck is not an outlier on some well-established metric.
I predict if after some years a statistical analysis is done on pedestrian crashes by car model the Cybertruck will just be some kind of average. It has decent AEB and it is a new car driven by young people. Would other cars have caused less injury in the crashes that do occur? Probably. To a degree that it justifies calling it a pedestrian killer? I doubt it.
I like the idea that it is “pretentious” to predict — without evidence as you’ve pointed out — that getting hit by a 6,600+lb vehicle is bad but it is not pretentious to confidently predict without evidence that getting hit by a 6,600+lb car is the same as getting hit by a different vehicle that is one to two thousand pounds lighter.
See, my concern here is that I feel very skeptical about my instincts on this. I suspect both cars are bad, but if the Cybertruck is (for example) twice as bad as a the F-150, would I know what that would look like? I doubt it.
Up until you’re sticking Mad Max type spikes on the front, I am not sure that I’d be able to say with confidence anything other than “I think probably trucks with high bonnets are worse for pedestrians than sedans with low bonnets”.
But as you say, there’s also a bunch of interesting side concerns: what if the vehicle itself twice as bad (i.e. causes twice as many deaths at the same speed in collisions with pedestrians), but where other vehicles are getting into one collision with a pedestrian every 100 000 miles or whatever, Cybertrucks only get into collisions every 200 000 miles due to advanced AEB (or use of self-driving, etc.)? Are they even?
I dunno. Just an interesting thought to chew over.
So not most European cities? Unless you only count villages and old towns of larger cities.
Europeans have been building and designing towns around cars almost since after the end of WW2. They just used a somewhat different approach (since European cars were tiny compared to NA ones in the 50s and 60s). There has also been a reversal with more focus on pedestrians and public transport over the last 20-30 years.
Yes I don't think it should be allowed in Europe, yet the outrage I see, also from, Americans, as if this is some new never seen before level of danger on the road is unreasonable.
Easy to say but does that really represent the statistical reality? Does higher acceleration cause more accidents? Sports cars have more accidents. Sports cars that are driven by young people that want to show off. Cars with a high top speed. But do you think people will try to corner with the Cybertruck like they're racing? Yes they will spend a few seconds after each stop sign at hogher speed than if they weren't driving a Cybertruck but then they're just coasting down the suburbs with 30mph or whatever. But it is not obvious to me at all that Cybertruck driving should occur significantly often in dangerous fashion just because you can get to your cruising speed and overtake a bit quicker. You need statistics to back up these claims and these don't exist yet.
Even so there is research on how car design impact road safety, and if there’s a sliver of doubt that that’s sufficient to justify banning the Cybertruck from public roads the tests to prove its safety should be done in a way where gathering statistics doesn’t mean killing people.
That thing is all steel and sharp corners. Not at all the same as a delivery truck, adhering to basic pedestrian safety standards and also driven mostly by workers with special driving licenses. Also they are way slower than these steel battering rams.
"Tesla sold almost 17,000 Cybertrucks in the third quarter, according to Cox estimates, making it the third most popular EV in the US during the period. The only other EVs that sold better were the Tesla Model 3 and Y.
So far in 2024, more than 28,000 Cybertrucks have been sold. That's more than Ford's F-150 Lightning, Rivian's R1T, and Chevy's Silverado EV, Cox data shows."
"BYD was ranked as the best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer worldwide after selling over three million units in 2023 after overtaking Tesla as the best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer in the previous year. BYD's sales volume translates into a market share of around 22 percent. Tesla and the Volkswagen Group were among the runners-up. "
Are people getting in the tanks, I mean PCs, and driving them around on public roads, literally unable to see what's right in front of them?
Freeze peach to drive my unsafe taaaank. Americuuuuh.
I really wonder if people are unaware of how absurd, stupid, and unsafe many American vehicles are, or if it really is just down to selfishne-, er, I mean individuality.
Car designs have converged because there are certain properties that are better than others for safety, performance, efficiency, and so on. Those concerns are arguably much more important than aesthetics or the ability to express one’s individuality.
I find Kia/ Hyundai designs more pleasing and “out of the box” than most other automakers. Of course they have some failures like the Ioniq 6 sedan, the thing looks like the hate child between a 911 and an MB C300.
The concept version was awesome. Somehow the production version got tweaked just enough to break the effect for me. I had no idea that Space Porche and Standard Sedan were so close in my mental space.
My girlfriend owns one so to share our experience, the cybertruck is an unreliable POS. She's had it three, four months now & we have had it in the shop for suspension repair, an ECU computer which fried itself at a charging station (2k), a coolant leak part replacement from the cyberbeast rear engine (1400), the passenger window falling inside the door after the wire used in the gear window retraction snapped or tangled in the gears (450). We have gone through something like 8-10 tires and rims because they can't handle a pothole, or slice themselves after some tech put the wheel cover on wrong (tried leaving it off but a tire caught debris and was punctured that way too).
She had about two or three tires slashed or had the air nozzle cut off and sentry mode didn't catch anything except the back of the persons head. The self-driving jerked itself into a barricade on the interstate when someone cut her off, she wasn't able to stop it from doing so fast enough, it was all just faster then her reaction time (thankfully the other driver admitted fault but if they had contested I wouldn't put my faith in self-driving laws to side on a drivers side in a dispute). We have put roughly 10k into this truck for service.
We bought the truck because she lives in the mountains, she drives 200 miles a day for work if not more 5 days a week (regularly up at 4am on the road at 6am and home around 7pm - 9pm depending), and its probably the biggest purchase regret of our lives.
She needed a vehicle and I just spent 15k on a used RAV, we made the decision for her to get the truck because self-driving sounded very exciting (its all 'corporate puffery' now though), and her being in the mountains left us looking at roughly 80k vehicles anyway so we figured let's take a chance on the truck and self-driving. I mean most cars you get a good five years out them anyway right? Turns out that paint it black tesla ad was even faked, and my personal opinion is Tesla used the reservations to get this news piece.
I truly don't see the cybertruck as being desirable for the average American, I believe it's a novelty which will die once Teslas early adopter advantage for self-driving dies up. I believe it should. We are currently looking to buy her a 8k commuter beater for local 60 - 120 mile work days and using the cybertruck just for the work out of state. We'd sell the truck but its depreciated so much and she still travels out of state once or twice a month minimum and all over the place once there so we still want something electric for those trips. We would sell it if I had about another 50k in the bank to be comfortable with taking the quick loss from doing so, we still might once the relatives house sells. Don't buy Tesla, that's my advice. We never will again.
I'm guessing they were covered under warranty, but the cash-equivalent costs were listed.
I think the bigger problem here is the inconvenience. You don't get much value out of the thing you purchased if it's in the shop most of the time. Plus you have to take time out of your day to bring it to the shop (if it's even possible) or wait for a tow truck to come get you if the vehicle is immobile or unsafe to drive, and then find a way to get home.
Warranties pay for parts and labor, but they don't cover incidental expenses, or more importantly, your time.
Isn't that like asking if Boeings flights aren't covered by life insurance?
Car insurance companies know the costs, and they have open listings of the car brands. They have literally all incentives in play to stay truthful. Compared to whatever PR we are force-fed a jour.
Don't call someone here a liar unless you have clear and convincing evidence of it. The OP never said that they laid out cash for these repairs.
On a repair invoice, the shop usually lists the cost, then it's paid for by the manufacturer at the bottom. It's all normal accounting for the back office. If you've ever owned a car that had warranty repairs, regardless of make or model, you'd see this.
>Don't call someone here a liar unless you have clear and convincing evidence of it.
The post in and of itself is clear and convincing evidence.
>On a repair invoice, the shop usually lists the cost, then it's paid for by the manufacturer at the bottom. It's all normal accounting for the back office. If you've ever owned a car that had warranty repairs, regardless of make or model, you'd see this.
That's not how any of this works for Tesla though, there are no "shops" you take it to, only Tesla service centers do warranty work. The prices listed for warranty work are always "$0.00", never listing how much any of it costs. The post is clearly a LARP.
> The post in and of itself is clear and convincing evidence.
I'm pretty sure no jury would agree with that.
> That's not how any of this works for Tesla though, there are no "shops" you take it to, only Tesla service centers do warranty work. The prices listed for warranty work are always "$0.00", never listing how much any of it costs.
I admit I'm not a Tesla owner and don't have direct experience, but I do see posts that contradict this assertion:
We are in agreement about the bottom line. Again, the poster did not claim they paid out of pocket for any of this work. The experience of whether they're seeing estimated values (even if not paid) seems to vary by customer.
I'm betting it's anti-Musk people or depending on where OP lives, perhaps an area that's gentrifying and is filled with people who dislike said gentrification.
> I mean most cars you get a good five years out them anyway right?
Uhh no? You should absolutely expect a good vehicle, hell most vehicles, to exceed 10 years without serious failures. Many vehicles come with 7 year warranties on manufacturing defects… It sounds like you need to take better care of your vehicles or buy better vehicles. I did notice that you said she drives 200 miles a day and that will certainly contribute but if you take care of it, most cars would probably do that for 10 years assuming it’s mostly cruising. Either way that statement of 5 years is nuts. I bought a 5 year old car with 80,000km on it and it was in damn near new condition!
I’ve owned 6 vehicles, including one motorcycle, none of them from brand new mind you, and all of them were still reliable after their 10th year lol. Currently I have a 5 year old car which you can’t tell apart from the brand new 2024 models because it has no wear and the model hasn’t had a face lift, and I have a 35 year old ute (truck)… 5 years is nothing. I think the average age of cars on the road would be older than 5 years
> hell most vehicles, to exceed 10 years without serious failures.
I do that with cars, usually 10 to 15 years (camaro-15, ford exploder-12, wife's chrysler sebring-14 (which was surprisingly problem free considering chryslers quality stats)).
One of my friends loves to get new ones every few years, but I'm more focused on the cost.
If your state has "lemon laws", maybe you can get some help. https://www.atg.wa.gov/general-lemon-law TLDR: recourse when mfg sells a defective, unsafe, or both, vehicle.
Not that this helps you...
IMHO, current CyberTruck is in the alpha testing phase. It has multiple disruptive innovations. Tesla wisely chose the relatively low volume CyberTruck to mitigate risk.
I'm concerned (but not surprised) Tesla is aggressively ramping up production.
Esthetics aside, CyberTruck has so many exciting, long overdue technology innovations. Better gigacasting, modular etherloop (replacing CAN bus), switch to 48v, drive by wire, no rear view mirror, etc.
(I think the stainless steel exterior will prove to be a mistake. Mostly for safety reasons.)
I would definitely suggest at least getting a consult from a lemon law lawyer if it's been in the shop this much. Especially if you also have buyer's remorse.
See what needs to happen to qualify, document what's already happened, and get an idea of the process and recent interactions between your lawyer and the specific manufacturer.
I had a probable lemon on a new model that I didn't do that for because we liked it despite its faults, and some of the early problems reasserted themselves before (after warranty) engine problems led me to get rid of it. I regret not pursuing a lemon law return and replacing it with a later in production model. Might have still ran into early engine troubles, but they probably figured out how to apply paint in the meantime.
This isn’t even close to true, fwiw. You can easily find stats on EV batteries. There are early Teslas out there with 200k+ miles after 10+ years with minimal degradation.
Those are outliers. It's like saying there are people who live upto 106 years easily.
These batteries are subject to extreme temperatures routinely including fast charge/discharge cycles and we simply can't escape the physics with our wishful thinking alone.
How are they exactly temperature controlled? To control temperature, we would need to circulate something around the cells and that something has to be heated or cooled whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
Not to mention that such heating/cooling would additionally draw energy thus taking a toll on both the range and battery life.
Tesla has liquid cooling around the cells, a fairly advanced system that can move heat between battery, motors, cabin, and environment in arbitrary directions.
Before just claiming no EVs do this, you could have typed “Tesla battery cooling” into Google and gotten this from the AI thing:
> Tesla vehicles have a built-in battery cooling system that uses an electric pump to circulate coolant and keep the battery's temperature within an optimal range. This helps the battery perform well and last a long time.
If you read my comment, you wouldn't find any claim or falsehoods being spread rather a question.
With the conclusion that such cooling/heating wouldn't be free lunch and would take it's toll on the battery itself reducing both range and requiring more charge cycles because all those compressors need power too.
> you wouldn't find any claim or falsehoods being spread rather a question.
> whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
You've either pretty much never seen any recent-ish battery teardown or you just weren't paying attention to them. Acting like active cooling is some rare oddity in EVs is pushing a falsehood. It's an argument not based in reality clothed in the slightest amount of deniability by acting like you're someone who would be informed (supposedly watched some significant amount of teardowns) but just haven't happened to see it at all.
> would take it's toll on the battery itself reducing both range and requiring more charge cycles because all those compressors need power too.
You're largely misunderstanding the amount of energy needed to actually operate the car at highway-ish speeds and the amount of energy needed to keep a battery pack somewhere in the range of acceptable temperatures. You'll use far more energy maintaining the cabin than what you'll spend managing the battery in the majority of climates. And even then the actual locomotive power needed to drive the car still dominates the overall energy usage.
And FWIW when it's really cold or hot my battery preconditions using wall power so it's leaving the house at a good temp. Then it's a pretty solid mass of stuff, a good amount of thermal inertia. So it's only those trips where it's been parked for a long while and it's fully cold/hot soaked that it's really using much of the battery. And even then it's still far less than even 25% for all cooling (cabin + battery) energy use of it's overall usage even when it's >100F out here and is totally heat soaked.
And even then, assuming it's not over 100F or under freezing a lot of the cooling needed for the battery can be done by regular radiators and airflow without needing compressors. If it's 50-90F outside it's probably just cooling itself by airflow over a radiator for the liquid cooling loop so all it needs is a water pump circulating, maybe a fan. It's not like there's massive amounts of waste heat being generated like in an ICE.
> whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
You're massively misinformed. Practically all EVs have active liquid cooling through their batteries and have for quite some time. You should actually research them instead of being so confidently wrong.
For actively cooled car batteries, they’re not outliers. At this point, the onus is on you to show the generally accepted data about EV battery lives are wrong.
You aren’t going to be able to find legit data that says EV batteries regularly fail around the 3-5 year mark, like phone batteries.
The memefication of reality is happening right under our eyes, and the Cybertruck is the perfect vehicle for it.
Expect more such memetic design across everything. From people to products, the meme is the atomic unit of attention. Beauty is a secondary goal; to sprout memes is how you win in twenty twenty four - and beyond.
tbh I continue to say the i3 scale/weight was what mass market EV transportation should have been designed towards (and more efforts focused on public trans than single/small n occupant cars). Societal/environmental cost of 6000-7000 lb behemoths erase any emissions gains from going EV.
The biggest failing of the i3, in my opinion, is that it looked stupid. It was cheap and "dorky" looking for no obvious reason. There was nothing that stopped BMW from making it look like any of their other models but they chose to make it weird and different in a way that surely hurt its sales. A real shame, honestly.
The Bolt looked nearly as dorky and they sold plenty of those. Even with the battery recall. I doubt GM made much if any profit though. LG chemicals sure didn't.
The Ioniq 5 looks way better than both and of course it is doing numbers as a result.
i3 was just expensive, low range, and overall not a competitive EV in the NA market.
I can forgive price and range, because those are the sort of things that come with a company's first generation of EVs. But they didn't get anything else about it right. It's almost as though they were trying to have it fail so they could say "look, nobody wants EVs".
> What dumbass metric is causing these stupid decisions?
Sales and margin for the most part. The sales part, I imagine it's largely a failure of successfully marketing the vehicles, but I could be wrong.
The Volt to me was largely a failure of marketing at the time. Practically no normal people I know have any clue about what the Volt was. I went to a few dealerships to look at one and most salespeople didn't have a clue about the car (common though with car sales) or didn't even have any on hand to show. There was practically zero mindshare of GM equating with hybrids; the vast majority of car buyers I knew interested in hybrids essentially only knew/cared about Toyota. With declining sedan popularity in the US the writing was on the wall.
The Bolt was seen by many US car buyers as too small of a car and often confused for the several years older PHEV Volt. The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high. The people I talked to about the Bolt EUV figured it was just a different trim level of the same car, not realizing it was a good bit bigger.
Three different cars with different capabilities and yet so many people would just think they're the same V/Bolt thing GM talked about a decade or so ago.
> The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high.
Yes, this is / was a real issue and might be the biggest fuck-up for GM. I’m an EV nerd and when I talk about these cars I emphasize the first letter like I’m moderating a spelling bee…
Their CEO seems to be reacting to a perception that Chevy is “behind” and trying to get ahead of the market on EVs. If they were smart they’d still be making the Volt, since it’s an extremely reasonable PHEV that many people with garages in the US would appreciate. It would increase the number of electric miles driven.
I have a Volt and love it - it's the perfect car for someone like me with a 30 mi round trip commute. Partner recently got the plugin hybrid version of the BMW X5 (gets about 50 miles on electric), and so far we love that car, too.
Don't understand at all why GM doesn't make a PHEV SUV. They would be the perfect car for lots of people in the US.
Eh. If foreign carmakers want to compete in the US they can do what Toyota did and set up shop in the US. Employ Americans with market wages and under American labor standards.
We had a generation of globalism. It gutted the middle class.
Toyota did that because they saw the value of being in the US based on the then existing demand. Other manufacturers aren't getting that chance, and I'm not convinced those that banned 'em will be willing to let 'em manufacture here. Just look at how they're treating something with basically no stakes: TikTok.
Toyota set up shop in the US in 1981 because the US auto industry and unions lobbied for import restrictions. Then Congress held hearings and threatened legislation, followed by the UAW filing trade complaints.
Then, in the 1981, Japan signed the Voluntary Export Restraint (VER) agreement where they agreed to limit auto exports to the US to 1.68 million vehicles annually. [0]
The US is the second largest auto market in the world.
> Just look at how they're treating something with basically no stakes: TikTok.
TikTok is a direct channel for Chinese propaganda into the western infosphere.
That is hardly "no stakes".
Yes, the same concerns should also get the other social media giants wings clipped. The EU should keep taking bites out of YouTube, Facebook, etc. too.
TikTok can set up shop in the West. Setting up shop in the West means you are subject to Western laws. We have seen China demonstrate over and over that it will not comply with that.
There is a huge difference in people employed here vs in China--the self-censorship, for one. China relies on the fact that social pressure causes self-censorship even without the intervention of the higher-ups. This is vastly less effective when all the employees are from the US.
the irony is that apparently it was the one model where the sales were going up year over year, vs. the usual initial high demand and subsequent decline of ICE models
It's impressive. But to be fair, a totally novel item should be expected to have pent up demand that smooths out over time. The F-150 was introduced 49 years ago so demand has smoothed already.
Arguably their lack of extremely fast DC charging. But many of them got brand new replacement batteries, and the last wave off-lease have low miles. Looking at a wholesale price index, it seems that Bolt EUVs are $22-23k, which is similar to the prices of Model 3 (24-28k, but they don't separate standard and long range; the Bolt had only 1 variant).
What do you mean? All Bolts support level 2 charging via the standard J1772 adapter up to 7.2 kW or 11.8 kW depending on model year.
Level 3 charging aka DC fast charging was an option on them, so not all have the extra pins needed for a CCS charger.
I'm pretty happy with my 2017 Bolt which has the DC fast charging option. I wish it had distance-keeping cruise control; it's frustrating because it has the cameras and will even report following distance on the dash, but doesn't have the adaptive cruise feature for whatever reason. I also wish it charged a bit faster; 50 kW max is a little slow for road trips.
Next car is probably a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5, which has has both features and is also pretty reasonable. Prices on the used models are slowly coming down.
New cars have always been expensive. The average car is 12 years old in the US, not many EVs were available in 2012, but a lot of used cars are older than that. Give it time and EVs will drop in price. Though with charging standards changing it will be a while just because some cars will not be chargeable.
Anecdata, but in the Bay Area I see a Cybertruck almost every time I go out. At the beginning of the year it was once per month. Now there are two or three Cybertruck owners in my immediate neighborhood.
I don't like the look, personally, but my kids love it.
Sure, I'm in the Bay Area too. I see Rivians daily. Had an F-150 lightning pull up next to me yesterday. Every once in a while I'll see a Luicd whatever. Can't remember the last time I've seen a Cybertruck (on the road or broken down). In the past week I've seen a couple Hummer EVs. Hell I've seen more running Vinfasts than running Cybertrucks.
The reason theyre selling is likely due to a US small business tax loophole that allows you to write off things like range rovers and escalades as a business expense. coupled with US electric vehicle incentives state and federal, and its a pretty sweet deal on the most electric SUV per weight and length you can buy.
Honestly I fully expect to see these things crisping in the sunlit parking lot of a predatory auto lender in about five years, or rolling through the rough part of town on an 84 month co-signed auto loan with liability insurance only, wagon wheels, a lord beerus wrap and aftermarket stereo.
Like Range Rovers and Hummers they will be gobbled up by people who (with petite-bourgeoise socialism) can afford to buy the vehicle, but not maintain it. And if Youtube is any judge of build quality, this vehicle will start to fall apart the minute it exits the factory floor.
Literally every cybertruck I see has been fully wrapped with some business logo on it. I’m not sure I’ve yet seem one that wasn’t bought as a tax write off.
Because you buy it as a "company vehicle" but 98% of it's miles are driven for your personal use. Whether the tax code considers that a loophole doesn't matter. It's a loophole to give a personal item the tax treatment of a business asset.
You wanted to buy the vehicle anyway, you were going to buy it anyway, but for some absurd reason you get to count a personal vehicle against your company's tax liability.
The IRS considers that tax evasion rather than a loophole, though. Unlike using a loophole, it's actually illegal. That said, you're right -- the practice isn't that rare and that's how it's done.
The business spends pretax dollars to pay the car payments instead of post tax W2 income or dividends/other cash disbursements that are taxed and then you can depreciate the company car against future income.
I think the implication is that the small business owners use this tax structure, but then use the car as a personal vehicle rather than a business vehicle.
This thread is discussing how business owners use tax loopholes to buy personal vehicles as company assets to avoid paying with their personal post-tax money.
It’s obvious that most businesses can’t survive if their revenue is hit with income tax before expenses are paid, that’s why revenue is not taxed as income.
All those vehicles have been selling for much longer (and the CT does not outsell the Y). The CT is the third-best selling vehicle for a single quarter, has only been on the market for a year, and production was pretty low for the first few months. The Mach-e has been on the market for over four years.
It has been like this for a while. Teslas paint jobs were never amazing. I knew a guy that worked for a vehicle fleet management company. Most of the Teslas they were dealing with had such a bad paint job that they resorted to vinyl wrapping them.
Granted, this was a few years ago. I would hope they got their quality control processes dialed in by now
It is honestly baffling to me how many people have such strong opinions on the Cyber Truck. I don't personally like the aesthetic, but the majority of the reason I wouldn't get one is that I really don't like Teslas interior design/control scheme (which, much like apple, has lead a lot of manufacturers to copy them). I hate the 100% touch screen thing that they have decided on. But like...also, I just won't buy one. The fact that the car isn't my ideal one does not require me to despise it, or really care about it at all. There are a lot of cars that I don't like for one reason or another.
I mean, I guess I do get it: politics have poisoned people's brains and the fact that they don't like Musk's politics means that they have to have extremely strong opinions on everything connected to him, but it just doesn't seem worth the emotional effort.
And while I personally wouldn't ever buy one, it also is not surprising to me at all that a lot of people are buying them. I have no illusion that my personal tastes reflect the broader tastes of the car-buying public (if they did, then I would find it much easier to find a car that conforms to my preferences).
All of these things are by design. Musk’s strategy is to be in the news and for the product to be him.
He must have fired his PR team and gave up on the visionary genius schtick. Many people will hate that he’s revealed his true self to the world and it isn’t pretty.
Have you actually driven one? The only thing I use the touch screen for on a near daily basis is the defroster in the winter and that is before I start driving. Everything else I need regularly does have physical controls, e.g. wipers and blower speed.
I do have a model that still has the stalks though, haven’t driven the stalkless type enough to comment.
> But like...also, I just won't buy one. The fact that the car isn't my ideal one does not require me to despise it, or really care about it at all. There are a lot of cars that I don't like for one reason or another.
Normally I'd agree with you, but driving a car brings with it with pretty extreme externalities - it's not the people driving these behemoths that I'm worried about, it's everyone else. Distracting touchscreens, an erratic self-driving AI, and a car made of sharp points. Doesn't bode well.
My witty retort would have been, “yeah, well, people bought the Pontiac Aztek, too.”, except Tesla has sold almost as many Cybertrucks in the 3rd quarter as Pontiac sold Azteks in an entire peak sales year.
You're probably thinking of the Element. There were a lot of reasons it ended up with a rabid fan-base: Honda reliability, available manual transmission, available all-wheel drive. It was overall a really practical vehicle for those who wanted something with a good amount of interior space who didn't care about frills or luxury. Amusingly the Element was targeted at then-millennial young buyers looking for "adventure," but ended up being more popular amongst older people looking for a practical daily driver.
The Aztek had some similar positive properties, but was from one of the particularly bad eras of GM malaise and was highly unreliable. It's had a tiny bit of a cult resurgence recently, but it was never popular in the way the Element was.
The Aztek would have been a cult car if it wasn’t GM. It had the hoseable cabin, the center console was a removable cooler, etc.
But it had all of the stupid GMisms. Every expense was spared. It turned out to be like the malnourished love child of a Nissan Xterra and a Ford Windstar.
Personally when I see them in person I think they look dumb and ridiculous. But I have never driven it. I do like all other current Teslas but wouldn’t buy one because Elon
But I was driving with a non-tech, non-online friend and she blurted out “Wow what an ugly car”, I looked over and it was a cybertruck - so I felt validate in my views
I don't think "percent of EV sales" is a meaningful metric. We should want more EV brands! Tesla allows others to use their patents and chargers specifically because they want more EV brands to exist as well!
Percent of total auto sales is a far better metric.
Stop these awful huge heavy monstrosities, there is no place for them in the cities. Why are you doing this to us? Sell them all to warlords in Caucasus.
This to me implies that EVs have peaked and only the market for vanity vehicles remains at this time
Edit: I also have a suspicion that this is primarily due to them filling all the preorders. It’d be good to see a breakdown as to how many new orders people are placing after seeing this POS in real life.
That might be true, if the #2 selling car, and the #1 selling car were not also EVs.
The Model Y is currently the second best selling vehicle of all kinds, and it very likely is about to overtake the F-150 as the most-selling vehicle, the first time the F-150 has been dethroned in 46 straight years.
The sales numbers are saying we have not reached peak EV.
The weird thing I’ve seen is in almost all the online forums I visit, like Reddit, YouTube comment sections, parts of twitter, hacker news, the cybertruck is universally panned. Yet when I drove a cybertruck, the number of onlookers who approached me inquiring about the car with excitement is unmatched with even a Lamborghini that I once rented. Shows how much of a bubble the internet alone is. MKBHD got the ratio’s right in his review, 75% of all approaching population are excited about the car and when asked to guess its price, they all wildly overestimate it, guessing close to a million than a 100k. This car is probably a hit, it would be a bigger hit if it were a gas car, it’s low range and really low range when towing make it impractical for any actual truck work.
The thing is, the people most likely to complain that the Cybertruck is a bad vehicle are the people who are informed about it. The wider public doesn't know about things like the tonneau cover leaking, wheel bearings failing, the suspension being stuck down and causing tire rub, the aerodynamic wheel covers that were causing tire failures because they were puncturing the sidewalls, the upper control arms that bend like an empty aluminum can, the door edges that will cut your finger off, the tailgate that will also cut your finger off, the fact that it's got even worse sight lines than the Hummer H1, or that the bed effectively loses twenty percent of it's space because of the backwards angled bulkhead where the bed and the cab meet.
Someone who is an enthusiast will most likely know about those things because they were widely reported in the automotive news sphere, and thus they will have a much higher chance of being against the Cybertruck. The wider public doesn't know, and so the novelty factor draws them in.
I think a simpler explanation is that terminally online people just don't like the politics of the CEO and like to take any chance to dunk on him.
In a world that has been stagnant for decades in terms of design and doing things out the box, it's something at least trying to be different. Don't get all the hate
People were dunking on the Cybertruck before Musk made that sharp turn into a political lightning rod around when COVID hit. I recall seeing discussion about how silly the car is, even during the height of his popularity.
People who are uninformed were trying to dunk. Dismissing its aerodynamics when it has a CD of .34; and decent efficiency per battery size.
Ultimately ignorant terminally online people complain and dismiss what is the best selling ev truck.
You can disagree, but you would be objectively wrong.
I think that no matter who makes an off-road vehicle that rusts when wet, people that are aware of that issue (there's many more, that's just the first one that comes to mind) are going to cast shade on the product.
Even car people who agree with the CEO's politics dunk on it - see WhistlinDiesel
That's not a car person.
What's your definition of a car person? I don't care for the guy, but having multiple modified super cars and building several custom trucks in the past -- he seems like a car [truck] person to me?
He's a youtuber whose niche is outrage bait for engagement and views.
Someone like James May.
I prefer Sarah-n-tuned but something tells me that folks who want to purity test folks on if they are a “car person” or not will really dislike the idea of a trans female appearing person knowing more about cars than 99% of the “car people” of YouTube.
It feels a lot like rotten tomatoes adience vs critic rating deviations. Here, just like there, the critic scores are irrelevant because they arent the buyer
Elon Musk made it too easy to dunk on him with the CyberTruck, similar to the last Tesla event, it was kinda hilarious how bad that was, even if you agree with his political ideas, I don't know how you would have a different opinion about it.
How bad it was? What planet are you on? It was incredibly ambitious and impressive. They made huge progress in just a few years on robots.
Check out a Salesforce, apple or Google event where they flex about adding a heart rate monitor to their watch ir similarly banal improvement.
Ill never understand the hate
What about it is either ambitious or progressive?
They’ve not even met the goals they said they would meet 3 years ago.
I hate this argument in business.
A goal not some metric that has to be met. It’s a goal, an aspiration to do something, not a deadline.
Most businesses ran by people who use goals as deadlines fail horridly.
This is one thing many of the major companies that are ultra successful have in common. They are ran by people who set goals, failed to meet the goal - and continued to move forward.
Selling a product for money and then delivering the product without those features is fraud.
The gymnastics this cult does is infuriating. The dude lies. Constantly.
I own 3 teslas. I like the cars. Doesn't mean the CEO doesn't constantly lie and under deliver.
It doesn't matter if the car cures cancer. It doesn't make his past lies become truths.
If only Elon was more like your average commenter on HN, just imagine what he could have achieved then....
It's always about making impossible promises and talking about the future they hope to achieve, not things that will be available soon. Also, much of the talk made little sense, such as "individualized mass transit", it doesn't seem to solve any problem they were talking about.
Also, the robots that are controlled remotely by humans without disclosuring it is hilarious.
Elon Musk should dump Trump, support Kamala, perma-ban the right-wing and whoever the White House wants from Twitter. Then his popularity on HN will increase by 100x and HN commenters will start loving the Cybertrucks and start (re)liking X.
> tonneau cover leaking, wheel bearings failing, the suspension being stuck down and causing tire rub, the aerodynamic wheel covers that were causing tire failures because they were puncturing the sidewalls
I think unless you're the kind of person who specifically spends time online looking for reasons not to buy a Cybertruck, you probably wouldn't know _any_ of that.
Savage Geese, The Autopian, The Drive, Road & Track, and Motor Trend all individually reported on some or all of these issues. The tonneau cover leaks became a meme that people reposted on places like TikTok and Instagram. It's not those terminally online, it's that in the first year of the Cybertruck's release a bunch of outlets were documenting it because it brings in readers.
So 5 bits of anecdata, and a unknown number of terminally online TikTok and Instagram addicts, some of whom don't even own one in the first place.
As someone who doesn’t own a car, every single time the cyber truck shows up 50-90% of the info is about these issues. Why would you trust individuals who already bought one more than auto reviewers?
I think most of these people don't notice because they aren't pushing it. They're using it like most people use an SUV these days--as a normal car on roads and highways without any cargo. It's an overpriced status symbol to them.
And apparently that's also true for many people who buy these monster trucks that also push 100k use.
I drive a Cybertruck as my daily driver and I don't even know about most of these.
I smoke a pack a day and I haven't heard of lung cancer.
I play the lottery every day and I haven't won a dollar.
Etc etc
> I play the lottery every day and I haven't won a dollar
The chance of a consumer encountering any of those issues is equivalent to winning the lottery? We should all run and get a cybertruck! :-;
No, I'm describing the uselessness of people's individual experiences to describe statistical phenomena
But I don't see it a whole lot worse than a forum of users listing all the problem they without having any kind of statistic on exactly how frequent these issues are, per vehicle, per mile driven etc.
People who have problems with their cybertruck will go and post about it. Understandably, they are also frustrated, the posts sound angry, and then any journalist can repost/compile all those to make it sound like these are just dumpster fires on wheels. But just as in the lottery case, we never get to hear from every loser, only from the winners; here we don't get to hear from the "winners", only the "losers".
I mean they may well be dumpster fires on wheels but without solid statistics it's hard to be sure exactly so any kind of story can be made up about it.
Agreed! More objectively I’m pretttty sure Cybertruck has had an abnormal number of recalls since its introduction, but yeah: we need statistics to make any confident claims.
It's broken down by component, not vehicle, but NHTSA has actual data.
https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...
I'm sure they do have sufficient data to answer this question, but it's not in what you linked and I'm not going to be diving in to do the analysis myself.
That's not equivalent.
You are describing likelihoods in time series, we are discussing the likelihoods of exceptional defects, period. Which is actually low.
I ate Boar's Head meat and I didn't get listeria
Etc etc
The temporal component doesn't matter at all, the point is that an individual's experience is pretty meaningless when trying to understand statistical phenomena. Which is why we invented statistics and do things like "collect data"
You're misusing what's otherwise a useful comparison
I... Don't know how. The wheel cover issue had a service bulletin sent out to owners, and the suspension being stuck in the lowest position got an over the air update with a big notification. Those at least should've been known to you.
Cybetruck owners are the car world’s vegans.
This is a thread about the Cybertruck.
that's right, they don't have owners, they identify as independent.
No, it’s a thread about car sales and cybertrucks position in that list.
Also, I’m sure we are all familiar with the value of anecdotal evidence vs data, the response of “I’m a ____ and I don’t _____” is limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate
The value of anecdotal reports that "I experienced ______ failure" is similarly limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate, but somehow they're taken as gospel.
Also, I will walk up to a parked super car and take pictures of it, but I would never buy one even if I could afford dozens of them with cash.
Most of the things you mention are issues with individual units (lemons).
The problem with Teslas almost universally is with lemons. Which is to say if you get lucky your experience will be great. The problem is that there are a fuck ton of lemons and cars that have no problems turn into lemons right around the time that the first few problems show up (which means more lemons as they age).
That's essentially just a QA and reliability design failure which is indicative of broader issues with Tesla but it also means that until someone's vehicle starts having problems they will have nothing but a positive experience which can leave them blindsided by said problems.
Some markets could have more lemons that other. An insurance adjuster tell me that most of his interventions with towed Teslas were for cars refusing to start by electric issues and that a lot of the Teslas seen by him were second hand vehicles imported from other countries. The guy disliked the brand a lot. I assume that those weren't the best models if the first owner get rid of them.
For a number of years, a friend of mine has had a '99 Plymouth Prowler. If I were to base car popularity based solely on people coming up to ask about the car, his would win hands down and you'd assume (naturally) that Plymouth just couldn't manufacture enough to keep up with demand. There's a huge difference between attention-grabbing looks to a vehicle that will have people stop you and ask about it and what people will actually buy when it comes time to buy their next car. It's tempting to point to its position as #3 overall as an overwhelming success but the EV market is comparatively small still so I'm not sure it's useful to put much stock in it.
In terms of the negativity, I'd say that unlike other cars of similar design (like the Aztek) -- a way higher percentage of the panning I see online is about it not living up to its promised capabilities. There's loads of videos of Cybertrucks needing to be towed out of bad spots by other trucks, problems even when it isn't stuck because of how little its frame flexes, the additional torque wearing away tread on the tires much faster, etc. Some of those things can be engineered around and I'm sure Tesla engineers are working on it.
I'd hazard a guess that the market share the Cybertruck is taking isn't any existing trucks but rather more "luxury-class" SUVs like Mercedes, Land Rover, and BMW.
> For a number of years, a friend of mine has had a '99 Plymouth Prowler. If I were to base car popularity based solely on people coming up to ask about the car, his would win hands down and you'd assume (naturally) that Plymouth just couldn't manufacture enough to keep up with demand. There's a huge difference between attention-grabbing looks to a vehicle that will have people stop you and ask about it and what people will actually buy when it comes time to buy their next car.
You should give sashank_1509 enough credit to be able to distinguish between the jokey/mocking questions your friend's Prowler gets, and the enthusiastic ones he reports receiving.
>It's tempting to point to its position as #3 overall as an overwhelming success
There is no other way to spin a $100K car being the #3 overall EV vehicle of any type other than a success, especially given that a) #1 and #2 are also Tesla vehicles, and b) one of them was the world's best-selling car of any kind, EV or not, in 2023.
I doubt the prowler was getting mocking comments… they are a cool looking unique vehicle. People didn’t buy many for the same reason most people don’t buy an actual 1930s roadster they’re based on: they’re expensive and impractical- even as a sports car you can get a Porsche for much less money that will outperform it and can still fit a bag of groceries.
> There is no other way to spin a $100K car being the #3 overall EV vehicle of any type other than a success, especially given that
they have the US government block competition
Only from China. Non-communist non-dumping, friendly states are welcome to compete.
People keep assuming China is only successful because they're dumping, and miss the elephant in the room: China went all-in on EVs over a decade ago, while we were fucking about with hybrids and maybe-just-stick-with-ICE. They have world-class batteries and insatiable domestic demand and it's been that way since before Tesla, what if China is undercutting us because their cars are just better?
In that case our tarrifs are just protectionism, is what.
>They have world-class batteries and insatiable domestic demand
Excellent, then they won't have an issue with losing their export markets to tariffs, because they can just sell their EVs to the "insatiable demand" of the local consumers.
>what if China is undercutting us because their cars are just better
Price/performance they ARE better, China can produce cheaper because of their years of (government aided) investments and economies of scale. Of course, we aren't obligated to buy from belligerent states engaging in strategic mercantilism producing the goods of the future. We aren't obligated to prop up the Chinese export-oriented economic model in pursuit of one generation of cheap EV cars.
> excellent, then they won't have an issue with losing their export markets to tariffs, because they can just sell their EVs to the "insatiable demand" of the local consumers.
that’s what happened but the point in discussion here is why Tesla does not have competition in the US and the answer is simple
The answer above was apparently 'protectionism'. If we're only putting tariffs on EV cars from one country, then how is protectionism the simple answer?
Boy do I have news for you if you think China is the only country that pours money into domestic R&D for strategic commercial development…
Indeed, plenty of countries engage in a bit of strategic development. Plenty of countries aren't belligerent communists though. Communism brings the state direction of industry to another level and with Xi as the new leader for life means they'll be extra implacable.
100℅
50% of Telsas are made in China. China built Teslas are noticeably better built, too.
Welcome to reality.
>they have the US government block competition
>Only from China. Non-communist non-dumping, friendly states are welcome to compete.
>50% of Telsas are made in China. China built Teslas are noticeably better built, too.
Please explain how your comment relates to mine, because I see no connection.
Idk. I’d imagine it has more to do with the preorders and how they can stuff shipments.
I got to drive one… it’s an objectively terrible car. I would imagine that as the look gets let’s novel that attention will wane quickly. When they get the inevitable prominent pedestrian collision on video, it has Pinto potential.
It’s weird because the last “new” Tesla was the Model Y I think, and that is an incredibly well thought out car — probably the 2020s equivalent of the 1980s Taurus or Camry.
That's my thought too. Cybertruck had an enormous number of preorders and apparently lots of them are backing out rather than taking delivery, but those that do take delivery still mean that Tesla can deliver cybertrucks as fast as they can produce them until the backlog is gone.
It was pretty hilarious to watch some toolbag driving a Cybertruck around Santana Row (a fake-fancy outdoor mall made to look like a European downtown area out here in Silicon Valley) blasting music at all the people trying to enjoy dinner outdoors. I was there picking something up and he was doing laps around the place from before I got there until after I left, a good 30+ minutes, just driving around in circles desperately trying to get attention.
To be fair, it’s very typical to hear people revving up their crappy SRT Chargers or sport bikes constantly there all day and night. I’m not sure who’d be interested in the extremely-overpriced apartments that they have, given the noise and lack of proximity to anything else outside of the malls there. I believe there used to be Cars and Coffee events hosted there but I’ve heard they got kicked out due to too many incidents of bad behavior.
Is there some tax data about the amount of Clean Vehicle/CA and Federal EV credits issued for Cybertruck?
The income cap on getting the clean vehicle rebates is $135k ($200k joint filers). And I'm not sure about the federal rebates. Tesla doesn't offer 0% financing, current Cybertruck APR deal is reported to be 5.29% for up to 72 months. So I don't see how someone with the income under the rebate cutoff can afford that $100k car or the financing option. The delta between the number of rebates (Federal EV vs Clean Vehicle/CA) may allow to estimate, how many of these are corporate (pre-income tax + rebate?) purchases.
And these "Cox Automotive estimates", are these reliable numbers that had been confirmed by Tesla earnings, or it is a "best guess by influencers" type of information?
One fun loophole to get the tax credit is through a lease. A lot of leasing companies pass the full credit on as a straight deduction on the capitalized cost, and you can stack that with other incentives. Lucid had some really ridiculous deal going that was supposedly leasing the >$100k sticker Air GT for $849/mo : https://www.autoblog.com/news/2024-lucid-air-available-from-...
I looked into that and there was exactly one vehicle available and it was something like $7500 due at signing to get that $849/mo payment, IIRC on a 36-mo term, so really it’s more like ~$1058/mo, which makes more sense.
Still a lot of discounts on EVs if you know where to look. Definitely lease; these will depreciate like bricks after the batteries get used up and are down below 70% capacity. I’m not sure how financing companies are doing the math but their expected values at the end of lease terms feel wildly optimistic. My guess is some degree of mfg incentives to push EVs combined with models that took too much pandemic pricing into account for used vehicles. If you can get a good money factor on the lease, go for it.
Yup, I leased the new Honda with a trade incentive for $250/mo. When you net out the gas savings, it’s like $190/mo. Ended up getting about $2500 more for my 10 year old trade than Carvana.
The business model is weird, it’s almost like you’re capitalizing the cost of gas, except the gas tank leaks after a few years.
I figure they’ll either deal on a buyout at the end of the lease, I’ll turn it in, or gas prices will go nuts and I’ll be able to flip the car. My brother did that with a Volt - bought it for $18k pre-pandemic sold for $23k in 2021!
Cox Automotive is one of the biggest auto conglomerates for remarketing/etc. Autotrader, Manheim, cox rail, and a bunch of other fingers in the pie. They get a lot of data for both new and used vehicle sales as a result.
It only feels like a car because of the amazing steer by wire. It’s actually a truck though.
It's not a truck though. It's a unibody car with a bed and big wheels. Trucks are body on frame and can do real work without the back falling off.
Is the Honda Ridgeline not a truck? Ford Maverick? The cybertruck is simply the biggest thing in that segment.
Kind of. They're what I would call a ute. They're still car based vehicles with beds. But that doesn't mean they can't do 90% of what the average person uses a truck for. They just aren't as stout as a body on frame truck and won't take as much abuse. But use them for their intended purpose and they'll do just fine.
Fine then, Jeep Comanche. It's on a purpose built truck/suv platform.
The point here is that you're using generalities that are wayyyy too broad.
There's no reason a body on frame vehicle can't be stout. See every unibody fullsize van for example.
Both of those cars have more real world (i.e long distance) towing capacity than a cyber truck.
The Honda Ridgeline if confidently NOT a truck.
Unibody car is misleading because the materials are very different. I don’t think it is comparable to either a body on frame construction or the type of unibody a typical sedan or crossover has.
similar things were said about the Honda Ridgeline and the Chevrolet Avalanche; they ended up having the same long-tern issues that they were predicted to have; torn mounting points and reduced repair-ability when the inevitable occurs.
>similar things were said about the Honda Ridgeline and the Chevrolet Avalanche; they ended up having the same long-tern issues that they were predicted to have; torn mounting points and reduced repair-ability when the inevitable occurs.
The fact that you think the Chevy Avalanche[1] has unibody problems says everything I need to know about your opinion
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with unibody construction for a vehicle like this some work vans have been that way basically forever (though it makes me want to go postal when the OEMs graft a really shitty frame onto the back of a unibody van and call it a "cab and chassis").
[1]https://www.gmwholesaledirect.com/v-2009-chevrolet-avalanche...
Well, main issue with the avalanche was the bed was integrated with the Cab body, which still led to SOME repairability challenges.
Still, nowhere near as bad as a unibody like a Ridgeline or maverick
"Yet when I drove a cybertruck, the number of onlookers who approached me inquiring about the car with excitement is unmatched with even a Lamborghini that I once rented".
Your sampling method is flawed. Only Cybertruck fans are approaching you. Most people aren't going to come up and tell you they think your car is ugly.
TBF when I got a Mach E and they were still really new I did get a bunch of onlookers come up just to complain to me about how Ford is destroying the Mustang name and EVs are actually way worse for the environment than ICE cars and that I should be ashamed of myself for buying into the globalist lies and it's just a symbol of everything in the world going to hell. Happened about half a dozen times or so.
I did also get many positive interactions when it was new as well. But boy did those random negative encounters stick out!
Right, it’s kind of known as the incel mobile I think by most people. In the same way when you see a MAGA hat on the street, you already know a lot about the person before they a a single word and you do your best to avoid them but other people with MAGA hats will give each other the wink and nod.
In my experience that’s the closest thing I could describe to the cyber truck experience and how most people look at it.
Nobody knows what an incel is, other than the terminally online.
They know exactly what it is when they see it even if they don’t have a word for it. We could call it the loser mobile if it makes things clearer I guess.
But honestly, I don’t know what point you’re trying to make here but I’m not talking about language, I’m talking about the reaction people have when they see people in cyber trucks.
The Jeep wave, but less bend in the elbow
People are much more likely to approach you to say something positive than to say something negative.
There’s almost no precedent for a “hit” vehicle at that price point. Toyota stopped selling real Landcruisers in the US because Americans won’t pay that much for something with a Toyota Badge (hence the current real Landcruiser is sold as a Lexus in very low volume).
Tesla are claiming a hit after making people wait 5 years for a vehicle they couldn’t see and then shipping preorders. The preorders have been massively less than they claimed and now the vehicle is with people it is being shown to be of low quality and low capability. Unable to manage tasks Subarus and much cheaper vehicles can.
The proof of its success will be in the coming year. Now buyers are walking in to buy a real vehicle at a real price. The current owners bought a paper spec sheet at a fantasy price and are a self selecting group happy to pay 2-3x over what they were promised.
For the longest time, the Lx variant of the Land Cruiser was cheaper than the Land Cruiser in used markets because average car buyers don’t know that the LX is a Land Cruiser with leather.
There are tons of deals like this in the car world. While peons paid insane markups on the RAV4 prime, intelligent people were getting the Lexus variant for MSRP and they had an actually good interior on top of it!!!
I actually saw one in person for the first time a couple days ago. I had a great laugh at the owner's expense. He could better serve his desperate need for attention at a fraction of the price by hosting a block party or driving a 70s F150 or similar (aka an actual truck). Unlike many folks who think these things are trash I'm delighted they're on the market. Characterless voids trying to trowel over their emptiness with expensive consumer goods should absolutely be able to advertise loudly as a warning to the rest of us. Imagine what would have been possible if they'd spent that money on a combination of therapy and developing actual interests.
CT driver here. I didn't even get one for the attention. I thought it was cool-looking, useful, and could make for a good family car. I was right!
I'm an introvert so the constant attention (almost all positive, even in the Seattle area, surprisingly) was definitely an adjustment for me. Trust me, I'd be perfectly fine without the constant attention but people just keep giving it! Now I actually kind of enjoy it. My son waves at people from the back seat, I get asked questions by curious people all the time, and I get the occasional thumbs up randomly.
But that can't really be true, according to HN your car is your whole identity or something like that. Totally "hinged" take for sure.
As a fellow Seattleite, I'm excited to see it rust to hell now that it's raining more and more
My CT spent lot of time at a house by the ocean in island county the past few months. Trying my best to see if it’ll rust! No luck yet.
I don't even like cybertrucks or Teslas, but Jesus could you be any more sour grapes about this?
A hinged take.
quite hinged, your comment.
Your comment perhaps says more about your own mental state than of those you’re collectively chiding.
I'm quite certain there's a contingent that are salving their egos with some flavor of narrative around that idea. Thing is I'm reminded of a particular gaping chasm of a human being that used to work for Epic Games. Around the time Gears of War bonus checks started dropping he flipped out and bought a Lamborghini. Shortly after taking delivery he was overheard complaining loudly about not being able to "pull" at the local club and expressing frustration that the car wasn't getting him enough attention. He decided having the car painted radium green would fix everything. We can, of course, pretend folks like him aren't common as grass but then you're stuck having to explain away things like the Hummer H2, or the rando on here that was bragging about dropping five figures on overpriced kitchen appliances until someone pointed out he could have gotten an actual restaurant walk-in for an order of magnitude less...
I agree with you.
I think the truck is like dating an exciting but shallow person who doesn't care about you.
The truck is extremely fast, with excellent steering, suspension and lots of other groundbreaking technology.
But it is basically user-hostile. No dashboard, no stalks for turn signals or gear selection, and everything is on the central touchscreen. And that is super cluttered and impossible to do important things without looking away from your driving and jabbing at a moving touch point.
It makes you a worse driver, and you're spending 100k.
Honestly, give it a dashboard. Add stalks for turn signals, wiper, headlight, gear selection. Give it a few dedicated buttons for things you need to reach by touch (defrost, mute/volume, internal/external lights) and lots of animosity would go away. Make it an option for $5k! people will pay.
EDIT: they are learning. The wrapped black ones don't look terrible.
Oooooh, is this why I see so many Teslas not using their turn signals? How did that even get regulatory approval (though I guess not in the EU)?
Tesla has approval for no turn signal stalks on their other model in the EU.
I don't know why. It's the reason they don't indicate when leaving a roundabout.
No dashboard, no stalks, no extra buttons are needed. The voice control works just fine.
"siri, extend the door handles so the person can enter the car!"
If you drive the weenermobile you'll get a similar reaction, but it doesn't mean people want to buy it. It's an oddity, a curiosity they're excited to see in person.
Years ago I got a rental that was some new hideous looking 4-door Fiat model. Maybe a 500L or something. They were taking off the plastic wrap when I got it.
It was a week of beating off people approaching me and asking about it. It looked weird, I thought people wanted to beat me up but they were genuinely curious about it.
That some weird truck with a formerly 3 year waiting list is at the top of the charts a couple months into shipping should be surprising? Wait a year. Nobody is looking at the 500L now.
I went through this with my Model 3 back in 2018, when they were still rare in my area. Random people would approach me in super market parking lots, everyone at my gym wanted a ride in it. Now it's like driving a Toyota or a BMW, there are tons on the road and nobody bats an eyelid.
People used to do the same thing to me after we bought one of the first Nissan Leafs. So much that a friend expressed displeasure with going with me to pick up food because he knew we would very likely be delayed by someone asking about the car.
So I don’t think it’s much of a measuring stick.
But the LEAF is a great car :)
They’re especially great at depreciating: https://insideevs.com/news/715992/save-used-evs-price-differ...
Second only to the MB EQS. Down almost half in 12 months. This is why EVs are lease-only vehicles right now IMO.
I agree... I also think that for people with specific use cases, the rapid depreciation means that there are great deals available for used LEAFs. I wouldn't buy one new now.
PT Cruiser and New Beetle were also incredible attention-getters when new and eventual unexciting flops. The new VW ID Buzz van will be the same due to the subpar mileage. What good is a road trip car that you must stop to charge every 200 miles?
> impractical any actual truck work.
Some pickup truck work is high mileage, but a surprising amount of it is low mileage. It varies a lot, there are lots of trucks that do less than 100 miles a day.
Work trucks are also usually much more predictable than consumer vehicles. Most of them do the same thing every day. The predictability should make buying an EV easier.
That's true of the range, but the Cybertruck is also terrible in terms of torque, horsepower, and suspension compared to the Rivian truck or the F150 Lightning. Those EV trucks are very practical. The Cybertruck, not so much. As others in this comment section have pointed out, it's more of a luxury SUV than anything else.
That doesn't explain this tractor pull result where the tri-motor cybertruck outperforms both those EVs and an F350.
https://youtu.be/Pj2jMhwKuv4?si=rJ8B1NnzBvR6usqa
I thought this was a good review of the cybertruck:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_EJ3DyiiA
Oh, just like the video Tesla released of the CT towing a 911 faster than the 911?
Entirely objective, not misleading?
I'm sure there won't be multiple publications completely debunking this video too like they did the 911 video.
Are you talking about the debunking videos that highlight that the Cybertruck only beat the Porsche in the 1/8 mile and not the whole quarter mile? And that Cybertruck is still basically a 10 second truck?
It's honestly a absurd and funny to me how fast the truck is. It's like seeing an elephant fly. It's even funnier to see people get angry at it.
I definitely don't like marketing and ads, but that's literally how all ads work. It doesn't debunk some of the insane performance characteristics.
> Are you talking about the debunking videos that highlight that the Cybertruck only beat the Porsche in the 1/8 mile
No, I'm talking about the debunking videos and articles that show:
"We ran six quarter-mile drag races, and each one had the same outcome: The Porsche 911 Carrera T wins and the Tesla Cybertruck Beast loses... it’s not a particularly close race, either."
Re the 1/8: "We can say confidently that Tesla didn’t show the Porsche 911 Carrera T’s quickest possible run. In four out of six MotorTrend drag races, the Porsche 911 Carrera T beat the Cybertruck to the eighth-mile mark."
"The manual-transmission Carrera T has a 3,500-rpm limiter at standstill, and on a sticky, prepped drag strip, launching quickly requires getting off the line without letting the revs fall. Drop the clutch too fast, and the engine will bog, falling out of its powerband. It takes a slow, carefully modulated clutch release to get the perfect launch, which keeps the engine on boil and extracts a small amount of slip from the tires."
I'm sure Tesla was quite eager to make sure that they launched the Porsche optimally.
Yes. I get it. EVs have amazing acceleration. My brother in law has worked for, and owned, both Teslas and Rivians, so I'm no stranger to this.
But this was just another Tesla self-congratulatory event that needed "simulation" and "we didn't actually do it but we think it would go this way" puffery.
Hilarious that they used the base 911 as well, the one with slightly less horsepower than a BMW 340i. We’re talking Golf-R-with-a-chip-tune / stage 2 WRX levels of power here. Not exactly impressive in terms of actual sports cars.
Then you get to lateral grip and uhh, yeah 0.76G is worse than the average minivan.
911s are not designed for drag, especially the base model. If they wanted to compare it to something that’s good in a straight line but no good in corners, a Dodge Demon 170 stickers for under $100k. Comparable horsepower, too.
I appreciate your research.
I stand by everything I said, but I will add your research to my own repoitoire.
The F-150 is the most sold car in the US. How many of those ever see any “real truck work” versus driving from the suburbs to the grocery store or the office ? Probably less than 10%?
And the ones that do are white only, single cab full beds with no options. The fleet / contractor special. A Cybertruck is not that and was never meant to be.
> MKBHD got the ratio’s right in his review, 75% of all approaching population are excited about the car and when asked to guess its price, they all wildly overestimate it, guessing close to a million than a 100k
This has to be hyperbole. There are many in the middle class areas I spend a lot of time in, and even $100K cars are a rarity here. No-one is thinking "oh, wow, sure are a lot of people who just bought million dollar cars, here where the median home price is $500-600K!"
The only good thing about the CyberTruck is the steer-by-wire system. It makes steering suck in all other cars. But every other aspect of the thing is a complete failure. Selling a car with such terrible terrible visibility should not be legal.
(Caveat: I am not a car guy at all, never owned one)
In the US, most trucks sold do very little hauling, towing, or off-reading or anything else that might justify the giant form factor.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
And yet, trucks and SUVs are the best-selling cars in the US, and have been for a long time. There is a weird loophole for fuel efficiency in mileage standards for large vehicles, but obviously that doesn’t apply to the Cybertruck. There is definitely some psychological appeal to having a very dominant-looking vehicle.
So just as a business move, the Cybertruck makes sense. But there’s more overlap with Musk’s politics than you might think.
I read a book a long time ago by this very weird product marketer Clotaire Rapaille, who, several decades ago, was trying to convince executives to put a gun mount on an SUV. His argument was his research showed that the people who loved big cars saw the world as dangerous, and had fantasies of cutting through the hordes with a powerful vehicle. Rapaille’s methods are somewhere between the usual consumer panel interviews and guided meditation, so it’s hardly scientific, maybe more like poetry, but I found it compelling.
Musk actually tried to demonstrate the Cybertruck’s resistance to guns and sledgehammers. Its actual durability is, I gather, more debatable, but he was definitely trying to reach people’s darkest fears and impulses.
I can understand being curious about it since it is one of the most unusual looking vehicles. But, I mean, I saw one on Main Street recently and it was ugly as heck. I'd be curious about it too, without ever having any wish to buy one.
Nothing weird about it. It's panned as a vehicle to drive. Not panned as a way to attract attention, haven't seen anyone claiming it's bad at that.
Social media isn’t reality
There is an anti-musk campaign on-going and anything Musk does is being criticized. That being said, from my Youtube observations it seems that the biggest issue is the build quality. They clearly rushed this through.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see this thing in small alleys and especially with the crazy speeds you can accelerate with. But it's definitively an interesting model.
I feel Tesla is a US bubble. Despite all the disproportionate media this brand and it’s CEO gets, in my country I haven’t even seen one in the street yet, but I see EV Volvo, Renault, Fiat, BYD, GWM and others daily.
Tesla Model Y is the most sold car in Europe right now. Not most sold EV, most sold CAR.
I'm in Australia and I see zillions of Teslas.
Thankfully our road laws won't allow the hideous monstrosity that is the Cybertruck though.
Yeah because street folks impressed by a hunk of steel and thinking it cost a million dollars aren't in a bubble aha
There are a lot of terrible cars that impress non car people
The DeLorean DMC-12 is the car guy version of "never meet your heroes." So fucking cool, absolutely iconic design, and genuinely one of the worst cars ever manufactured. Criminally under-powered, no power steering, the only part of the window that would open was the part inside the plastic frame of it, issues with overheating, 0-60 in about 2 years, and the transmission was an utterly garbage Lotus one that was chosen because it was the only one that would fit in the frame.
Honestly one of my lottery dreams would be buying a DMC-12 and converting it to electric.
I've not driven a DMC-12, but lack of power steering doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me? All the vehicles I've driven without power steering have been ok; usually the steering wheel is much larger to give you the leverage you need; it's not as bad as you'd think if you've used a car with inoperative power steering.
But yeah, I had a nice conversation with a guy who kitted his out as a movie replica at a outdoor showing of the film. He said it was fun to go to events, but it's terrible as a car. And some of the parts are unobtanium, like the flux capacitor. Not that that's unique for cars in that era, try finding a federal EGR filter for an early Vanagon; just gotta hack around it.
The only car I've driven without power steering was my grandma's 1996 Fleetwood, and I recall turning that absolute aircraft carrier felt like I was trying to close a door on the Red October. Maybe others feel better, I'm honestly not sure.
I'd be surprised if a 1996 Cadillac was available without power steering? That's a big luxury car, and not having power steering doesn't feel very luxurious. I see there is a power steering pump on parts searches, but reviews don't mention it, and the steering wheel in pictures doesn't look too big.
If the power steering on that was inoperative (maybe the pump died or the fluid level was empty, etc), I'm sure it would be a beast to turn in a parking lot though.
Yeah, but how many other cars can you revisit the 80s in?
Mine of choice would be the Lamborghini Countach, as long as I don't have to back it up. I'm too old for the Lambo Lean.
But can it also take you back to 1955 or 1855? or 2020...wait... wtf wants to go back to that year...lol
novelty != taste; that vehicle sets new records for ugly..
James May (of Top Gear fame) recently tried the Cybertruck and didn't immediately hate it.
I also fell for this online bashing of the cybertruck. And since I had a model S but skipped the model 3 for a taycan and was aware of the poor quality of the model 3, I thought it made sense.
However if people are buying the cybertruck despite all its faults, then I'm glad to be proven wrong.
I feel this is also selection bias. People approaching owners in public are unlikely to be aware of what an engineering disaster the thing is, what with all the issues with quality control, slow delivery, and very slow repairs/maintenance from Tesla, or the funnier stories where owners have had their trucks brick entirely due to getting the thing washed, whereas in the comment sections you're referencing, those topics are usually the topic of conversation. And, I mean, even if the people approaching owners do know about that stuff... I dunno, I find it hard to picture myself walking up to a complete stranger and shit-talking their new toy to their face. And not just because I'm a nice person, but because too many people in this country are emotionally unstable and armed, and as funny as I think Cybertrucks and their owners are, I'm not prepared to get killed for a joke.
And to put this even further: most people even in America are not "car people" and therefore don't know shit about cars, where they come from, what goes into them, etc. My parents are great examples of this. They've owned something like 4 of the 10 worst cars of the new millennium list put out by Forbes, but like, an awful car in 2024 is still generally fine for an undemanding casual user. Sure, people buy tons of trucks here, but the vast majority of them aren't used for anything more strenuous than hauling a dozen bags of fertilizer, and my Corvette can handle that. A Cybertruck is a terrible truck, but most people don't do truck shit with the trucks they buy, and it's a perfectly middle-of-the-road SUEV. I think it's a bad option if that's what you're after, chiefly because you're gonna spend a LOT of money on tires you don't really need to, and the panels aren't aligned right, and if anything goes wrong with it you're liable to spend months playing vehicular ping-pong with your Tesla dealership, and it's (IMO) ugly as sin... but you do you. Assuming it doesn't have some kind of catastrophic failure that an unfortunate number do, you'll probably have a fine experience.
The videos of it struggling to move in snow and "bravely" fording a creek of 5 inch deep water are funny as hell to see, because it's shocking what Cybertruck owners think "hard going" in a truck is. They'd probably lose their minds seeing some of what I've seen modified trucks crawl up, through, and across in the course of off-road competition if they think driving through a fast stream makes the Cybertruck a feat of engineering, but again, most people who buy these things aren't driving through a blizzard at 90mph to get medicine to the good children of the village so they live to see Santa come Christmas morning. They're going across town to the Good Denny's, or to the local mall for shopping, or to their kids soccer game. And on that journey, a Cybertruck and virtually any vehicle you can buy new right now, will suffice. Just don't get it wet.
> it’s low range and really low range when towing make it impractical for any actual truck work.
So it's a bit crap then?
There was a Cybertruck at the Paris Games Week (there was a Tesla corner in the con for some reason). That was my first time seeing one in person.
The most striking thing was how tall it was. Half the kids attending the PGW were smaller than its front bumper. I hope these things never, ever get allowed in France.
They are not legal in the EU, but a loophole is being exploited to import them.
I'd appreciate EU citizens writing to their MEPs about this.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/tesla-cyb...
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Merica.
Not just Merica. People prioritize flashing their status via a large, expensive impractical cars than the greater good everywhere. Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
The market share for American car brands remains relatively low, typically below 5% in Europe. Notable American manufacturers like Ford and Tesla have struggled to capture a substantial portion of the European market compared to their Asian and European counterparts
Ford has gone pretty much entirely native in Europe. though. Their line up for decades has been pretty indistinguishable from German or French carmakers.
Their European division was a bit similar to what GM/Opel had going.
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
Not in the part of Europe I'm in. I can't recall the last time I've seen an American car here in the streets of Vienna. Also: Don't large American SUVs consume a lot of petrol? Considering the gas prices I'd assume not many people can/want to afford them.
Vienna isn't representative for all of Europe. Not even for the rest of Austria. Go to the other more car centric cities and you'll see.
Can you name a single European city that is positively teeming with large American SUVs?
Don't change the meaning please. Obvious not teeming like in the US but the traditional European family station wagon is being replaced by large SUVs everywhere in Europe.
Quoting you:
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
If they were truly “flying off the shelves,” I’d expect the frequency to be so obvious that it would be unmistakable. So I’m asking you to support your claim with data or at least more detailed anecdotes. Which city? Which models?
That’s strange since the Cybertruck doesn’t meet European regulations (at the very least UN-R26) due to pedestrian safety. Not sure if there is a workaround if someone imports it as their personal vehicle though.
Obviously it's legal to own and display road-illegal vehicles. Just think about open-wheel racing, including go-karts. Just can't drive them on the road. The truck will have been transported inside a bigger truck or on top of a car transporter.
You can't get road insurance for them either.
Perhaps there's some sort of exception if it's just for exhibition? If there wasn't, I suppose it would be difficult to have things like museums, auto shows, etc
There is an exemption for formal road legality for vehicle development and sales in all countries I've been working in with vehicle development and testing.
If it's strictly the height that's the issue Tesla can make it so it's software locked not to surpass a certain height on paved roads or geo fence it.
It’s not strictly about height, that is only one of the factors. Modern cars usually have pedestrian safety systems that the cybertruck does not have by design.
I keep seeing people say this.
What are these? Have you seen a hummer or a ford F2 or f350? What about a Lexus LS or GX? Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator?
What about a Camry other than its size specifically is for pedestrians when hit?
Then we have the smart car. A small bubble designed to not crush. Fairly sure if that thing hits somebody they are not going to be “gee I am glad that the car makers made this car so safe for me being hit by it”
I can think very hard what a car would look like that would be pedestrian safe, and what features it would have. And none of any cars today look like they would be safe.
As for features for safety only one comes in mind, automatic breaking for pedestrians.
As for the cyber truck. The bend up front looks a lot more safe than most of the other pointy cars.
A hood low enough to throw the pedestrian over the car. Enough space under the hood to allow enough deformation to prevent serious head injury (main reason the pedestrian is killed as I remember). Hood "airbags" that lift the hood up, adding even more space to decelerate the pedestrian (as I remember, this was optional but available to car manufacturers).
Normally new cars should come with emergency braking. As I remember, emergency braking is the only new technology to challenge the seat belt in efficiency. All the other safety features are almost marginal on how effective they are.
I don't know if the cybertruck has it, but I think the EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking.
> EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking
Emergency breaking system have been a mandatory assistance system for a while now (afaik it was introduced mid 2022). Admittedly, I don’t know how efficient they actually are in preventing injuries from pedestrians.
I just know that from my experience driving with these systems, they occasionally do seem not quite there. I’ve had my car warn me from hitting a guy that was happily walking on the sidewalk but completely ignore people taking a pedestrian crossing (maybe because I was already breaking myself).
So yeah, tech is great and all. But having design considerations as a completely passive system like your front bumper breaking off on colission still seems essential
The further reading section of the Wikipedia page has some decent info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_safety_through_ve...
TL;DR it’s about being low enough to not smack people of different heights in the head and cause massive acceleration of their brains against their skulls. Same with internal organs, and for legs it’s more about having some of that energy transferred into rotational energy, then having a soft-enough bumper and hood to again minimize acceleration forces and energy transfer.
There are also airbag-based solutions where it either inflates under the hood to give some cushion for the hit person to decelerate more gradually before stopping against something less forgiving, or kinda like a giant couch / Wacky Races cartoon catcher’s mitt inflating on the hood and front of the vehicle before they’re actually hit.
The pushback is, of course, mostly cost-based.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2007/12/the-truth-about-eu...
https://americawalks.org/vehicle-safety-for-pedestrians/
I just wish that the US would stop allowing people to build and operate killdozer pickups with bumpers well above where other vehicle bumpers are. When those crash into other vehicles, the other vehicle ends up with a differential, tires, and probably skid plates smacking into their vehicle, which it’s not designed to handle. Combined with how larger tires require more braking power to slow at the same rate, plus modified suspension geometry, higher CG, increased weight, and decreased driver intelligence, it makes for a much more dangerous vehicle for others to be around. Why do we continue to allow this, just like all the obnoxious modified exhausts and ECU tunes that massively increase the pollution being put out by one vehicle so they can feed their egos and intimidate other road users?
Higher bumpers are also a lot less safe for pedestrians, obviously: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15949454/
Stuff like this has no legitimate purpose off-road and no business being operated on public highways: https://www.tiktok.com/@leanqueen6.7 but it’s become some idiotic macho culture thing.
Interesting about height and fatality risk: (from the article)
> a 10cm increase in the front-end height of a vehicle led to a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk, most strongly affecting the survival chances of women, children, and older people.
Kid killer cars
Even if it were allowed on the roads of France, with its 4 tons, you would have to pass the specific driver license C1 [1], because over the 3.5 tons limit of a classical driver license B. More than that, the C1 must be renewed every 5 years at least.
[1] : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F31121
We will fight for your freedom to prevent sharp corners on roads.
It's basically the same size as an F-150. It has a crumple zone although it probabl only activates for hard car collisions. I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150. Which is not good at all, but it is still a bit pretentious to paint it as a horribly dangerous car when there is no evidence that it is worse than one of the most common cars in the US.
> I've seen no evidence that it is significantly worse for pedestrian safety than an F-150
Serious question: have you looked? Or is there any special reason you imagine that if such evidence existed, you would have seen it?
I say this because I spent 10-15 minutes looking for information and gave up because I’m not sure of any tests which I could use to compare the two, or any testing bodies that focus on pedestrian safety. If that information exists, I’d be interested to see a side by side comparison.
I originally thought that the nhtsa would perform some tests of this kind but I was disappointed to find out that this doesn't seem to be the case. Most focus on pedestrian safety seems to be on automatic emergency braking and other ADAS systems. In this regard I claim that by default one should expect the Cybertruck to be at least decent. Not the best but surely not terrible. While the shape of the hood and the visibility obviously matter of course it seems to be the case that such evaluations are basically done by eyeballing it. Pedestrian dummy crash tests with collection of force data etc. seem to not at all be standard. Which sucks, but it again shows that the Cybertruck is not an outlier on some well-established metric.
I predict if after some years a statistical analysis is done on pedestrian crashes by car model the Cybertruck will just be some kind of average. It has decent AEB and it is a new car driven by young people. Would other cars have caused less injury in the crashes that do occur? Probably. To a degree that it justifies calling it a pedestrian killer? I doubt it.
I like the idea that it is “pretentious” to predict — without evidence as you’ve pointed out — that getting hit by a 6,600+lb vehicle is bad but it is not pretentious to confidently predict without evidence that getting hit by a 6,600+lb car is the same as getting hit by a different vehicle that is one to two thousand pounds lighter.
See, my concern here is that I feel very skeptical about my instincts on this. I suspect both cars are bad, but if the Cybertruck is (for example) twice as bad as a the F-150, would I know what that would look like? I doubt it.
Up until you’re sticking Mad Max type spikes on the front, I am not sure that I’d be able to say with confidence anything other than “I think probably trucks with high bonnets are worse for pedestrians than sedans with low bonnets”.
But as you say, there’s also a bunch of interesting side concerns: what if the vehicle itself twice as bad (i.e. causes twice as many deaths at the same speed in collisions with pedestrians), but where other vehicles are getting into one collision with a pedestrian every 100 000 miles or whatever, Cybertrucks only get into collisions every 200 000 miles due to advanced AEB (or use of self-driving, etc.)? Are they even?
I dunno. Just an interesting thought to chew over.
yea I prett much agree
I assume they don’t have a lot of F-150s in Paris, either.
Any city built and or designed before cars is a nightmare for giant American pickups.
That said do you see those in Boston or NYC a lot?
> Any city built and or designed before
So not most European cities? Unless you only count villages and old towns of larger cities.
Europeans have been building and designing towns around cars almost since after the end of WW2. They just used a somewhat different approach (since European cars were tiny compared to NA ones in the 50s and 60s). There has also been a reversal with more focus on pedestrians and public transport over the last 20-30 years.
Yes I don't think it should be allowed in Europe, yet the outrage I see, also from, Americans, as if this is some new never seen before level of danger on the road is unreasonable.
I don't know, the average driver handling a 6600 lbs chunk of sharp aluminum capable of going 0-60 in 4 seconds terrifies me.
Easy to say but does that really represent the statistical reality? Does higher acceleration cause more accidents? Sports cars have more accidents. Sports cars that are driven by young people that want to show off. Cars with a high top speed. But do you think people will try to corner with the Cybertruck like they're racing? Yes they will spend a few seconds after each stop sign at hogher speed than if they weren't driving a Cybertruck but then they're just coasting down the suburbs with 30mph or whatever. But it is not obvious to me at all that Cybertruck driving should occur significantly often in dangerous fashion just because you can get to your cruising speed and overtake a bit quicker. You need statistics to back up these claims and these don't exist yet.
You don’t need data to be terrified of something.
Even so there is research on how car design impact road safety, and if there’s a sliver of doubt that that’s sufficient to justify banning the Cybertruck from public roads the tests to prove its safety should be done in a way where gathering statistics doesn’t mean killing people.
Why do you hope they never get allowed in France?
Because theyre a danger to pedestrians being so tall.
also hard and sharp
I honestly can’t believe they’re street legal anywhere given that the steel panels essentially turn them into a knife driving down the highway.
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Fearmongering? Ralph Nader was writing about how unsafe motor vehicles were in 1965
"Your wish for child safety impedes my freedom to play suburban cowboy in my jacked up electric scythe. That's tyranny."
Well, it is?
What is?
In that case, I can't imagine how you feel about delivery trucks.
That thing is all steel and sharp corners. Not at all the same as a delivery truck, adhering to basic pedestrian safety standards and also driven mostly by workers with special driving licenses. Also they are way slower than these steel battering rams.
Cab-over trucks usually have pretty good visibility out the front. Plus, they are useful for delivery of goods that help society.
Many cities do not allow large trucks inside the city especially in pedestrian areas. Will the same restrictions apply to the cybertruck?
The new Amazon electric ones appear to have pretty great visiblity. Same for the new USPS vehicle (which, to be fair, looks a bit bizarre).
Delivery trucks are typically operated by professional drivers who require clean driving abstracts and maybe even drug testing.
There are also far fewer of them per capita than passenger vehicles.
At the end of the day they're a necessary evil while the ever growing number of vanity pavement princess pickup trucks are not.
The headline is pretty misleading.
From the article: "Tesla sold almost 17,000 Cybertrucks in the third quarter"
and I believe the total sales volume for last quarter was 400k EVs in the US and about 3.5mio worldwide.
That means Cybertruck sales were like 2-3% of total sales in the US and <0.5% worldwide.
https://archive.is/pBDXs
Relevant snippet:
"Tesla sold almost 17,000 Cybertrucks in the third quarter, according to Cox estimates, making it the third most popular EV in the US during the period. The only other EVs that sold better were the Tesla Model 3 and Y.
So far in 2024, more than 28,000 Cybertrucks have been sold. That's more than Ford's F-150 Lightning, Rivian's R1T, and Chevy's Silverado EV, Cox data shows."
Thank you for the relevant snippet. Here's how Tesla(not just cybertruck) compares globally. https://www.statista.com/statistics/541390/global-sales-of-p...
"BYD was ranked as the best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer worldwide after selling over three million units in 2023 after overtaking Tesla as the best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer in the previous year. BYD's sales volume translates into a market share of around 22 percent. Tesla and the Volkswagen Group were among the runners-up. "
Are we supposed to be able to access that graph? I'm getting a "Sign up for Statistia" prompt.
This is the source the data is from: https://insideevs.com/news/707935/world-top-ev-oem-sales-202...
Plug-in car registrations in Q1-Q4 2023 (vs. previous year):
Top 5 total: 7,531,757 and 55% share Others: 6,157,534 and 45% share Total: 13,689,291I see multiple Cybertrucks every day driving around LA.
I'll admit the design has grown on me, and we need more mainstream vehicles challenging the boring design "norms".
I would love to see a cross between the Model Y and Cybertruck in the future.
> we need more mainstream vehicles challenging the boring design "norms"
I'd argue that we need to start treating cars like the utilitarian objects they are and stop associating our personalities with them.
We need to start treating PCs like the utilitarian objects they are and bring back beige cases.
Are people getting in the tanks, I mean PCs, and driving them around on public roads, literally unable to see what's right in front of them?
Freeze peach to drive my unsafe taaaank. Americuuuuh.
I really wonder if people are unaware of how absurd, stupid, and unsafe many American vehicles are, or if it really is just down to selfishne-, er, I mean individuality.
Car designs have converged because there are certain properties that are better than others for safety, performance, efficiency, and so on. Those concerns are arguably much more important than aesthetics or the ability to express one’s individuality.
Not really the case for PCs.
You could still have cars in every color, and yet they're all black or gray.
80s home computer design please!
Fractal Design is always a nice option for that
I can't wait. I'm so tired of this RGB gamer aesthetic bullshit.
I find Kia/ Hyundai designs more pleasing and “out of the box” than most other automakers. Of course they have some failures like the Ioniq 6 sedan, the thing looks like the hate child between a 911 and an MB C300.
The newer generation Honda's are SHOCKINGLY nice looking. I'm a huge fan of the new Land Cruiser too, I would happily bring one of those home.
I drive an Ioniq 6 and love the design. To each their own…
The Ioniq 6 is SO CLOSE to being beautiful.
The concept version was awesome. Somehow the production version got tweaked just enough to break the effect for me. I had no idea that Space Porche and Standard Sedan were so close in my mental space.
I like their designs well enough, but I’d hardly call them “out of the box”. Slightly edgy.
My girlfriend owns one so to share our experience, the cybertruck is an unreliable POS. She's had it three, four months now & we have had it in the shop for suspension repair, an ECU computer which fried itself at a charging station (2k), a coolant leak part replacement from the cyberbeast rear engine (1400), the passenger window falling inside the door after the wire used in the gear window retraction snapped or tangled in the gears (450). We have gone through something like 8-10 tires and rims because they can't handle a pothole, or slice themselves after some tech put the wheel cover on wrong (tried leaving it off but a tire caught debris and was punctured that way too).
She had about two or three tires slashed or had the air nozzle cut off and sentry mode didn't catch anything except the back of the persons head. The self-driving jerked itself into a barricade on the interstate when someone cut her off, she wasn't able to stop it from doing so fast enough, it was all just faster then her reaction time (thankfully the other driver admitted fault but if they had contested I wouldn't put my faith in self-driving laws to side on a drivers side in a dispute). We have put roughly 10k into this truck for service.
We bought the truck because she lives in the mountains, she drives 200 miles a day for work if not more 5 days a week (regularly up at 4am on the road at 6am and home around 7pm - 9pm depending), and its probably the biggest purchase regret of our lives.
She needed a vehicle and I just spent 15k on a used RAV, we made the decision for her to get the truck because self-driving sounded very exciting (its all 'corporate puffery' now though), and her being in the mountains left us looking at roughly 80k vehicles anyway so we figured let's take a chance on the truck and self-driving. I mean most cars you get a good five years out them anyway right? Turns out that paint it black tesla ad was even faked, and my personal opinion is Tesla used the reservations to get this news piece.
I truly don't see the cybertruck as being desirable for the average American, I believe it's a novelty which will die once Teslas early adopter advantage for self-driving dies up. I believe it should. We are currently looking to buy her a 8k commuter beater for local 60 - 120 mile work days and using the cybertruck just for the work out of state. We'd sell the truck but its depreciated so much and she still travels out of state once or twice a month minimum and all over the place once there so we still want something electric for those trips. We would sell it if I had about another 50k in the bank to be comfortable with taking the quick loss from doing so, we still might once the relatives house sells. Don't buy Tesla, that's my advice. We never will again.
I’m genuinely curious, on a 4-month old vehicle, why weren’t the three specific repairs and costs you list be covered under warranty?
I'm guessing they were covered under warranty, but the cash-equivalent costs were listed.
I think the bigger problem here is the inconvenience. You don't get much value out of the thing you purchased if it's in the shop most of the time. Plus you have to take time out of your day to bring it to the shop (if it's even possible) or wait for a tow truck to come get you if the vehicle is immobile or unsafe to drive, and then find a way to get home.
Warranties pay for parts and labor, but they don't cover incidental expenses, or more importantly, your time.
Isn't that like asking if Boeings flights aren't covered by life insurance?
Car insurance companies know the costs, and they have open listings of the car brands. They have literally all incentives in play to stay truthful. Compared to whatever PR we are force-fed a jour.
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Don't call someone here a liar unless you have clear and convincing evidence of it. The OP never said that they laid out cash for these repairs.
On a repair invoice, the shop usually lists the cost, then it's paid for by the manufacturer at the bottom. It's all normal accounting for the back office. If you've ever owned a car that had warranty repairs, regardless of make or model, you'd see this.
>Don't call someone here a liar unless you have clear and convincing evidence of it.
The post in and of itself is clear and convincing evidence.
>On a repair invoice, the shop usually lists the cost, then it's paid for by the manufacturer at the bottom. It's all normal accounting for the back office. If you've ever owned a car that had warranty repairs, regardless of make or model, you'd see this.
That's not how any of this works for Tesla though, there are no "shops" you take it to, only Tesla service centers do warranty work. The prices listed for warranty work are always "$0.00", never listing how much any of it costs. The post is clearly a LARP.
> The post in and of itself is clear and convincing evidence.
I'm pretty sure no jury would agree with that.
> That's not how any of this works for Tesla though, there are no "shops" you take it to, only Tesla service centers do warranty work. The prices listed for warranty work are always "$0.00", never listing how much any of it costs.
I admit I'm not a Tesla owner and don't have direct experience, but I do see posts that contradict this assertion:
* https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-service-invoic...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/17wnts6/commen...
>I'm pretty sure no jury would agree with that.
I'm pretty sure every jury would agree with that.
>I admit I'm not a Tesla owner and don't have direct experience, but I do see posts that contradict this assertion:
Those posts prove my point exactly. One of them literally states:
"Yes, but usually when I sign something for warranty work. The dollar amt on the paper is $0."
We are in agreement about the bottom line. Again, the poster did not claim they paid out of pocket for any of this work. The experience of whether they're seeing estimated values (even if not paid) seems to vary by customer.
A handful of us are wondering the same thing.
All of the aforementioned things are 100% covered by warranty. The GPs comment is entirely made up, LARPing for internet points.
> She had about two or three tires slashed or had the air nozzle cut off and sentry mode didn't catch anything except the back of the persons head.
Who is doing this? Anti-Musk people? Anti-EV people? I’m not from the US so I’m not familiar with the politics.
I'm betting it's anti-Musk people or depending on where OP lives, perhaps an area that's gentrifying and is filled with people who dislike said gentrification.
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Embraced by whom, exactly?
The amount of US right wing propaganda bla on Hackernews has reached Twitter level. Truly sad to see. Another platform to avoid going forward
> I mean most cars you get a good five years out them anyway right?
Uhh no? You should absolutely expect a good vehicle, hell most vehicles, to exceed 10 years without serious failures. Many vehicles come with 7 year warranties on manufacturing defects… It sounds like you need to take better care of your vehicles or buy better vehicles. I did notice that you said she drives 200 miles a day and that will certainly contribute but if you take care of it, most cars would probably do that for 10 years assuming it’s mostly cruising. Either way that statement of 5 years is nuts. I bought a 5 year old car with 80,000km on it and it was in damn near new condition!
I’ve owned 6 vehicles, including one motorcycle, none of them from brand new mind you, and all of them were still reliable after their 10th year lol. Currently I have a 5 year old car which you can’t tell apart from the brand new 2024 models because it has no wear and the model hasn’t had a face lift, and I have a 35 year old ute (truck)… 5 years is nothing. I think the average age of cars on the road would be older than 5 years
> hell most vehicles, to exceed 10 years without serious failures.
I do that with cars, usually 10 to 15 years (camaro-15, ford exploder-12, wife's chrysler sebring-14 (which was surprisingly problem free considering chryslers quality stats)).
One of my friends loves to get new ones every few years, but I'm more focused on the cost.
If your state has "lemon laws", maybe you can get some help. https://www.atg.wa.gov/general-lemon-law TLDR: recourse when mfg sells a defective, unsafe, or both, vehicle.
Not that this helps you...
IMHO, current CyberTruck is in the alpha testing phase. It has multiple disruptive innovations. Tesla wisely chose the relatively low volume CyberTruck to mitigate risk.
I'm concerned (but not surprised) Tesla is aggressively ramping up production.
Esthetics aside, CyberTruck has so many exciting, long overdue technology innovations. Better gigacasting, modular etherloop (replacing CAN bus), switch to 48v, drive by wire, no rear view mirror, etc.
(I think the stainless steel exterior will prove to be a mistake. Mostly for safety reasons.)
I would definitely suggest at least getting a consult from a lemon law lawyer if it's been in the shop this much. Especially if you also have buyer's remorse.
See what needs to happen to qualify, document what's already happened, and get an idea of the process and recent interactions between your lawyer and the specific manufacturer.
I had a probable lemon on a new model that I didn't do that for because we liked it despite its faults, and some of the early problems reasserted themselves before (after warranty) engine problems led me to get rid of it. I regret not pursuing a lemon law return and replacing it with a later in production model. Might have still ran into early engine troubles, but they probably figured out how to apply paint in the meantime.
Someone commented on some forum:
"People buying a car with a lifespan of their smartphone batteries is beyond me."
This isn’t even close to true, fwiw. You can easily find stats on EV batteries. There are early Teslas out there with 200k+ miles after 10+ years with minimal degradation.
Those are outliers. It's like saying there are people who live upto 106 years easily.
These batteries are subject to extreme temperatures routinely including fast charge/discharge cycles and we simply can't escape the physics with our wishful thinking alone.
We can’t escape physics, but we can address physics. Car batteries are usually temperature controlled, they are cooled when fast charging etc.
Especially with modern battery tech, you should easily get 200,000km out of the battery before it drops to below 80% of its original capacity
How are they exactly temperature controlled? To control temperature, we would need to circulate something around the cells and that something has to be heated or cooled whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
Not to mention that such heating/cooling would additionally draw energy thus taking a toll on both the range and battery life.
Tesla has liquid cooling around the cells, a fairly advanced system that can move heat between battery, motors, cabin, and environment in arbitrary directions.
Before just claiming no EVs do this, you could have typed “Tesla battery cooling” into Google and gotten this from the AI thing:
> Tesla vehicles have a built-in battery cooling system that uses an electric pump to circulate coolant and keep the battery's temperature within an optimal range. This helps the battery perform well and last a long time.
Here’s the battery cooling system theory-of-operation from Tesla, for their _first_ car almost two decades ago: https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/Roadster/TheoryOp/1.2....
Here’s someone tearing down a Chevy Bolt battery talking about the coolant system: https://insideevs.com/news/341527/weberauto-examines-the-che...
Here’s an F150 Lightning battery apparently leaking coolant: https://www.lightningowners.com/threads/rear-motor-area-leak...
Please, do a bit more research before spreading damaging falsehoods about EVs.
If you read my comment, you wouldn't find any claim or falsehoods being spread rather a question.
With the conclusion that such cooling/heating wouldn't be free lunch and would take it's toll on the battery itself reducing both range and requiring more charge cycles because all those compressors need power too.
> you wouldn't find any claim or falsehoods being spread rather a question.
> whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
You've either pretty much never seen any recent-ish battery teardown or you just weren't paying attention to them. Acting like active cooling is some rare oddity in EVs is pushing a falsehood. It's an argument not based in reality clothed in the slightest amount of deniability by acting like you're someone who would be informed (supposedly watched some significant amount of teardowns) but just haven't happened to see it at all.
> would take it's toll on the battery itself reducing both range and requiring more charge cycles because all those compressors need power too.
You're largely misunderstanding the amount of energy needed to actually operate the car at highway-ish speeds and the amount of energy needed to keep a battery pack somewhere in the range of acceptable temperatures. You'll use far more energy maintaining the cabin than what you'll spend managing the battery in the majority of climates. And even then the actual locomotive power needed to drive the car still dominates the overall energy usage.
And FWIW when it's really cold or hot my battery preconditions using wall power so it's leaving the house at a good temp. Then it's a pretty solid mass of stuff, a good amount of thermal inertia. So it's only those trips where it's been parked for a long while and it's fully cold/hot soaked that it's really using much of the battery. And even then it's still far less than even 25% for all cooling (cabin + battery) energy use of it's overall usage even when it's >100F out here and is totally heat soaked.
And even then, assuming it's not over 100F or under freezing a lot of the cooling needed for the battery can be done by regular radiators and airflow without needing compressors. If it's 50-90F outside it's probably just cooling itself by airflow over a radiator for the liquid cooling loop so all it needs is a water pump circulating, maybe a fan. It's not like there's massive amounts of waste heat being generated like in an ICE.
> whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
You're massively misinformed. Practically all EVs have active liquid cooling through their batteries and have for quite some time. You should actually research them instead of being so confidently wrong.
For actively cooled car batteries, they’re not outliers. At this point, the onus is on you to show the generally accepted data about EV battery lives are wrong.
You aren’t going to be able to find legit data that says EV batteries regularly fail around the 3-5 year mark, like phone batteries.
Hmm, that'd be a funny comment if it were close to realistic, but unfortunately it's not. No upboat from me, I'm afraid.
Its the design.
The memefication of reality is happening right under our eyes, and the Cybertruck is the perfect vehicle for it.
Expect more such memetic design across everything. From people to products, the meme is the atomic unit of attention. Beauty is a secondary goal; to sprout memes is how you win in twenty twenty four - and beyond.
EV's have been horrifically ugly and/or boring for decades, its fine for the Cybertruck to buck that trend.
Hah, a unwieldly, unreliable, pedestrian-killing-homing-missile is comparable to those Chinese "hoverboards".. I like it.
Everybody will wear Ed Hardy again?
Very well said.
To move past this barricade you must show your identification card. And a dank meme.
tbh I continue to say the i3 scale/weight was what mass market EV transportation should have been designed towards (and more efforts focused on public trans than single/small n occupant cars). Societal/environmental cost of 6000-7000 lb behemoths erase any emissions gains from going EV.
The biggest failing of the i3, in my opinion, is that it looked stupid. It was cheap and "dorky" looking for no obvious reason. There was nothing that stopped BMW from making it look like any of their other models but they chose to make it weird and different in a way that surely hurt its sales. A real shame, honestly.
The Bolt looked nearly as dorky and they sold plenty of those. Even with the battery recall. I doubt GM made much if any profit though. LG chemicals sure didn't.
The Ioniq 5 looks way better than both and of course it is doing numbers as a result.
i3 was just expensive, low range, and overall not a competitive EV in the NA market.
I think the bolt looks fine? Especially the 2022+ versions. Biggest issue is the 50kw max charging rate imo.
I can forgive price and range, because those are the sort of things that come with a company's first generation of EVs. But they didn't get anything else about it right. It's almost as though they were trying to have it fail so they could say "look, nobody wants EVs".
I really wish they would have continued to make the i3 and reduce the cost. It was perfect for a lot of people but the price was just too high.
So basically the sub-$30k Chevy Bolt EV and EUV. US sales broke 60,000 units in 2023.
The Bolt EUV is the perfect EV, and it’s a travesty that they stopped selling it. Hopefully the talk of them bringing it back is true.
WTF is going on with the Chevy EVs?
They dropped the Volt which you can only pry out of owners cold, dead hands. They dropped the Bolt EUV which seems to be similarly adored.
What dumbass metric is causing these stupid decisions?
> What dumbass metric is causing these stupid decisions?
Sales and margin for the most part. The sales part, I imagine it's largely a failure of successfully marketing the vehicles, but I could be wrong.
The Volt to me was largely a failure of marketing at the time. Practically no normal people I know have any clue about what the Volt was. I went to a few dealerships to look at one and most salespeople didn't have a clue about the car (common though with car sales) or didn't even have any on hand to show. There was practically zero mindshare of GM equating with hybrids; the vast majority of car buyers I knew interested in hybrids essentially only knew/cared about Toyota. With declining sedan popularity in the US the writing was on the wall.
The Bolt was seen by many US car buyers as too small of a car and often confused for the several years older PHEV Volt. The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high. The people I talked to about the Bolt EUV figured it was just a different trim level of the same car, not realizing it was a good bit bigger.
Three different cars with different capabilities and yet so many people would just think they're the same V/Bolt thing GM talked about a decade or so ago.
> The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high.
Yes, this is / was a real issue and might be the biggest fuck-up for GM. I’m an EV nerd and when I talk about these cars I emphasize the first letter like I’m moderating a spelling bee…
Even then Vo- and Bo- sound a lot alike in a lot of English phonetics when speaking casually. The -lt carries a lot of weight.
I'm waiting for the Colt, the Jolt, the Molt, the Dolt...
Their CEO seems to be reacting to a perception that Chevy is “behind” and trying to get ahead of the market on EVs. If they were smart they’d still be making the Volt, since it’s an extremely reasonable PHEV that many people with garages in the US would appreciate. It would increase the number of electric miles driven.
I have a Volt and love it - it's the perfect car for someone like me with a 30 mi round trip commute. Partner recently got the plugin hybrid version of the BMW X5 (gets about 50 miles on electric), and so far we love that car, too.
Don't understand at all why GM doesn't make a PHEV SUV. They would be the perfect car for lots of people in the US.
They don't need to bother. They got competition effectively banned at the border. Now we're stuck with the same mediocrity we've had for decades.
Eh. If foreign carmakers want to compete in the US they can do what Toyota did and set up shop in the US. Employ Americans with market wages and under American labor standards.
We had a generation of globalism. It gutted the middle class.
Toyota did that because they saw the value of being in the US based on the then existing demand. Other manufacturers aren't getting that chance, and I'm not convinced those that banned 'em will be willing to let 'em manufacture here. Just look at how they're treating something with basically no stakes: TikTok.
Toyota set up shop in the US in 1981 because the US auto industry and unions lobbied for import restrictions. Then Congress held hearings and threatened legislation, followed by the UAW filing trade complaints.
Then, in the 1981, Japan signed the Voluntary Export Restraint (VER) agreement where they agreed to limit auto exports to the US to 1.68 million vehicles annually. [0]
The US is the second largest auto market in the world.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_export_restraint
> Just look at how they're treating something with basically no stakes: TikTok.
TikTok is a direct channel for Chinese propaganda into the western infosphere.
That is hardly "no stakes".
Yes, the same concerns should also get the other social media giants wings clipped. The EU should keep taking bites out of YouTube, Facebook, etc. too.
TikTok can set up shop in the West. Setting up shop in the West means you are subject to Western laws. We have seen China demonstrate over and over that it will not comply with that.
There is a huge difference in people employed here vs in China--the self-censorship, for one. China relies on the fact that social pressure causes self-censorship even without the intervention of the higher-ups. This is vastly less effective when all the employees are from the US.
You can't make $25k/vehicle selling Bolts.
the irony is that apparently it was the one model where the sales were going up year over year, vs. the usual initial high demand and subsequent decline of ICE models
https://archive.is/pBDXs
Isn't the Cybertruck that Mad Max looking thing that looks like it will shear you clean in two if it hits you? I'm surprised that's street legal.
It may literally be too sharp for EU standards...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/tesla-cyb...
That's not in civilized countries (hum, Europe)
Europe using Civilized to refer to themselves only sure has some /really/ ugly history.
This kind of summary is tricky because the answer can depend on the bucketing that occurs from the spread of models or manufacturers.
The linked Kelly Blue Book report tables are probably more-useful, and state that in Q3, 4.8% of the vehicles sold were Cybertrucks.
I'm not familiar with pickup-truck-adjacent vehicles, but I notice the "Ford F-150 Lightning" was 2.1%, and the "GMC Hummer Truck / SUV" was 1.2%.
It's impressive. But to be fair, a totally novel item should be expected to have pent up demand that smooths out over time. The F-150 was introduced 49 years ago so demand has smoothed already.
GM has Silverado and Sierra EV trucks on the same platform as the Hummer.
I think the take-away from this is that EV market in the US is a long-ways away from economy cars when the #3 selling car is $100k.
You can't even find middling used EVs for sub $20k. They're all just Chevy Bolts people were desperate to unload.
I thought the Bolt had a good reputation. What's wrong with them?
Arguably their lack of extremely fast DC charging. But many of them got brand new replacement batteries, and the last wave off-lease have low miles. Looking at a wholesale price index, it seems that Bolt EUVs are $22-23k, which is similar to the prices of Model 3 (24-28k, but they don't separate standard and long range; the Bolt had only 1 variant).
I found the bolt to be very cramped.
No L2 charging for one.
What do you mean? All Bolts support level 2 charging via the standard J1772 adapter up to 7.2 kW or 11.8 kW depending on model year.
Level 3 charging aka DC fast charging was an option on them, so not all have the extra pins needed for a CCS charger.
I'm pretty happy with my 2017 Bolt which has the DC fast charging option. I wish it had distance-keeping cruise control; it's frustrating because it has the cameras and will even report following distance on the dash, but doesn't have the adaptive cruise feature for whatever reason. I also wish it charged a bit faster; 50 kW max is a little slow for road trips.
Next car is probably a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5, which has has both features and is also pretty reasonable. Prices on the used models are slowly coming down.
New cars have always been expensive. The average car is 12 years old in the US, not many EVs were available in 2012, but a lot of used cars are older than that. Give it time and EVs will drop in price. Though with charging standards changing it will be a while just because some cars will not be chargeable.
This clearly has nothing to do with running down the preorder list which has now been exhausted and had a less than 10% claim rate.
Those numbers are going to crater hard in the coming months
Anecdata, but in the Bay Area I see a Cybertruck almost every time I go out. At the beginning of the year it was once per month. Now there are two or three Cybertruck owners in my immediate neighborhood.
I don't like the look, personally, but my kids love it.
I was at a park. Ct pulled up to a stop sign. Kid playing drops their toy, runs into the field toward the truck, and says in awe "Cybertruuuuuck!".
People buy them as big toys.
Sure, I'm in the Bay Area too. I see Rivians daily. Had an F-150 lightning pull up next to me yesterday. Every once in a while I'll see a Luicd whatever. Can't remember the last time I've seen a Cybertruck (on the road or broken down). In the past week I've seen a couple Hummer EVs. Hell I've seen more running Vinfasts than running Cybertrucks.
I see Rivians daily too. Might have seen an F150 Lightning, but I can’t tell them apart from any other truck, honestly.
Well they literally say "Lightning" on the side so it's pretty easy to tell when parks right next to you.
This serioualy reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer gets to design a car. I don't understand how anyone can drive this thing unironically.
I believe the guys that secretely want a F150 and remove the catalysator are the target demographic.
Musks resent policial turns fits the Cybertruck image too.
16 thousand Cybertrucks sold in Q3.
To compare, 3.9 million cars sold in Q3.
It sells for $100k. Bet all $100k cars move volume
> It sells for $100k.
That was just the top of the line Founders Edition, which is no longer for sale.
It's $80k now, and more like $70k for businesses (with tax incentives)
The reason theyre selling is likely due to a US small business tax loophole that allows you to write off things like range rovers and escalades as a business expense. coupled with US electric vehicle incentives state and federal, and its a pretty sweet deal on the most electric SUV per weight and length you can buy.
Honestly I fully expect to see these things crisping in the sunlit parking lot of a predatory auto lender in about five years, or rolling through the rough part of town on an 84 month co-signed auto loan with liability insurance only, wagon wheels, a lord beerus wrap and aftermarket stereo.
Like Range Rovers and Hummers they will be gobbled up by people who (with petite-bourgeoise socialism) can afford to buy the vehicle, but not maintain it. And if Youtube is any judge of build quality, this vehicle will start to fall apart the minute it exits the factory floor.
Literally every cybertruck I see has been fully wrapped with some business logo on it. I’m not sure I’ve yet seem one that wasn’t bought as a tax write off.
Literally every cybertruck I see has not had any business logo whatsoever on them.
How is buying a company vehicle a "tax loophole"?
Because you buy it as a "company vehicle" but 98% of it's miles are driven for your personal use. Whether the tax code considers that a loophole doesn't matter. It's a loophole to give a personal item the tax treatment of a business asset.
You wanted to buy the vehicle anyway, you were going to buy it anyway, but for some absurd reason you get to count a personal vehicle against your company's tax liability.
The IRS considers that tax evasion rather than a loophole, though. Unlike using a loophole, it's actually illegal. That said, you're right -- the practice isn't that rare and that's how it's done.
The business spends pretax dollars to pay the car payments instead of post tax W2 income or dividends/other cash disbursements that are taxed and then you can depreciate the company car against future income.
So? Businesses spend pre-tax dollars on most things they buy.
Most companies literally don't have the margins to be solvent if all their purchasing activity is subject to 20%+ tax.
I think the implication is that the small business owners use this tax structure, but then use the car as a personal vehicle rather than a business vehicle.
This thread is discussing how business owners use tax loopholes to buy personal vehicles as company assets to avoid paying with their personal post-tax money.
It’s obvious that most businesses can’t survive if their revenue is hit with income tax before expenses are paid, that’s why revenue is not taxed as income.
I would love to see the party registration breakdown of these recent buys.
It would be wonderful irony if suddenly buying EVs has become trendy among the right-leaning crowd.
I think it is trendy: Tucker Carlson has been promoting this truck on his YouTube channel in at least two 1 hour videos.
It is a big step from his humble origins promoting tanning balls machines.
Shocking if true! I see way more model ys, mustang Mach es, rivians, ev6s, well pretty much everything than cybertrucks...
All those vehicles have been selling for much longer (and the CT does not outsell the Y). The CT is the third-best selling vehicle for a single quarter, has only been on the market for a year, and production was pretty low for the first few months. The Mach-e has been on the market for over four years.
Does the concept of time exists?
Not on the internet.
Cybertruck reminds me of the Moon Patrol buggy.
Here's the thing about the Cybertruck, if you give it a decent paint job it actually looks kind of amazing...
https://pristineautospa.com/the-benefits-and-advantages-of-c...
It's the unfinished metal look that absolutely baffles me.
Tesla somehow made a vehicle that only looks its best when you put an aftermarket wrap/paintjob on it. It's almost impressive when you think about it.
It has been like this for a while. Teslas paint jobs were never amazing. I knew a guy that worked for a vehicle fleet management company. Most of the Teslas they were dealing with had such a bad paint job that they resorted to vinyl wrapping them.
Granted, this was a few years ago. I would hope they got their quality control processes dialed in by now
It is honestly baffling to me how many people have such strong opinions on the Cyber Truck. I don't personally like the aesthetic, but the majority of the reason I wouldn't get one is that I really don't like Teslas interior design/control scheme (which, much like apple, has lead a lot of manufacturers to copy them). I hate the 100% touch screen thing that they have decided on. But like...also, I just won't buy one. The fact that the car isn't my ideal one does not require me to despise it, or really care about it at all. There are a lot of cars that I don't like for one reason or another.
I mean, I guess I do get it: politics have poisoned people's brains and the fact that they don't like Musk's politics means that they have to have extremely strong opinions on everything connected to him, but it just doesn't seem worth the emotional effort.
And while I personally wouldn't ever buy one, it also is not surprising to me at all that a lot of people are buying them. I have no illusion that my personal tastes reflect the broader tastes of the car-buying public (if they did, then I would find it much easier to find a car that conforms to my preferences).
All of these things are by design. Musk’s strategy is to be in the news and for the product to be him.
He must have fired his PR team and gave up on the visionary genius schtick. Many people will hate that he’s revealed his true self to the world and it isn’t pretty.
But the car sucks too.
Have you actually driven one? The only thing I use the touch screen for on a near daily basis is the defroster in the winter and that is before I start driving. Everything else I need regularly does have physical controls, e.g. wipers and blower speed.
I do have a model that still has the stalks though, haven’t driven the stalkless type enough to comment.
I haven’t driven a cyber truck, but I was in a friend’s Model X the other day and the gear selector was on the touch screen.
> But like...also, I just won't buy one. The fact that the car isn't my ideal one does not require me to despise it, or really care about it at all. There are a lot of cars that I don't like for one reason or another.
Normally I'd agree with you, but driving a car brings with it with pretty extreme externalities - it's not the people driving these behemoths that I'm worried about, it's everyone else. Distracting touchscreens, an erratic self-driving AI, and a car made of sharp points. Doesn't bode well.
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Speak for yourself. I also hate the car.
Can you get insurance for them?
State Farm charges me marginally more for my CT than they do for my Model Y.
You can get insurance for anything if you pay enough.
Every single Cybertruck on the road has insurance. You cannot take delivery without insurance.
My witty retort would have been, “yeah, well, people bought the Pontiac Aztek, too.”, except Tesla has sold almost as many Cybertrucks in the 3rd quarter as Pontiac sold Azteks in an entire peak sales year.
Was it the Aztek that had really rabid fans? It was one of those boxy ones.
Never could figure out if they actually had really good reasons for it or were just trying to justify having bought an Aztek.
You're probably thinking of the Element. There were a lot of reasons it ended up with a rabid fan-base: Honda reliability, available manual transmission, available all-wheel drive. It was overall a really practical vehicle for those who wanted something with a good amount of interior space who didn't care about frills or luxury. Amusingly the Element was targeted at then-millennial young buyers looking for "adventure," but ended up being more popular amongst older people looking for a practical daily driver.
The Aztek had some similar positive properties, but was from one of the particularly bad eras of GM malaise and was highly unreliable. It's had a tiny bit of a cult resurgence recently, but it was never popular in the way the Element was.
I think you're right, it was the Element. People dismissed it as an Aztek but it had some features.
They all pale next to the true King of Vehicles - the Minivan.
If you look at an Aztek today it doesn't stand out as unusual at all.
It feels like the Aztek was ahead of its time and many mid-size SUVs have since caught up with its aesthetic.
The Aztek would have been a cult car if it wasn’t GM. It had the hoseable cabin, the center console was a removable cooler, etc.
But it had all of the stupid GMisms. Every expense was spared. It turned out to be like the malnourished love child of a Nissan Xterra and a Ford Windstar.
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Some small business owners are saving $10k annually with electricity costs at the rate they are using them.
Personally when I see them in person I think they look dumb and ridiculous. But I have never driven it. I do like all other current Teslas but wouldn’t buy one because Elon
But I was driving with a non-tech, non-online friend and she blurted out “Wow what an ugly car”, I looked over and it was a cybertruck - so I felt validate in my views
Alternate headline: Tesla sales dip below 50% of all EV sales.
Source: https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q3-2024-ev-sales/
I don't think "percent of EV sales" is a meaningful metric. We should want more EV brands! Tesla allows others to use their patents and chargers specifically because they want more EV brands to exist as well!
Percent of total auto sales is a far better metric.
This appears to be an alternate article, rather than an alternate headline for this one.
Cox Automotive generated the data[0] sourced in the second "paragraph" from the original article.
[0] https://www.coxautoinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Kelley...
Didn't mean to confuse, this is an alternate interpretation of recent EV sales data.
Stop these awful huge heavy monstrosities, there is no place for them in the cities. Why are you doing this to us? Sell them all to warlords in Caucasus.
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That thing is a monstrosity.
This to me implies that EVs have peaked and only the market for vanity vehicles remains at this time
Edit: I also have a suspicion that this is primarily due to them filling all the preorders. It’d be good to see a breakdown as to how many new orders people are placing after seeing this POS in real life.
Given you can cancel your preorder without losing any money, one would presume that the majority of pre orderers were happy with the results.
Not necessarily. People who had placed the preorder were looking for a vanity vehicle, which it sure is. And, those people are not going to cancel.
I’m interested in the customer base once that market is exhausted.
> This to me implies that EVs have peaked
That might be true, if the #2 selling car, and the #1 selling car were not also EVs.
The Model Y is currently the second best selling vehicle of all kinds, and it very likely is about to overtake the F-150 as the most-selling vehicle, the first time the F-150 has been dethroned in 46 straight years.
The sales numbers are saying we have not reached peak EV.
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