This isn’t news to anyone following the business. I’m pretty sure it was announced months ago that model X and Cybertruck (and maybe Model S too) were being discontinued.
And Model 3 and Y have always been 95%+ of the cars Tesla delivered.
They also told us zero emission cars would solve climate crisis. It is worse then ever, and electric cars are just used to push far righ extremism, chinese propaganda and dependency on russia!
Oh man... if you want to start a professional career as internet troll you have a really long road ahead of you. You can do it though, never give up! :D
Just to be clear, the earliest possible date for no further increase in temperature under the most optimistic IPCC scenarios is 2050. Actual decline to pre industrial levels at best around 2100.
The Musk strategy is to quietly drop failures/broken promises from a previous hype cycle after kicking off a brand new hype cycle to take its place.
This is entirely consistent with his tried and true strategy to constantly redirect attention forward to the distant future, and never stay idle long enough to encourage looking back at the ever growing pile of ideas that didn't work out.
> A people mover that moves the minimum of people (2)
You meant maximum? Though minimum would be fun, too: taxi won’t start unless you agree to socialize and chat with a random stranger. As soon as silence is detected it pulls over and the ride ends.
Ah yes. That makes sense now. But I guess the minimum of people for taxis would be one in general. A small taxi for one person is plausible. Zero won’t work as it would be a delivery vehicle only then.
90% of taxi rides are 1 person 95% 2 so its based on, you know, business intelligence rather than your hot take which is anti Elon rhetoric like most of this thread or any for that matter here (keep thinking this is reddit)
The Zeekr with sliding doors that Waymo is using seems like a way better concept for a robotaxi. Still fits in a standard parking space but can carry a group at need without being terribly inefficient for a single person.
Worth clicking. Ton of people who actually want the cybertruck to continue. I can't believe there are still people who still didn't realize what colossal idiot Musk is.
I mean as much as I love thd idea of actually doing something bonkers, the lack of sales seemed inevitable to most I assume, so that should come as no surprise. Should have stayed a concept car.
I wouldn’t be surprised if cost were the only reason its sales weren’t even lower. If it’s expensive it’s at least a plausible status symbol. At a reasonable price it’s just an incompetently designed utility vehicle.
In what world would a Cybercab displace something like a Model 3 or Y? It's a two door coupe. Are you thinking automation? That's already coming to the 3/Y.
The Model Y charging curve is notably bad, I agree, in particular when equipped with the big Texas batteries Tesla wanted for the Cybertruck. But the counterpoint is that even peaking out at 250kW, I usually only spend 10-15 minutes charging my Model 3. The weak charging curve only exposes itself as an issue on marathon road trips where you are running it up from 10-80 repeatedly on a tight schedule.
And in any case, the better charging curve hasn't helped the competition put a meaningful dent in Model Y sales. The leading competitor is the Ford MME, and the charging curve on it is possibly weaker than the Model Y. It still outsells the Ioniq 5.
I can't find the post where the guy wanted something like Uber, but the driver shows up in a beat up pickup truck, and just agrees with everything you say, "Hell yeah, brother!"
It's pretty perfect as a 2nd family car (and I may buy it for exactly that if the production model reviews are good) but yeah, it's a tough sell for a primary car with that range. Assuming they manage to meet their sales targets and stay in business, I bet it'll improve rapidly over the next couple of model years.
What are your use cases that need more range than 200 miles? I used to drive a nissan leaf with 90mi range in southern california and only had to stop to charge outside the home a few times for days where I went between LA and Orange County. Otherwise I never really cut it close - and this was with the slowest wall outlet charging at home.
Personally I live in the Midwest. I make fairly frequent drives of around 200 miles to visit friends and family. I drive a pluggable hybrid. EV charging stations exist at both destinations, but are very spotty in between.
During the winter, range plummets. That 200 isn't getting me all the way from A to B. Having a hybrid fueling option is just much more practical for me.
I'm not saying I couldn't get it done, I could, but sitting for hours waiting for some slow-ass EV charging station in the middle of winter is not bullshit I'm signing up for.
Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes and it has 300+ mile range and 135kWh battery. And its still a 400v architecture
> Slow ass ev charging? My f150 charge from almost dead to almost full in 35-40 minutes
Unfortunately a lot of people only really have a level1 class charger at home and that's a 10+ hour charge on a F150. Probably somewhere around 5-7 hours for a level 2 charger but that's only a "given" on new construction.
If you live close to a level3 charger than you can get topped up in under an hour but that also isn't as convenient as plugging in when you get home and forgetting about it since you have to drive to the charger.
Not that I am trying to argue with you, I'm not, but people have a "gas station mindset" about EVs and it leads to confusion, so let me spell out how this trip would look with a "charging station" mindset:
Leave home at 100%/200mi
Drive to destination (approx 3 hours) arrive with ~0%/0mi
Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi
Begin driving back home with a 20%/40mi deficit of range.
Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
Charge for 20%/40mi (~10 minutes)
Complete drive home and fully charge again.
Total extra time on 400 mile trip vs gas (assuming 300 mi tank range, so 1 fill-up): ~5 minutes (or 8 minutes if you stop for a quick charge on the way so you don't have to white knuckle down to 0%).
For cold driving in the winter, it would probably be closer to an extra 20 minutes.
I love my EV, but you're really not being at all realistic here. That's more of a perfect possible case scenario based on numbers from a website, not a real world scenario. I take a ~350 mile drive to Milwaukee in our 300 mile range car (2025 Ioniq 5) and we have to stop three times on the trip in each direction.
You're not actually going to get 200mi from 100% when you have 2 people and baggage loaded and traffic exists, and no one sane would be comfortable arriving with literally 0% battery. Charging stops take minimum 10 minutes just accounting for getting off & back on the freeway; usually more like 30-40 minutes because why would you not just charge back up to 80% since you're stopped anyway? Your destination hotel almost certainly does not have a charger, or if they do they charge an idle fee, so you can't just leave it overnight, so really that has to count as another charging stop.
For a 200mi each way trip, realistically you're talking probably two 30 minute charge stops in each direction. That's not completely unacceptable (eg just have some lunch at one of the stops) but your 5-8 minute quote is absolutely not realistic. A bump up to 300mi range would drop that down to one stop in each direction, which would be a real benefit.
Sorry to be blunt, but if you need to stop 3 times to charge to go 350 miles in an 300 mile range EV, you are doing something severely wrong or there is a problem with your car.
The only way I can make this happen is the combination of driving in freezing temperatures, with the heat blasting the whole time, while doing ~80mph.
A drop from 80% to 20% in a 300mi car is 0.6 * 300 = 180 miles. It's a 350 mile trip. 350 / 180 = 2 80-to-20 discharges, and that's assuming no little detours for stopping at a cheese store or whatever. So we could do it in 2 stops if we were OK arriving with 20%, but we need some charge at the destination for getting around MKE, so it's three stops. And yeah, we drive 75 because that's the speed of traffic and the HVAC does whatever it does to make us comfortable.
There are 30-50 mile (>10%) stretches with no fast chargers in WI. I'm not going to risk being stranded if one is broken and I need to make it to the next one. I'm not really interested in nibbling around the edges & hypermiling to save one half-hour stop.
I occasionally drive 300 miles in an EV rated for ~319 miles, and I have to stop once in each direction, but I also have to charge at my destination. There's a Tesla station near there, and the rates are fantastic if you get there before 7 AM.
I keep it at 65 and let the heater do whatever it wants to do so that people are comfortable. Temperature, elevation differences, and wind definitely change things.
There's a section of the drive where I average something like 1.3 mi/kWh on the way up the mountain, but something like 6 mi/kWh on the way down. On the return trip, it's kind of fun to see the guess-o-meter show 110 miles remaining over the course of 25 miles, or have it actually increase.
I'm sure that gas vehicles follow a similar pattern, but I don't pay attention to usage like I do in an EV.
A few things -- I am not op, but I do drive an EV and sometimes drive it through some rural areas.
> Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
This is the aspect which isn't really possible in very rural areas. There is nowhere to stop at to charge, or the options are very limited. It's getting better, but it's the reason why people want more range.
Plus, in the midwest, the ranges tank in the dead of winter, due to sub-zero temperatures and headwinds.
If you would be using it just locally, as opposed for road trips, note that it has an LFP battery. LFP batteries are perfectly happy to be always charged to 100% and discharged down to 10% (lower is OK but most people want to keep some spare in case they aren't able to charge when they expected to).
Lithium nickel batteries suffer accelerated aging at high charge and at low charge, so it is usually recommended to stay in the 80-20% range, only going to 100% shortly before a road trip.
A Slate with a 200 mile range operated 100-10% would give you 180 miles between charges. That would be the same range as a lithium nickel battery EV with a 300 mile range operated 80-20%.
I only have one car at a time (not married). I frequently visit family that lives about 80 miles away that live in a charger desert. I used to own a Chevy Bolt and it could get me to those family and back on one 100% charge with a little bit for grocery runs etc. while there. Even that I wish had like maybe another 20 miles of range lol.
Exactly. 200mi EPA is essentially 130-150 highway in winter, which is stopping for charging every 2hrs going 65 - not feasible for anyone living in the midwest.
EV trucks sound good but you can't haul anything heavy or your range plumments. Unless the battery is huge but that is weight. A truck that can't haul is just for show.
Even gasoline trucks are stupid no low end torque, you need to rev it. I had a 6 cylinder Cummins diesel and at 500rpm idle on a hill it could move the 10,000 pound truck up the hill.
I used to think this way, but it turns out that EV trucks hold up on range better than one would expect thanks to regenerative breaking. The added weight of cargo requires more energy to get up to speed, but you get most of that back when breaking, so it's not lost energy. Meanwhile, a gas or diesel truck's range plummets when hauling since all the energy used to accelerate the load is lost in breaking. I'm not saying that EV hauling is perfect or a solved problem, but that the trades offs aren't as intuitive as they might seem.
Trailers may not have regenerative braking today, but that's a chicken-and-egg problem; trailers already have wiring hookups, and once EVs become the default for personal vehicles, it's easy to imagine that regenerative braking will become standard.
I feel like this is less true nowadays. Or at least, less of a concern.
I have a Rivian and my 400mi range gets cut significantly (down to 200 or 300, depending on the trip) when I have 7k lbs on the back, but never enough to stop me from towing. And with good charging in the area, it's a non issue. And waaaaayyyyy cheaper than diesel.
Maybe if I was towing daily, I'd feel different. Your mileage may vary. (Couldn't resist the closer!)
Edit: btw instant torque is a game changer. You can't beat an EV on that front
I'm looking foward to the arrival later this month of my 280PS ""compact"" EV (Abarth 600E), which will be roughly as much power as every other car I've owned put together.
I borrow my brother’s truck all the time to transport various DIY supplies. I could probably get a roof rack for my car for things like plywood and drywall, but borrowing the truck is easier.
Some gas engines have low end torque, big block V8s and anything turbo. But yeah if hauling uphill is your thing diesel is a no brainer. It would be great if our half ton and midsize trucks had diesel options but as usual other countries have better options.
Personally I'm going hybrid truck next time. The advantages of electric (torque, 240V inverter) with the flexibility of gas. Payload is lower but I'm hoping they fix that by the time I need a new truck
Yet again I consider the disparities between the US market, as described by commentors, and the UK market. Cybertrucks never made it to road legality here, and would probably have required an HGV license (if the maximum manufacturer permitted vehicle+load weight is over 3500kg).
The US style pickup is pretty rare. There are some Ford Ranger/Raptors, which look comically large but are apparently smaller than the common F150 (??). People who need a truck bed get a Ford Transit or similar with the bed variant.
Agricultural use cases are handled with actual tractors (who can use the cheaper "red" diesel!)
The pickup in the US is a staple of the plumber, roofer and other tradesmen, and as you say; this use case as a tradesman’s tool is broadly filled by the panel van in Europe.
To some extent you even see this in New York too. Certainly there’s a need for these vehicles in rural areas where road conditions may be poor or absent altogether and the work needs done regardless.
The cybertruck on the other hand isn’t a work vehicle, it’s bought by the same people who buy the super kitted out models and who have no interest in using it for work, let alone taking the thing off road.
Ultimately I think of it as the modern Delorean, but I don’t think it will engender the same level of good will when it ages out and becomes less common due to the increasingly negative profile of Musk and his connections to the politics in which the vehicle was created.
I really thought it would have had a lot of potential for cheaper manufacturing. No paint process is huge. And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
The original wasn't what shipped. From what I read the cheaper easier process wasn't, which isn't unusual.
It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.
Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
Cheap hackable electric work truck (I imagine chassis with basic cabin that you can expand in various ways, like the EU van options have like half a dozen chassis) would be great but it's not something Tesla ever wants to make
Who are their customer base? Musk seems to have decided to fire his actual customer base, but getting a new one more ideologically aligned with him hasn't quite worked out.
>Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
95% of their cars sold have been in the $30k to $60k range. They have long been the best bang for the buck electric car (in the US, since BYD isn’t allowed.
I know its not fashionable to have such pesky concerns as priority in US, but pedestrian safety was simply non-present, hence it was banned all over Europe. Not missing it here, not missing that fugly ego whim of a sick man at all.
There's a comparison that's been making the rounds on social media for a while.
In once panel, there's the Cybertruck whose owner bragged about it carrying a large round hay bale (weighs around 1,500lbs) with the suspension looking like it was about to die. Next to it is a shot of a circa-1980 Ford F250 carrying three of the same bales and sitting perfectly level. TBF, the F250 probably had air bags in the rear suspension, but still...
That thing is only a "truck" because they decided to call it that.
Even modern trucks have turned into giant "luxury" vehicles that can't haul much more than the smaller trucks of 30 years ago. For most trucks bought by families, the heaviest thing they lug around is cat litter.
There's a pattern here: when an Elon Project is successful, he jumps in with Elon innovations, like cyber truck. The next example that will follow this pattern is building a rocket that's too big for orbital payloads, but takes 22 refueling flights to get beyond orbit.
What do you mean too big for orbital payloads? Mass to low earth orbit is what matters, which starship is well optimized for. You could always put a tiny third stage on there to go places, but that is back to the apollo style yeeting a tiny amount of mass somewhere else and would not help with getting serious tonnage to the moon and mars
For a company, matching products and services to demand is what matters. Being able to get more mass into orbit only matters if enough people are willing to pay to get stuff there. The analogy is that jumbo jets exist, but almost no passenger flights bother with jumbo jets because it's not economical. Unlike with civilian aviation we have yet to observe a natural experiment which would allow us to place an economically practical ceiling on rocket payload size, but it very much still remains plausible that something Falcon 9-sized is actually the sweet spot, especially given that Starlink is the only commercial offering that's pushing the existing Falcon 9 capacity. And yes, this completely ignores any mention of going to the moon or Mars, because although there may be incentives to do so (e.g. scientific incentives, political incentives, philosophical incentives), there is no economic incentive other than getting some government contracts which will be just as short-lived as Apollo was once the public loses interest.
Starlink is SpaceX's biggest revenue stream by far, and they are retiring Falcon 9 and quitting the contract / launch market, so they are matching very well with their own product, which is what they actually care about?
Same. Initially I was optimistic about the Cybertruck because I though “flat metal panels and no paint is going to make both manufacturing and repairs so much easier and cheaper”.
Paint has been well studied. We know how to do it really cheap and automated these days. Cheap is relative. I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed. But on a scale of factory and for how long it will last, that's cheap.
Flat metal is more expensive than curved metal. Curved metal, you design the curves to help support the stress points: you can get by with thinner sheets. Flat metal requires thicker heavier more expensive sheets of sheet metal in order to be strong enough.
Curved metal also lets you design the whole thing to be more aerodynamic. which is an important consideration even with something as un-aerodynamic as a truck.
There were no flat panels. That was a sales pitch. In reality, a slight curve to a panel adds so much strength that it can be made considerably lighter/cheaper than a flat panel of sufficient strength. Flat panels also tend to dent inwards very easily, which is not a good look for a car. Then there is the issue of thermal expansion. A pre-bent bit of metal will expand in a predictable way. A dead-flat panel could buckle in multiple unexpected ways.
I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.
how you repair steel panel and also make it look nice ?
...you don't. You replace it in whole. You can't use filler to mask small dents and paint over it, if you want it to look as before, you have to pretty much replace it.
They built that truck backwards and upside down. The single-piece forged aluminum frame was basically impossible to repair and brittle. Typical truck frames flex, they're part of the suspension. For small accidents, the frame can be bent back. The CT would just crack, requiring extensive aluminum welding to fix which is waay harder than welding a steel frame.
Either you have a modern expensive car and insurance which knows how to handle it properly, or it doesn't matter anymore and you got to a cheap car doctor.
Speaking out of my ass here, but I would not be surprised if it's much cheaper to paint cheap stamped steel, compared to using more expensive stainless steel that's treated to remove all surface marring/scarring from the stamping process. Those panels don't come out all brushed from the metal presses...
What happens if you scrape your fridge getting it into the kitchen?
You go to the DIY shop and buy a tin of white spray paint.
What happens if you scrape your brushed stainless fridge getting it into the kitchen?
Well, now you get to either live with it, or come up with some really clever ideas on polishing out the scratch and then sanding it back to disguise it with the rest of the surface which will never really look right.
Painted piece of plastic gonna be cheaper than sheet of stainless steel. Stainless is significantly more expensive than typical materials used on car, which would be normal steel or plastic depending on panel.
Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).
Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper
"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about
They developed, at great cost, the process used for the cars with the giga press and the plastic. It would've been a fine process for an inexpensive truck.
The steel exoskeleton idea didn't survive to production. The production truck has a mix of aluminum castings and welded steel unibody, with the stainless panels just acting as the skin. Maybe they bring some structural rigidity, but not like the origami plan that was originally discussed.
The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.
It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.
It’s staggering how much money they wasted because Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts. It was years late because stainless steel is so much harder to work with, especially when it has so many complicated geometries, and every one of those delays was a chance for him to say “maybe the people I hired for their expertise know something I don’t” rather than “I’m the boss, make it work”.
They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
> They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
They could have Roadstered it.
Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter.
The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
A real expert told Elon that self landing rockets were possible over chutes. The retconning to build the myth of Elon is ridiculous.
Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.
Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.
Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.
So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.
> Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.
How much money have Americans gifted NASA to pay Russia for launching payloads ton Soyuz rockets?
And you could just as easily frame it as Musk "gifting" something to the US government by offering cheaper launches than Roscosmos and Boeing/ULA, and developing new capabilities cheaper than Boeing
No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).
"What I’m discovering in the market is that SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream, which is good. We should all dream. I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? First of all, you don't wake people up. They have to wake up on their own."
Part of the delay was also the 48V architecture. So in addition to the obvious new things like stainless steel panels they also had to redesign mundane parts like window motors and interior lighting. The Cybercab is also using a 48V architecture so even though they've never talked about it being an R&D platform maybe they'll retcon it that way.
That forces a redesign of all the car electronics. While it might well be a good idea anyway from an R&D point of view it's undeniably expensive.
(I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)
I mean once you buy the tooling, it’s still probably cheaper to produce stainless steel trucks than paint normal steel. I agree on everything else though
If that’s true it would only be the case if you could amortize that tooling across enough vehicles. Selling 10k-20k per year from a production line planned with a capacity of 125k per year won’t get you there.
The original design is what gave them millions of pre-orders, it was the reduction in range and increase in cost that made most people cancel those pre-orders.
I wonder how many people liked the design vs tolerated it? If Ford offered a cybertruck trim on the F-150 without changing the price would people buy it?
No doubt there is some demand for an "out there" design, but I'd have to guess that the projected $40K price was itself a large part of the attraction.
The design looks much better rendered on screen than in real life.
I thought the early images looked amazing but I see them all the time in real life (a few people in my neighborhood own them) and they just look so stupid on the road.
I doubt that replacing painted regular steel with fancy stainless steel is going to be cheap. Paint is expensive, but so is stainless steel. I also can't imagine the "origami" technique to be cheaper than stamping, the reason they suggested that is because their fancy stainless steel can't be stamped. And in the end, Tesla couldn't even do it, so they glued the parts on...
I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.
> And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.
At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.
A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper.
A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.
Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.
Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.
I think the cybertruck appeals to a very narrow market. It's too expensive for most people who just want a big vehicle to get groceries and run kids to around, and doesn't really have any qualities that make it useful for commercial use, outside of being a rolling billboard. Unless it just really appeals to you and you have cash to burn, I don't know why you'd buy a cybertruck over a Ram/Ford/GM. A RAM 1500 w/ etorque costs half a cyber truck and gets decent fuel mileage... If you need a work truck a RAM 3500 is cheaper and will reliably haul 30-40k loads 12 hours a day and the warranty isn't void the second your tires touch dirt.
Trucks are a status symbol in the USA. EVs were becoming acceptable in the mainstram, hence the initial surge in sales, but that has cooled off since 2024. Now very few outside of the big tech cities are spending money on EVs. Hence the fate of the electric F-150 as well.
Look at the F150 lightening to see the failure of electric trucks. Chevy, Dodge and Ford all have, and it shows. Chevy's electric Silverado has a lot more range because more people want a truck for towing than the 1% that hacker news claims, and so range became and issue. Ford and Dodge are instead looking at plug in hybrids for the future: use an engine when towing, and battery for acceleration and shorter trips.
Musk was a fool to mistake the hollering of a small group of enthusiasts for that of the truck-buying U.S. population. Nobody was actually wanting for the CyberTruck. He should've listened to his marketing people and not be guided by social media and his right-wing instinct.
Then again, he's a con-man who's now quietly distancing himself from CyberTruck ("I had nothing to do with it") and moving on to the next con-trick: the CyberCab.
Well, if you're dreaming, instead of a cyber truck at 40K, wouldn't you want instead a Chauffeured Rolls-Royce and the Swedish bikini team to keep it maintained?
No, Id like a cyber truck with 500 mile range for $40k which also is a boat and is bulletproof, all as originally promised. That would be awesome. The product we got in reality is a terrible shadow of the original idea.
When I want to go to the symphony I want a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. I don't care how it is maintained, that is the chauffeurs job. If I want to see under dressed girls I'll go to a strip club after if, or maybe hire an escort to sit next to me.
When I want a truck to "go mudding", the fun is driving it through the mud. Maybe my chauffeur is tows the truck to the mud pit, but I'm getting it stuck in the mud myself. Sometimes the local cheerleaders are holding a fund raiser and I'll pay them to clean the truck after I'm done.
When I want a truck because I need to haul things - I want to pay someone else to take care of it when I'm not around.
In reality I'm not rich enough for the above. I do a lot of maintenance myself because I can't afford to pay someone. I have one vehicle that is a bad compromise for everything because I can't afford more.
In reality I have moral objections to under dressed girls and so I'm not going to the strip club or hiring escorts. But if I was that type I wouldn't be paying them to maintain my car. I have had the cheerleaders clean my car while I watched, but I wasn't paying them to be "eye candy" even though I did enjoy looking, and the next week is was the boys wrestling team (which I don't enjoy looking at) that got paid just as much for the same job.
In reality I'd prefer public transportation, but that is a different story.
Based on the lie about how much it would cost, how many they could produce, and how soon they would be delivered...
Even very ugly cars will sell if they give you a really good deal for the money. The Cybertruck at $39,999 was a shockingly good deal. It was just a lie.
No one is arguing that, but in turn you cant argue there was real buzz and popularity of the product on announcement. Whether that was caused by a lie or not is irrelevant, it was popular big time before anyone knew what the real product was going to be like.
Outside of certain kinds of construction contractors, I rarely if ever see pickup trucks used for this purpose.
This anecdote might indicate why: We recently had a bunch of work done on our house. The siding crew had a pickup truck, and every morning the very first thing they did was unload the entire contents of the truck into our back yard. The plumbers and electricians would just get the stuff they were actually using and then lock the van.
ok ok, i get the message- never try anything new, never follow your passion! you all took the easy bet and now you’re gloating. look at all the comments and ask if you’re adding to the conversation?
recognize that your subjective tastes are not universal.
recognize that, like one decent commentator mentioned, no paint is genuinely good in many regards.
recognize the cybercab is probably already good enough and is rapidly getting better.
some minor panels were glued on the cybertruck while while most were not- be fair.
let me repeat, be fair!
There was nothing "new" in cybertruck. Delorean had bare metal panels!
It wasn't a good truck, vehicle, EV, anything. It was Elon's crayon drawing turned car. That's not "innovation" we should applaud
It was the first fully drive-by-wire production car, and it was the first car with steerable rear wheels. That's an innovation, on one of the worst vehicle of all time.
Not even close - there are probably at least a dozen 4 wheel steering cars going back to the mid 80's starting with things like Nissan Skyline, Honda Prelude, etc.
don’t get lost in the minutiae, these are banner features by there are hundreds of little details that matter perhaps more. and just like the iphone had nothing radically new, it’s the synthesis and implementation that matter more. a strong argument is that that tried to do too much. the truck has true issues but many have been resolved. show me the car that i should be getting excited about. i just get so exhausted by the selective hole-poking.
the cybertruck in its whole was new in that there is nothing else like it. even the ss panels are different alloy and rear steering is differently implemented. The polarization is probably its only real downfall- essentially suffering from ridicule and too often actual harassment. your argument against it is that you think it was drawn with a crayon(subjective and childish)when the motivation was to simplify the manufacturing>cost thru folding. and last, “It wasn't a good truck, vehicle, EV, anything”- what does that add to the conversation?
Surprise: a car that can only be legally sold and used on mainstream roads in the US makes poor sales, even in the US, after its design was widely ridiculed.
The Model 3 was a masterpiece of design, the Cybertruck is more like Cybercuck.
I legitimately would have bought it if they made it look more like a regular pickup truck, and if Elon didn't go full crazy.
I did buy a Model-Y shortly before his Trump endorsement, and then sold it for technical reasons.
On a cold January morning, I was pulling up to a stop-sign, didn't have any autopilot turned on, and the car accelerated.
I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car. They're honestly kind of dangerous vehicles. The average person can't handle the responsibility of a self-driving vehicle.
I told all of my friends and family that I would not recommend the vehicle yet to a non-technical person, even when I was myself driving it and loving it.
Setting your experience aside, my national transport agency in Denmark recently approved Tesla full self driving because the data confirmed that it’s safer than the average driver. I think it’s both true that these cars can fault, and that they’re safer on average than humans. To be clear, Denmark is not alone. Many European countries have approved it for the same reason, and many more are evaluating. Holland is the toughest to pass, and they passed.
> I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car.
There's a shit ton of software between the gas pedal and the machinery of just about every car on the road today whether that be an ICE, hybrid, or EV. We're a long ways away from the go-go pedal directly pulling a cable opening the throttle plate.
Behold the Toyota Hilux [1], a truck so reliable that it is the truck of choice in many developed nations and even less developed ones. It's so cheap and reliable it became the platform for a war [2]. It also has a truck bed equivalent to a Ford F150, a vehicle significantly larger. But you can't buy a new Hilux or equivalent in the US because cars younger than 25 years cannot legally be imported [3] (to stop grey imports on Mercedes in the 1980s, originally) and because of CAFE standards [4].
Electric vehicles obviously don't have the hurdle of meeting emissions standards so Tesla, or any other company really, had (and has) the opportunity to create a small, cheap utility truck that no gas-powered vehicle can compete with. This is what the Cybertruck should've been.
There have been breakdowns of the Cybertruck and it is such an incredibly bad design. Things like the weight of stainless steel panels but with an aluminum frame. Why is that a problem? Because aluminum is prone to catastrophic failure with the up and down motion of towing a heavy load than stainless steel simply isn't [5].
The rumor has been that the only thing propping up Cybertruck demand is Elon forcing his own companies like SpaceX to buy them [6]. Other than that, the Cybertruck became a weird political statement [7]. Those people are getting crucified on resale. It's even a trend on Tiktok and elsewhere to watch these trade in videos. People who paid $150k+ are getting <$70k less than 2 years later.
Anyway, I'm shocked no US manufacturer is tackling the EV small utility truck market. Yes there was the F150 Lightning but it's still too big (and thus expensive).
Oh man, I was wondering if anyone was gonna bring up Slate.
I try not to get excited about stuff, but the idea of The Next Big Thing in Cars being a total lack of garbage nonsense screens and giving us back CRANK CRANK WINDOWS -- this is pure joy.
Wheels. Seats. Motor[1]. Box to keep rain off. Done.
Oh you attached a bed to that? Double awesome.
[1] Enough top end cruise speed for American interstates.
The Tacoma is more like the modern Hilux. I should've been more specific. The 1980s and 1990s Hilux weighed in at 1000-1200kg. Now it's 1700-2100kg. It's a lot bigger truck. Those 1980s and 1990s trucks were indestructible and so easy to service.
Now I get why the gas powered Hilux has changed. Emissions standards have changed. Fuel efficiency is more important. Modern cars are full of computers and microcontrollers. But an EV is relatively simple. It's one of the big advantages. Yes you have an OS and it's not just turning the ignition but the drive system itself is fairly simple, the thing that turns battery power into movement (compared to ICEs). No moving parts (in the engine), basically.
You could absolutely make a small EV utility truck. Remember that part of the reason why people were excited about the Cybertruck when it was announced was the price point (~$35k). Of course it turned out to be 3 times that.
Look at what BYD is doing [1]. Now these are PHEVs rather than pure EVs. Other automakers are making smaller pure EV trucks.
> A Tacoma is basically the US model of the Hilux.
This is a very common misconception Americans believe about the hilux. I’ve owned multiple generations of both on different continents.
The Tacoma is much heavier, but has a much lower payload rating. It has way less torque, and gets much worse fuel economy. The Tacoma only comes with a regular bed- no cab chassis, no tray back, etc.
The Tacoma is much more expensive. The Tacoma only exists in two countries. The hilux is one of only a few truly global vehicles.
One is a genuine work utility vehicle, one is a lifestyle vehicle.
They have never shared a frame, engine, transmission, axles or body panels.
618 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadOn the surface, it seems to take the wind out of their sails.
They told us the cybertruck was awesome.
They told us flying cars soon.
Now we see the fate of the first promise.
I would have delayed this announcement for as long as possible after the flying car show from a PR perspective.
Which makes me think this announcement is throwing a bone to the financial bean counters ahead of the potential merger with SpaceX.
Cleaning both companies books of fat before the big game.
And Model 3 and Y have always been 95%+ of the cars Tesla delivered.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/31x-4YJUBNE
Literally nothing Tesla promised is coming true.
The Musk strategy is to quietly drop failures/broken promises from a previous hype cycle after kicking off a brand new hype cycle to take its place.
This is entirely consistent with his tried and true strategy to constantly redirect attention forward to the distant future, and never stay idle long enough to encourage looking back at the ever growing pile of ideas that didn't work out.
Hah, feels like when someone says they're going to stop dating the unemployed slob to focus on dating the alcoholic.
A taxi with only 2 doors, what an improvement!
You meant maximum? Though minimum would be fun, too: taxi won’t start unless you agree to socialize and chat with a random stranger. As soon as silence is detected it pulls over and the ride ends.
Seems like that might have something to do with it.
No added information, with a thread full of ad hominem attacks
Also i wonder whether in 5-7 years Model 3 and Y will be around
Also Model Y/3 battery/charging is ancient at this point. It hasn’t had any meaningful improvements for 8 years now.
Look up a Model Y’s charging curve it’s horrible. There are cars out there with much more consistent ones, 400 kW charging, much more range etc etc
The Model Y charging curve is notably bad, I agree, in particular when equipped with the big Texas batteries Tesla wanted for the Cybertruck. But the counterpoint is that even peaking out at 250kW, I usually only spend 10-15 minutes charging my Model 3. The weak charging curve only exposes itself as an issue on marathon road trips where you are running it up from 10-80 repeatedly on a tight schedule.
And in any case, the better charging curve hasn't helped the competition put a meaningful dent in Model Y sales. The leading competitor is the Ford MME, and the charging curve on it is possibly weaker than the Model Y. It still outsells the Ioniq 5.
During the winter, range plummets. That 200 isn't getting me all the way from A to B. Having a hybrid fueling option is just much more practical for me.
I'm not saying I couldn't get it done, I could, but sitting for hours waiting for some slow-ass EV charging station in the middle of winter is not bullshit I'm signing up for.
Unfortunately a lot of people only really have a level1 class charger at home and that's a 10+ hour charge on a F150. Probably somewhere around 5-7 hours for a level 2 charger but that's only a "given" on new construction.
If you live close to a level3 charger than you can get topped up in under an hour but that also isn't as convenient as plugging in when you get home and forgetting about it since you have to drive to the charger.
Leave home at 100%/200mi
Drive to destination (approx 3 hours) arrive with ~0%/0mi
Charge while at destination to 80%/160mi
Begin driving back home with a 20%/40mi deficit of range.
Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
Charge for 20%/40mi (~10 minutes)
Complete drive home and fully charge again.
Total extra time on 400 mile trip vs gas (assuming 300 mi tank range, so 1 fill-up): ~5 minutes (or 8 minutes if you stop for a quick charge on the way so you don't have to white knuckle down to 0%).
For cold driving in the winter, it would probably be closer to an extra 20 minutes.
You're not actually going to get 200mi from 100% when you have 2 people and baggage loaded and traffic exists, and no one sane would be comfortable arriving with literally 0% battery. Charging stops take minimum 10 minutes just accounting for getting off & back on the freeway; usually more like 30-40 minutes because why would you not just charge back up to 80% since you're stopped anyway? Your destination hotel almost certainly does not have a charger, or if they do they charge an idle fee, so you can't just leave it overnight, so really that has to count as another charging stop.
For a 200mi each way trip, realistically you're talking probably two 30 minute charge stops in each direction. That's not completely unacceptable (eg just have some lunch at one of the stops) but your 5-8 minute quote is absolutely not realistic. A bump up to 300mi range would drop that down to one stop in each direction, which would be a real benefit.
The only way I can make this happen is the combination of driving in freezing temperatures, with the heat blasting the whole time, while doing ~80mph.
Also using heat instead of seat warmers just hurts you for the same level of comfort.
I keep it at 65 and let the heater do whatever it wants to do so that people are comfortable. Temperature, elevation differences, and wind definitely change things.
There's a section of the drive where I average something like 1.3 mi/kWh on the way up the mountain, but something like 6 mi/kWh on the way down. On the return trip, it's kind of fun to see the guess-o-meter show 110 miles remaining over the course of 25 miles, or have it actually increase.
I'm sure that gas vehicles follow a similar pattern, but I don't pay attention to usage like I do in an EV.
> Stop anywhere/anytime after you get below 60%/120mi
This is the aspect which isn't really possible in very rural areas. There is nowhere to stop at to charge, or the options are very limited. It's getting better, but it's the reason why people want more range.
Plus, in the midwest, the ranges tank in the dead of winter, due to sub-zero temperatures and headwinds.
Lithium nickel batteries suffer accelerated aging at high charge and at low charge, so it is usually recommended to stay in the 80-20% range, only going to 100% shortly before a road trip.
A Slate with a 200 mile range operated 100-10% would give you 180 miles between charges. That would be the same range as a lithium nickel battery EV with a 300 mile range operated 80-20%.
Even gasoline trucks are stupid no low end torque, you need to rev it. I had a 6 cylinder Cummins diesel and at 500rpm idle on a hill it could move the 10,000 pound truck up the hill.
I have a Rivian and my 400mi range gets cut significantly (down to 200 or 300, depending on the trip) when I have 7k lbs on the back, but never enough to stop me from towing. And with good charging in the area, it's a non issue. And waaaaayyyyy cheaper than diesel.
Maybe if I was towing daily, I'd feel different. Your mileage may vary. (Couldn't resist the closer!)
Edit: btw instant torque is a game changer. You can't beat an EV on that front
My EV has 470PS, it can hauul plenty heavy for long range. Weights 2.2 tons.
Even the Ford F-150 Lightning was already able to pull 4.5t and has a range of 300 miles.
It just has to look manly and rugged, any actual offroad or hauling capabilities are at best a nice-to-have.
I borrow my brother’s truck all the time to transport various DIY supplies. I could probably get a roof rack for my car for things like plywood and drywall, but borrowing the truck is easier.
Personally I'm going hybrid truck next time. The advantages of electric (torque, 240V inverter) with the flexibility of gas. Payload is lower but I'm hoping they fix that by the time I need a new truck
The US style pickup is pretty rare. There are some Ford Ranger/Raptors, which look comically large but are apparently smaller than the common F150 (??). People who need a truck bed get a Ford Transit or similar with the bed variant.
Agricultural use cases are handled with actual tractors (who can use the cheaper "red" diesel!)
To some extent you even see this in New York too. Certainly there’s a need for these vehicles in rural areas where road conditions may be poor or absent altogether and the work needs done regardless.
The cybertruck on the other hand isn’t a work vehicle, it’s bought by the same people who buy the super kitted out models and who have no interest in using it for work, let alone taking the thing off road.
Ultimately I think of it as the modern Delorean, but I don’t think it will engender the same level of good will when it ages out and becomes less common due to the increasingly negative profile of Musk and his connections to the politics in which the vehicle was created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_T90 (EV version)
It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.
Cheap hackable electric work truck (I imagine chassis with basic cabin that you can expand in various ways, like the EU van options have like half a dozen chassis) would be great but it's not something Tesla ever wants to make
95% of their cars sold have been in the $30k to $60k range. They have long been the best bang for the buck electric car (in the US, since BYD isn’t allowed.
Just because the big batteries are so dangerous?
It’s like they completely forgot the “what do people need” phase of product management.
In once panel, there's the Cybertruck whose owner bragged about it carrying a large round hay bale (weighs around 1,500lbs) with the suspension looking like it was about to die. Next to it is a shot of a circa-1980 Ford F250 carrying three of the same bales and sitting perfectly level. TBF, the F250 probably had air bags in the rear suspension, but still...
That thing is only a "truck" because they decided to call it that.
Most people should just buy a sedan. :-/
For a company, matching products and services to demand is what matters. Being able to get more mass into orbit only matters if enough people are willing to pay to get stuff there. The analogy is that jumbo jets exist, but almost no passenger flights bother with jumbo jets because it's not economical. Unlike with civilian aviation we have yet to observe a natural experiment which would allow us to place an economically practical ceiling on rocket payload size, but it very much still remains plausible that something Falcon 9-sized is actually the sweet spot, especially given that Starlink is the only commercial offering that's pushing the existing Falcon 9 capacity. And yes, this completely ignores any mention of going to the moon or Mars, because although there may be incentives to do so (e.g. scientific incentives, political incentives, philosophical incentives), there is no economic incentive other than getting some government contracts which will be just as short-lived as Apollo was once the public loses interest.
Flat metal is more expensive than curved metal. Curved metal, you design the curves to help support the stress points: you can get by with thinner sheets. Flat metal requires thicker heavier more expensive sheets of sheet metal in order to be strong enough.
Curved metal also lets you design the whole thing to be more aerodynamic. which is an important consideration even with something as un-aerodynamic as a truck.
I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.
...you don't. You replace it in whole. You can't use filler to mask small dents and paint over it, if you want it to look as before, you have to pretty much replace it.
As the DeLorean community will tell you, repairing unfinished stainless steel to aesthetically pleasing levels is almost impossible.
Take a piece of tinfoil, crumple it, then try to uncrumple it to its factory finish.
Repairing painted bodywork is easy and cheap: hammer it to get a rough shape, apply fillers, then paint & polish to factory finish. Simple as.
Either you have a modern expensive car and insurance which knows how to handle it properly, or it doesn't matter anymore and you got to a cheap car doctor.
Not sure I follow your ford pinto comment either.
You go to the DIY shop and buy a tin of white spray paint.
What happens if you scrape your brushed stainless fridge getting it into the kitchen?
Well, now you get to either live with it, or come up with some really clever ideas on polishing out the scratch and then sanding it back to disguise it with the rest of the surface which will never really look right.
Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).
Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper
"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about
The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.
It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.
They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
They could have Roadstered it.
Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter.
The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
Seems to me like a sentence that's quite easy to understand.
Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.
The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.
Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.
So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.
Btw. the cybertruck he announced, never came.
How much money have Americans gifted NASA to pay Russia for launching payloads ton Soyuz rockets?
Do you frame all government funding as "gifting"?
Let me criticsize NASA for paying / gifting Russia for launching payloads.
So we are now back to square one.
Pls continue
https://www.facebook.com/61572338938589/videos/in-june-2013-...
Pathetic argumentation in this thread, to be real.
(I have a very slight visibility on 48V car audio R&D, for example. Most digital electronics could be adapted with a different DC-DC converter but the audio power amp stage takes direct supply voltage)
Steel is heavy, you have to paint the frame anyway, people like cars with colors, the steel has to be maintained too (scratches etc.).
Even more interesting would be how much the steel hurts the tons-to-orbit in the Starship.
No doubt there is some demand for an "out there" design, but I'd have to guess that the projected $40K price was itself a large part of the attraction.
I thought the early images looked amazing but I see them all the time in real life (a few people in my neighborhood own them) and they just look so stupid on the road.
I live in the UK so I'll likely never be able to get one, but I'd love a car I can just buy new panels for and wrap them with minimal tools.
I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.
It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.
At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.
Elon talks about a lot of things. Consider if you might be part of the media ecosystem that enables that strategy.
A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.
Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.
Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.
The folded steel exoskeleton has no potential, it was a bad idea that was abandoned. It was always going to crack at the folds.
Replacing a well-known manufacturing stage with a completely unproven one for no good reason is rarely a good idea.
He only wants government subsidies. He'll make a tiny Rainbow city car for 2028 and the Democrats will take him back. Mark my words.
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This is specifically about the Tesla Cybertruck, which has been shown to be fairly shoddy in construction AND is tied to a very, very divisive figure.
Then again, he's a con-man who's now quietly distancing himself from CyberTruck ("I had nothing to do with it") and moving on to the next con-trick: the CyberCab.
Those people are just as loud as others, but never actually buy, because a $40k CyberTruck never existed.
When I want to go to the symphony I want a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. I don't care how it is maintained, that is the chauffeurs job. If I want to see under dressed girls I'll go to a strip club after if, or maybe hire an escort to sit next to me.
When I want a truck to "go mudding", the fun is driving it through the mud. Maybe my chauffeur is tows the truck to the mud pit, but I'm getting it stuck in the mud myself. Sometimes the local cheerleaders are holding a fund raiser and I'll pay them to clean the truck after I'm done.
When I want a truck because I need to haul things - I want to pay someone else to take care of it when I'm not around.
In reality I'm not rich enough for the above. I do a lot of maintenance myself because I can't afford to pay someone. I have one vehicle that is a bad compromise for everything because I can't afford more.
In reality I have moral objections to under dressed girls and so I'm not going to the strip club or hiring escorts. But if I was that type I wouldn't be paying them to maintain my car. I have had the cheerleaders clean my car while I watched, but I wasn't paying them to be "eye candy" even though I did enjoy looking, and the next week is was the boys wrestling team (which I don't enjoy looking at) that got paid just as much for the same job.
In reality I'd prefer public transportation, but that is a different story.
Tesla took over 2 million preorders for the Cybertruck before they closed the program due to high demand.
Even very ugly cars will sell if they give you a really good deal for the money. The Cybertruck at $39,999 was a shockingly good deal. It was just a lie.
This anecdote might indicate why: We recently had a bunch of work done on our house. The siding crew had a pickup truck, and every morning the very first thing they did was unload the entire contents of the truck into our back yard. The plumbers and electricians would just get the stuff they were actually using and then lock the van.
There was nothing "new" in cybertruck. Delorean had bare metal panels! It wasn't a good truck, vehicle, EV, anything. It was Elon's crayon drawing turned car. That's not "innovation" we should applaud
Not even close - there are probably at least a dozen 4 wheel steering cars going back to the mid 80's starting with things like Nissan Skyline, Honda Prelude, etc.
However, I do not know if any of those was series-produced.
They may have been only demonstration prototypes.
https://evwire.com/etrucks/market-share
> Zero-emission trucks over 12 t ·
(Cybertruck is still in the <3.5t class afaik)
> Zero-emission Class 7–8 trucks
These seem to be the classical cargo carrying trucks, not the pickup trucks.
The Model 3 was a masterpiece of design, the Cybertruck is more like Cybercuck.
But yes, those credits have been vanishing for a while.
I did buy a Model-Y shortly before his Trump endorsement, and then sold it for technical reasons.
On a cold January morning, I was pulling up to a stop-sign, didn't have any autopilot turned on, and the car accelerated.
I think there is just too much software between gas pedal and the machinery of the car. They're honestly kind of dangerous vehicles. The average person can't handle the responsibility of a self-driving vehicle.
I told all of my friends and family that I would not recommend the vehicle yet to a non-technical person, even when I was myself driving it and loving it.
Some outside factor might cause a signal failure, causing cascading destruction.
There's a shit ton of software between the gas pedal and the machinery of just about every car on the road today whether that be an ICE, hybrid, or EV. We're a long ways away from the go-go pedal directly pulling a cable opening the throttle plate.
Electric vehicles obviously don't have the hurdle of meeting emissions standards so Tesla, or any other company really, had (and has) the opportunity to create a small, cheap utility truck that no gas-powered vehicle can compete with. This is what the Cybertruck should've been.
There have been breakdowns of the Cybertruck and it is such an incredibly bad design. Things like the weight of stainless steel panels but with an aluminum frame. Why is that a problem? Because aluminum is prone to catastrophic failure with the up and down motion of towing a heavy load than stainless steel simply isn't [5].
The rumor has been that the only thing propping up Cybertruck demand is Elon forcing his own companies like SpaceX to buy them [6]. Other than that, the Cybertruck became a weird political statement [7]. Those people are getting crucified on resale. It's even a trend on Tiktok and elsewhere to watch these trade in videos. People who paid $150k+ are getting <$70k less than 2 years later.
Anyway, I'm shocked no US manufacturer is tackling the EV small utility truck market. Yes there was the F150 Lightning but it's still too big (and thus expensive).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Hilux
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War
[3]: https://www.octane-magazine.com/articles/features/usa-25-yea...
[4]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-how-regulations-accident...
[5]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nZcb9TTyneFbxiDav/the-giga-p...
[6]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/tesla-lea...
[7]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/12/tesla-...
I try not to get excited about stuff, but the idea of The Next Big Thing in Cars being a total lack of garbage nonsense screens and giving us back CRANK CRANK WINDOWS -- this is pure joy.
Wheels. Seats. Motor[1]. Box to keep rain off. Done.
Oh you attached a bed to that? Double awesome.
[1] Enough top end cruise speed for American interstates.
A Tacoma is basically the US model of the Hilux.
Now I get why the gas powered Hilux has changed. Emissions standards have changed. Fuel efficiency is more important. Modern cars are full of computers and microcontrollers. But an EV is relatively simple. It's one of the big advantages. Yes you have an OS and it's not just turning the ignition but the drive system itself is fairly simple, the thing that turns battery power into movement (compared to ICEs). No moving parts (in the engine), basically.
You could absolutely make a small EV utility truck. Remember that part of the reason why people were excited about the Cybertruck when it was announced was the price point (~$35k). Of course it turned out to be 3 times that.
Look at what BYD is doing [1]. Now these are PHEVs rather than pure EVs. Other automakers are making smaller pure EV trucks.
[1]: https://www.carscoops.com/2025/12/byd-new-compact-pickup-pro...
This is a very common misconception Americans believe about the hilux. I’ve owned multiple generations of both on different continents.
The Tacoma is much heavier, but has a much lower payload rating. It has way less torque, and gets much worse fuel economy. The Tacoma only comes with a regular bed- no cab chassis, no tray back, etc.
The Tacoma is much more expensive. The Tacoma only exists in two countries. The hilux is one of only a few truly global vehicles.
One is a genuine work utility vehicle, one is a lifestyle vehicle.
They have never shared a frame, engine, transmission, axles or body panels.
They are not related, and are not similar.