Disabling Javacsript lets you read the article already. There's no need to visit archive.today, where you participate in executing DDOS attacks against anyone who criticizes the site's creator.
He wishes. Delorean is a modern classic, regardless of commercial success. Cybertruck will go down like the H1/H2; something entirely emblematic of the times it was conceived and marketed in, that later generations will go "did they really think that was cool?".
Part of that was a NHTSA rule that hilariously (from 79-82) made 85mph speedometers mandatory; but even later, because of tooling costs, those dials persisted.
Not that the DMC-1's PRV v6 and tall Renault 5-speed were gonna make getting to 85 easy...
> The issue stems from the brake rotors, and the report says more severe road conditions "may strain" the stud holes in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If the cracks persist and worsen, it may result in the wheel detaching entirely.
> In a recent off-road escapade at the King of the Hammers event in Johnson Valley, California, a Tesla Cybertruck experienced a mechanical failure resulting in one of its wheels snapping off. The incident, captured over the weekend, has raised eyebrows about the durability of Tesla's much-touted electric truck.
I can't remember the specific video, but I recall seeing someone breakdown some of the poor materials/engineering choices for "truck" use cases and of the mass of the CT.
whatever this author writes should to be taken with a grain of salt ... i mean, he's paying his mortage and putting his kids thru school by professionally critiquing everything Elon does .. at leaat based on his wirted article history .. https://www.wired.com/story/how-tesla-made-its-new-230-mph-c... ..
That article seems to be fairly flattering of the technical tricks tesla used to make the demo roadster flip? Your claim about "paying his mortgage ... critiquing everything Elon does" is certainly not backed up by this citation. Dude clearly doesn't like the cybertruck, but to a first approximation, that pretty much describes everyone.
As someone who described himself in an earlier post as a "Big Elon fan boy", perhaps the source of bias here lies in a location other than the author of the WIRED article.
Unloved and unwanted is outright false. Go to cybertruckownersclub.com for a more balanced take. Somehow Wired managed to completely miss the best U-word description of it: Ugly.
Which is why it’s being discontinued, due to high sales. The trucks simply make too much money and sell to too many people, it wouldn’t be fair to other automakers to continue.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For better or worse, it looks unique, and while a truck probably should be functional rather than flashy, I appreciate the swing they took with the design.
I have very little interest in electric vehicles, Tesla, Elon Musk, etc. But I still think the Cybertruck, at least the design, looks awesome. It looked like something you'd see in the "Another World" or "Out of this World" intro cinematic.
I kept thinking the design was going to grow on me as I saw more of them on the road, but nope. I still think it looks unbelievably ugly. I do not think it looks like something that you'd see in Another World, it looks more like something I would have designed when I was fourteen playing with Lightwave.
It looks like something that would be fun and cool to drive around in a video game. I would never get a Tesla for unrelated reasons, and would especially not get a Cybertrunk because it's not fit for purpose, but I thought the hate for the aesthetics was overblown.
But then I saw it in-person, and it looks indescribably weird and bad, akin to the uncanny valley. The problem is that it's a real vehicle and not in a video game.
Truly the peak of 2020s antisocial car design. The car looks designed to plow through other vehicles, barriers, and pedestrians without slowing down to count the bodies. "Bulletproof bodypanels" is only a selling point on a mass production car if you routinely piss people off enough to make them grab iron. Folks who need pickup trucks for the utility they provide have stuck with trucks that are actually fit for purpose. It was a way to signal to the world that you had extremely poor judgement and low standards.
There are plenty of people who drive pickups because they like them, not because they fulfil a utilitarian purpose, and not all of them are assholes.
I would say the issue is more that there has been little to no progress in mainstream consumer car aesthetics in the past 25 years. It used to be that you could clearly tell a 50s car from a 60s car from a 70s car from an 80s car, etc. Everything from the past 25 years or so is pretty indistinguishable, so something comes along with a clear but possibly misguided aesthetic vision, its naturally going to appeal to some people.
I noticed that the cyberpunk wedge cars that inspired it are 2 seaters… maybe this shape isn't right for much larger cars?
DeLorean is the real life 80s reference of course, but in cyberpunk revival media like the coupe in Ghost in the Shell 2017, the spinner in Blade Runner 2049—those cars are all much smaller cabins than the cybertruck
Electric trucks in general seem terrible. You only see Rivians and Cybertrucks in urban settings, the electric F150 was discontinued. Anybody who knows how people that actually need trucks use trucks saw this coming, I never once saw a cybertruck used as a truck.
I always got the impression that the vast majority of the F150s are never used as trucks either. Americans just like really really big cars because fuel is cheap there and none of the cities are old enough that big cars are impractical.
No, the F150 has great sales numbers but this is mostly due to commercial/work use. And commercial buyers need trucks that can tow, haul, be fitted with large toolboxes, booms/cranes, winches, plows, etc. The F150 electric solved none of those problems.
You're dismissing a cultural aspect of the popularity of trucks in america. There is way more trucks in Texas than say in Indiana, or Massachusetts on the road. Texas is one of the only states where people still drive hummers. They're not all doing off-roads
Yeah my neighbor has a Sierra EV truck and he claims 500 miles range towing a camper, which I doubt but he loves it. He's all-in on EVs, has a Volvo as well and solar on his roof to help charge them.
Yeah 205 kWh is a huge battery (and charging at 350 kW is faster than anything else except a semi). But I doubt the 500 mi number too. Maybe he was going downhill.
Well that's true. Loads of F150s in service as work trucks though. Potentially many could be EVs but the added cost and need for charging infrastructure for a fleet works against that.
Obviously it doesn't affect the electric vehicles but light trucks being excluded from CAFE def did a lot to acculturate americans to always buying a big car
Truck brained people are notoriously stubborn. If it isn’t like daddy’s old truck they simply can’t see past it
I live in the PNW and you see people not using their trucks as trucks every single time you go out on the road. This includes urban areas.
I’ve owned an F150 and an R1T and for camping, overlanding, snow trips, etc the Rivian is hands down the most capable vehicle I have ever driven. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a Ford
Truly terrible for pedestrians. Modern trucks are already death traps with their super high front grills, multiplying the weight compounds the problem.
Vehicle mass is a significant factor in collisions between vehicles because taking two thirds of the impact is a major increase over taking half of it. Heavier vehicles are much more dangerous to lighter vehicles.
It's basically irrelevant in pedestrian collisions because the pedestrian is already taking ~95% of the impact even from a lighter car and the <5% difference between that and an arbitrarily heavier vehicle is completely dwarfed by any of the other variables like the speed of the collision. For a pedestrian it's better to get hit by an 80,000 pound vehicle at 35 MPH than a 3000 pound one at 39 MPH.
You're solving for force when the thing that causes the damage is (very rapid) acceleration. The total acceleration comes from the initial difference in speed between the two things that collide and the proportion of the acceleration applied to each object is inversely proportional to their relative masses.
If they have the same mass then they each take half. If one of them is 19 times heavier then the other one takes 95% of the acceleration. If one of them is six hundred trillion times heavier then the other one takes ~100% of the acceleration, but this is still only ~5% more than taking 95%.
You think cutting the weight of the truck is going to make it safer for pedestrians?
This is the silliest argument against the Cybertruck, IMO. Its forward visibility is significantly better than other full-sized trucks, yet people continue to bring up pedestrian safety every time the Cybertruck is mentioned.
F150 Lightning was ruined by the dealership network who had 0 interest or financial incentive to sell them. When they did sell them, they added huge markups.
The quality of the vehicle is actually quite high.
Most people driving trucks in the US don't use them as trucks, especially in cities. I think most people willing to take on a $1000/mo truck payment for their personal vehicle in the current economic climate are doing so for social reasons anyway. Whether the electric trucks on offer at the same price can compete on that front is a much more slippery question.
If we can get some affordable electric trucks in the US, it will be very interesting to see how the more rational segments of the market react once they are no longer priced out.
I've only ever heard positive things from every electric truck owner I know and this is coming from a market that's very truck-forward in terms of culture.
> Anybody who knows how people that actually need trucks use trucks saw this coming
I'm a current truck driver and very excited to swap out my ICE truck for a Slate next year. I need something that can haul my trash to the dump, grab a load of wood chips for the garden, and bring home the occasional sheet good from the home store.
I agree with your assessment as it applies to the Cybertruck or F150, but not the idea of an electric truck. Some people buy trucks because they need a light-duty hauling solution; unfortunately, the market seems to only want to sell luxury SUVs that happen to have truck beds.
cough small dump trailer (<3000 GVWR). Can be pulled by a light SUV. No shoveling those wood chips, depending on where the trash is going no having to lift that a second time either. I've carried 25 sheets of 3/4 ply in mine (and unloaded them by myself, as the tilting bed meant I could tilt up a bit and easily slide them off)
Not wrong. I combined my truck and SUV budget and bought a used X7 m50i and a small utility trailer. No joke it's the best pulling vehicle I have ever owned. Super heavy, super grippy, in trailer mode the torque comes on fast. It's brilliant. My old 03 Silverado sits even more now.
Trailers aren't a silver bullet. I own multiple trailers (one even has a crane on it) and will still use anything else given the chance because it's just such a hassle once the empty weight of your trailer gets above what's convenient to move around by hand (which it will if you want to beat what a half ton truck can do, not what's within the rating, but what it can do).
The thing about equipment is no matter what you've got, you're always going to want something bigger.
You just need to cover the bulk of uses, not every last thing you might need to do. I think the light SUV + utility trailer is a pretty good sweet spot, even better for many things than a pickup truck on its own. Like have fun lifting 20 sheets of plywood up onto a pickup truck and back down, assuming you've even got one with a full length bed that can support that whole pile.
And sure I'd think larger trailers get to be a hassle to move empty by hand, but isn't that what having more equipment is for? And isn't that well into the tier where you need a truck for a tow vehicle regardless?
Unless it's so small it roughly equals the utility capacity of a half ton truck a trailer is a big hassle. People choose to pay more for a truck because it "just works" with "no thinking" for a wide variety of stuff.
Man, you sure love combative framings. Being able to dump sure eliminates a different "big hassle". Same with not having to be constantly working at driving a larger vehicle for simple errands. Personally I'd rather have to do some "thinking" than be manually lifting things unnecessarily (often twice). There are always tradeoffs, and I was merely mentioning a different option for people who are doing the occasional homeowner dump and mulch runs.
I have a hitch for my current truck and honestly a dump trailer wouldn't be a bad idea anyway for some use cases, but even if I had one I'd probably only use it when I had to. The convenience factor just being able to hop in and drive, or having the truck bed with you when you didn't plan on moving something just wins out.
I think there are still tradeoffs of conveniences. A separate vehicle is handy for being able to slowly collect things to get rid of in one later trip, or to store something you just got until you're ready to put it somewhere else (I've got what remains of a 1/2 yard of sand sitting in mine). And being able to just dump something and drive away is quite nice (especially when you can put it into the trailer using equipment to begin with).
On the other hand, I've never experienced being able to just haul something without a little planning first, so I don't miss it.
Unlike electric cars, the price for a used F-150 lightning is still a substantial fraction of new price. There is still substantial demand.
Work trucks are a very different market than for passenger vehicles. Their usage is a lot more consistent and known. This means that electric works very well for some work trucks and very poorly for others.
The other aspect of work trucks is that their generally purchased by very conservative businesses who don't want to buy the bleeding edge, they want several years of reliability data before committing. The F-150 Lightning was cancelled just as that data was starting to come in.
Of course, most F-150's are sold as passenger vehicles rather than work trucks. Along with almost all Cybertrucks.
I see electric Silverados and Hummers (not a truck, but effectively the same vehicle as the electric Silverado) all the time, usually pulling landscaping utility trailers (flatbeds with huge commercial lawnmowers, etc.). I have no idea if this is economic or not (they definitely aren't cheap) but I've heard electric towing can't be beat for responsiveness, torque, etc.
It's pretty economical. Towing about halves your range. So you're still paying quite a low gallons/mile equivalent. However, that decreased range is a killer. So it makes sense why you'd see them doing lighter duty local work like landscaping.
An acquaintance saved thousands of dollars (over ten thousand, easily) by using his Cybertruck while building a cabin up in the mountains. All those trips to the hardware store and picking up random building materials add up very quickly when you are going up and down the mountain for materials and the big box hardware store is two hours away.
Kids really love these things and get very excited to see them on the road.
They are going to be very valued collectors items in 30 years once the kids of today have enough disposable income to buy whichever are left roadworthy by then.
You can't post like this here. Since you've been doing it repeatedly, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Mostly I've seen younger kids love it. I was at the park and a little girl saw a Cybertruck pull up -- "Look, Dad, it's from the future!"
I think Cybertruck is probably ultimately a failure, but the amount of hate it gets when they are at least trying to push things outside of the normal makes me sad. The amount of negativity towards anything new that's not perfect is insane.
> the amount of hate it gets when they are at least trying to push things outside of the normal makes me sad. The amount of negativity towards anything new that's not perfect is insane.
A significant portion of the hate they get is for what they represent and who they’re from, not because they’re “new” or “different” or “not perfect”.
I mean the things you acknowledge people hating him for probably overlap considerably with the things I'm thinking of when declaring him mediocre. To pick just one: Think of the boring CEOs who work hard to instill and drive an inclusive culture at their companies, and who make sure their people are treated as human beings. You haven't heard of any, because they're not out there trying to be an entertainment personality.
Look, there is "trying to push things outside of the normal" and then there is "completely misunderstanding the purpose of a half-ton truck." I say this despite that fact that the Cybertruck, from a size perspective, it straddles the line between half-ton and 3/4-ton, and it is a complete utter non-starter as a 3/4 ton for several reasons.
If the CyberTruck were the size of a Honda Ridgeline or Ford Maverick, I think truck folks (who skew conservative) would look at it a lot less derisively. There are entire swathes of the half-ton truck market that the Cybertruck simply cannot compete in due to a seeming fundamental misunderstanding by the design team of what the vehicle needs to be capable of and amenable to. This is especially evident in the fleet/work truck market where the unibody design immediately shuts out folks who need to put an aftermarket bed replacement (think plumbers, welders, and other trades).
It straddles the 1/2 to 3/4 ton segment in terms of specs, but it is fundamentally impossible to tow a 5th wheel or gooseneck trailer with a Cybertruck.
Again, there is "think different" and there is "misunderstand the market."
>My kids, and any friends of theirs riding with us, will boo whenever they see them on the road
Because adults around them groomed them for that. Kids don't just start booing at objects out of the blue, they parrot the learned behavior of the adults around them.
In which case I'd probably gasp at meeting those "adults" IRL.
Unless you’re Ferrari or Porsche, you don’t want to be in the situation where your vehicle has future collectors’ value. That usually just means it didn’t sell very well (rarity).
Let’s keep in mind that Tesla invested in this truck to be the next F-150, which is the best-selling vehicle in the USA for the past multiple decades.
You’re talking about different things. A failure from a manufacturer perspective can be a major success from a collector perspective (see also the DeLorean).
Even the hated Edsel is worth quite a bit today.
Of course it might be harder to keep a Cybertruck running for 50 years due to all the computerized components. Restorers will probably be relegated to rebuilding Cybertruck bodies with new components.
> Of course it might be harder to keep a Cybertruck running for 50 years due to all the computerized components. Restorers will probably be relegated to rebuilding Cybertruck bodies with new components.
Really no different than any classic car, really. GM isn't selling OEM parts for a '57 Chevy, for example. If you need replacement parts on those, nowadays, you're likely going to specialty manufacturers given there really aren't any "parts cars" around anymore.
We'll have to wait and see. I honestly kind of doubt that will be true. There's all kinds of Tesla hacking that's been going on for years. It's possible to get a Tesla motor running without any external Tesla electronics through aftermarket solutions that carry support from the vendors.
For combustion engine parts all you need is metal work tools, not locked down proprietary software and electronics. My dad has a 1954 Citroen b11 that he’s kept alive and humming since he got it in the late 60s.
In its time, the Edsel was more meh than hated. Mainly people didn't buy them because they were essentially pricier Fords and it was a recession year, and Ford threw in the towel for Ford-internal political reasons. The looks were not as much of an issue as people think today. It certainly didn't have the same political associations.
If anything the original discussion of collectors was the non-sequitur. How this relates to the business of automobiles is far more relevant to the topic and article.
I guess I can’t really complain. They were making an interesting point about collectors that opened up a new line of discussion, in which I learned a couple of things. But that seemingly wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t responded to your comment, so somehow your non-sequitur response to his non-sequitur seems to have been necessary to generate that discussion. So thanks?
Very clearly behavior introduced and encouraged by the parents, driven by politics, and not the merits of the object itself. Though it is an interesting commentary on the extreme, enforced conformity and politicization-of-everything we see in the world today.
What evidence do you see that "everything" is politicized? Elon was the largest single donor in the US midterm elections by far... Seems like he politicized things himself.
If the Nazi salute wasn't political enough. Children going through WWII in their history classes might dislike Cybertrucks independently of their parents.
It's always an excuse and everyone else's fault that things are politicized. The same people telling us to leave every social problem to the Invisible Hand get fussy when it actually manifests.
You don't need to pretend any longer, you can openly embrace expressing your political opinions with your salutes. With the masked federal agents kidnapping and murdering citizens, even people who weren't paying attention previously have realized what MAGAs want for society.
> The same people telling us to leave every social problem to the Invisible Hand get fussy when it actually manifests.
Yep. This is the world the Supreme Court handed us with Citizen's United. Now that money is speech, we all have to accept that when we buy things, our money can be used against us.
This is the world they wanted, and if you hate cancel culture, then you need to get on board with fixing the damage from Citizen's United... not raging against regular people who are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, and using their money as speech.
What you buy is your politics now. It fucking sucks, but look at it with clearer eyes.
Totally, what kid would boo something without being preconditioned to hate it? Humans can never separate concepts in there heads. Either you’re good or you’re evil. Have news for you all, we are all both. Not saying I support that guys behavior, but he’s done some impressive stuff to further mankind.
Quite something how many posts here seem to default to "Those children who do not share my opinion, they must have been brainwashed. It's the only explanation."
I mean, fair point. But it sure does smell like the original commenter's kids have been brainwashed. "Booing" a car or having a hateful attitude towards a car without any external influence? I actually don't think the Cybertruck looks good - at all. But all my kids are amazed by it. And we haven't spoken to them at all about Elon.
Im crying laughing imaging a full adult thinking children not liking their car is bullying. Nooo you dont understand my consumer choice is my entirely personality nooo
Real question: If the person's window is down and you boo it to their face, is it? If everyone in the city boo's it to their face, is it? There are many fashion related items I think are absurd looking, from clothing to cars to haircuts. I'll hate on it with my disgruntled friends. But... I genuinely can't imagine booing any of them in front of the person' who demonstrably likes them.
Clearly this behavior is not original, but taught. Kids don't "boo" things out of nowhere. They are indifferent as hell to things on their own sure, but not a CB ...
This theory backs up my opinion that every rich person who drives an exotic car is just an eight year old who had a Lamborghini poster on their wall growing up
I think if you were to compare the cybertruck with other things kids like, you'd see that it looks like a hot pile of garbage. There's nothing about it that would attract a kid, it looks like a refrigerator.
I think there's a lot of kids (and parents) being influenced by politics more than pure ascetics.
The classroom of kids Ive seen (my kids attend 3 different schools), all of them are amazed by them - age ranges: 3, 7, 9 all their classrooms loved them. Same with some of the older kids I've been around. They're all boys, I do imagine it's a very boy-friendly car.
I personally don't have a cyber truck, not big on it personally, but never put my own opinions into my kids. The kids may not "like it", but they are amazed by it.
I'm in an area that doesn't really hate Musk, so I think that does have an impact.
> Kids really love these things and get very excited to see them on the road.
Do you have anything empirical to back this up? This feels like someone kind of hoping something is true. It's like the Harley rider sure that everyone thinks they're super cool with their super loud bike.
Little kids think crotch rockets are cool. Only the children of Harley owners think Harleys are cool. I mean, you understand there is a whole meme about this right?
In the same way that I'm entirely certain kids don't look at a monstrous mobile trash bin and say "wow, cool!". But the owners of those ugly abominations sure think they look cool.
Definitely not, not only is the De Lorean a cooler car (by far) it wouldn't even be a collectors item if it wasn't in one of the most popular movies ever made. The cybertruck has the exact opposite associations, instead of being in a cool movie it's the pet project of one of the most hated humans alive.
I suspect we’re going to discover a depressing future with today’s era of cars. 40 years from now will the Cybertruck software even let you turn it on?
My kids and their friends play a game where when you see certain cars, you do certain actions. Like "punch buggy" with VW bugs but with a bunch of different cars. Cybertruck is "cyberslap" and you get to slap someone when you see one.
It certainly could, but likely very Ship of Theseus'd. I feel like enough of the parts are DRM'd hard by Tesla you'd need to Frankenstein the thing to do it.
I live in Dubai. There is no lack of super cars on the streets. The other day a cybertruck was parked outside my window and this group of teenagers spend a long time posing in front of it taking group pictures and individual pictures.
You don’t see that with a Ferrari or Rolls Royce.
It is definitely going to be a collectors items, if it isn’t already.
That’s not gonna pay the bills for Tesla, but I guess it’s something.
Truly one of the most baffling stories in recent automotive history. All they had to do was make a normal pickup truck with Tesla tech. Hell, go ahead and use it as the testbed for 48V, steer-by-wire and whatever else if you want to - but the amount of time and money wasted to make what was in the end an absolute monstrosity that failed to deliver on any of its price, performance and range promises strains credulity. Cybertruck is the most visible inflection point marking Elon's descent into madness, IMO.
The dimensions felt off to me. I had it as a loaner and enjoyed it a bit, especially since it had HW4. But I would never buy one.
The size is just too impractical. It would never fit in my garage. On top of that, the standby drain was significant. Just sitting idle, it would lose 10 to 20 miles of range.
After Helene knocked out power in parts of my area for a little over 14 days, I found out that a friend of ours used his cybertruck to power his house through the entire mess. He'd run the house on it for a couple of days, then drive the cybertruck over to a super charger station, recharge, then come home and plug the house back in.
The battery capacity on those things is equivalent to 9 Tesla Powerwall units or something close to it.
They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story. Before, I always wanted to install powerwalls...but I never considered in an extended event being able to drive my powerwalls somewhere to recharge them.
It’s unclear to me how a vehicle battery can be 9-10x the size of a house battery, be used as a house battery, include an highway safe cabin, motors and wheels and only cost 4x what a single home battery costs. Oh, and at least Kia rates their battery warranty based on miles driven, so using it as a home battery does not impact any 10-year capacity guarantees.
AI tells me they are completely different though, so I must be missing something.
Powerwall is a scammy product. WAY too expensive for the storage it provides.
---
So the summary is: Cybertruck is using a different battery chemistry, Powerwall is a scam.
(I mean - to be clear, the Cybertruck is also a scam, but it's a different kind of scam not directly related to the battery capacity, since it's hauling around a 123kWh NCMA battery pack)
Permitting in California more than doubles the installation cost of home batteries + PG&E gets to screw with you if you buy one.
Propane generators here have the same problem.
That still doesn't explain the price gap. You can literally just get a V2H EV and use it instead of a home battery (or, you could if the ecosystem was more mature).
Generally a propane generator is a wiser, more reliable backup option. Propane doesn't go bad, and in disaster scenarios often the sun isn't shining or your solar panels could be damaged. Solar + battery is a good system when the weather is good and everything is going well, but for a fallback system a propane generator can't be beat.
Yeah, this is where I landed, too. Except propane bottles only get me about 3-4 hours per bottle and it's pricey. It ran my $50 for one day of AC during the last outage.
I just bought a kit to convert to natural gas though. Most people who've done it are happy to not change bottles all the time. It won't help after an earthquake but the regular PSPS outages I get make natural gas a better fit for the moment.
Not everyone lives somewhere with natural gas service, and gas service could also go out in some types of disasters.
It’s possible to get larger propane tanks and refill them more cheaply (rather than exchanging expensive grill tanks at the store). Some hardware stores will refill tanks directly. You can even get very large tanks (refilled by a truck that comes to your house) if you want weeks of power on tap. But this is probably overkill for most, unless you’re very remote.
I tried that but services want regular deliveries and aren't interested in refilling emergency tanks. And a tank large enough for decent power backup will be hard to move.
Ah, ok. They make auto-change regulators that allow you to hook up two tanks, and two 30-60lb cylinders should last quite a while. But if you have natural gas service and aren’t in an earthquake or hurricane zone then that’s probably better.
We got a 500 gal propane tank. Get it topped off every so often, can power two large portables and one built in generator for longer than we've ever needed, even close to it.
I'm running an EG4 system with a decent amount of battery storage. I have a generator port on it that makes it easy to plug in a portable generator to assist the PV and charge the battery. It's really easy for me to roll my generator over and run it a few hours a day to supplement the solar. Even a cheap 5kW generator is plenty because it doesn't need to power the house, just provide a continuous charge to the batteries.
The whole GP is irrelevant to the article regardless. Point being, what does it matter that the cybertruck has this feature when it's a not unique and b irrelevant to why it failed.
The whole comment comes across as an AI agent that is lacking severe human context by posting a complete non-sequitur, regardless if it is actually an agent or not.
Yeah sorry - that's an overly negative take. It's just odd to me the TOP comment on a post about the cybertruck winding down is a random anecdote about it's battery backup capabilities, lol.
The ford home integration setup never really worked as advertised. The idea is that if the home power fails, the truck will output high voltage DC to an inverter that powers the house. No owners have got this failing over reliably.
Most people just plug an extension cord into the onboard inverter. You have to manually flip it on and plug it in, but 240V30A is plenty for an emergency. Doing it this way isn't any different from any other vehicle with an onboard inverter though.
It's completely illegal unless your home has a "transfer switch" (manual or automatic) installed for this purpose - and if you're plugged into the generator side of a transfer switch, then you can't charge the truck, only discharge it. There are probably modules designed for solar power that allow two-way transfer safely.
On the other hand there are no tricky rules for an electric truck to have extra power outlets in it.
Bingo. Unsurprisingly, the ford system is basically an off the shelf solar system minus the panels and with a very tiny battery to kickstart the system.
What are the chances that the supercharger station even has power after a hurricane? You want something that is already on the property. I've had roads blocked by fallen trees for days after a windstorm event.
If you are concerned about riding through a 14 day+ event you need a generator. Even a fully off-grid solar / wind setup could be compromised in these kinds of storms. I've seen entire roofs cleaned off by a <100mph storm. Anything not bolted down to a concrete slab cannot be depended on.
> Powershare allows you to draw power directly from your compatible Tesla vehicle to power your devices, your home or the grid.
> Powershare is currently available for all Cybertruck vehicles, and all new Model 3 and Model Y2 vehicles ordered on October 1, 2026 or later.
> To verify if your vehicle has Powershare, navigate to ‘Software’ > ‘Additional Vehicle Info’ > ‘Powershare Support: Enabled’ on your vehicle touchscreen.
The caveat is that Powershare is low wattage. You really need to pair it with a Powerwall and have an average draw less than the limited capability of the car to supply it.
To power a house directly from an EV, the main options now are the EV trucks -- Lightning, Silverado, Cybertruck all can have this ability, 240V 30A typically
Have an older Model Y too. It’s a real bummer that Tesla decided to give up being the bleeding edge tech company. No V2L/V2H, no Apple CarPlay, no longer range leaders in their category (though still cheapest per km range).
I have a 2017 Tesla S100D. (Yay back when we had letters and numbers!)
As you probably know, there's a 12 volt battery in these cars. That battery is automatically recharged by the big 100kWh main battery.
Some years back, I bought a 12 volt, 2000W inverter and connected it to this 12 volt battery in the Tesla, ran a couple of extension cords, and powered our refrigerator, extra freezer, and a number of other things with it for many hours. The main battery percentage in the car showed an appropriate drop. This actually wasn't during an outage, it was contingency testing. We already have a natural gas, 3600 watt generator that connects to one of our panels and use that during (unfortunately frequent) outages.
In my 2017, it's a bit of work to get to that battery, but it's quite doable and seemingly quite safe. The obvious, very rough/estimated/simplistic math is the 100kWh main battery divided by 2kW is about 50 hours. Different factors would push that number up and down of course.
During an outage I tried the 12v and found it was unable to surge the freezer box. Now, the inverter I used wasn't great, but IIRC I read they didn't allow significant current off the cig lighter outlet.
I will definitely try this again. If it works, that'd be great.
1) if you're permanently modifying your home or electric panel you're over $1k. (General Motors "Vehicle2House" is ~$10-20k for hardware + installation... an EXTREME investment unless you plan on regular "emergency" usage of it)
2) if you're buying some portable solar panel "battery boom box" you'll likely run out and the folding solar panel it comes with is more gimmick than reliable
3) if you're buying a "real" gas/diesel generator, you have to run it + change the oil every 6 months otherwise it might not start in your emergency situation
...just buy a thing that clips to your car battery and dangles out the front hood of your car!
You already maintain your car every 3-9 months, you already (should) have at least 1/2 tank of gas at all times (especially in a weather / outage situation), you can generally idle your car for at least 2 days off a tank of gas in an emergency, and if this thing can charge your phone/battery packs, keep your fridge running (kindof?), and run a small space heater overnight...
It makes soooo much more sense to buy a $500-$1000 emergency accessory that piggybacks off the car you already maintain than trying to stand up a whole extra distribution mechanism for "survival-ish power, maybe 1-2 times over 3-4 years".
Despite the dealer saying the used one I bought supported it, it turned out to not be available in the trim I got. My fault obviously for believing something a car dealer said.
This thread is first time I hear about V2H. (I don’t have any car yet, electric or otherwise.)
It sounds amazing. Only thing I wonder if it can even be set up so that it will be like an Uninterruptible Power Supply. So that when there is a blackout, the V2H supplies all the power without any interruption.
I have several computers but no UPS yet. Imagine if I could buy an electric car and when I am not using it, my car is UPS for my whole house including my computers! :D
> It sounds amazing. Only thing I wonder if it can even be set up so that it will be like an Uninterruptible Power Supply. So that when there is a blackout, the V2H supplies all the power without any interruption.
That's the point of V2H (or a residential battery, which it emulates). Although you still want a UPS for computers. Although "without any interruption" is probably not at the scale of a UPS, and possibly not at the scale a desktop computer will require. So you'd still want UPSes for that. Notably it depends how the grids cuts off, if it cuts off in one shot (like throwing the breaker) the failover should be almost instantaneous, but if it fluctuates before failing the battery might need a lot longer to engage.
V2L will also do the trick, although it's more annoying.
If power loss is a regular event you probably want V2H, but if it's just a remote fear or something that happens once every 5~10 then V2L and a few extension cords will do.
I don't think the residential power generator is needed anymore if you have an electric car.
As soon as we got the adapter for our Ioniq 5, I sold generator to a neighbor. The car will run what we need for four days, which is longer than the generator and five gallon can of gas is going to last.
> They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story
If you're after the V2L feature, you can get for much cheaper: for 16% of the price of a Cybertruck, you can get 86% of the battery capacity (about 8 powerwalls) by buying a used Fisker Ocean Extreme (107kWh vs. the cybertrucks 123)
Another way to view this is that driving a cybertruck every day is quite wasteful (no different than driving a full size gas pickup every day). One recharge cycle in a cybertruck uses enough energy to power a typical home for 8 days, 130kWh. If you aren’t doing truck things with it, it’s better to drive a more efficient EV or hybrid car. It uses almost twice as much Wh per mile compared to a model Y.
I think this is why these EV trucks don’t do well (ford also cancelled the F150 lightning). For truck things, they aren’t particularly capable (you’d get less than 100 miles towing). For daily driving duty, a car or small suv is much more efficient. You can power your home during a storm from most EVs these days, you’d just have to top it up more often
Cybertruck uses like a fifth of the energy of a full size gas pickup truck and is only like 50% more than a typical smaller sized EV. The truth is that most homes don't use much energy apart from hvac. The Chevy Bolt can also power a home for several days if you only have the fridge and lights running.
Yes, but a gas engine is so inefficient that it loses more than half of that energy to waste heat. But almost all of the electricity is converted into useful power in an EV. A 600hp Cybertruck will go 13 miles on $1 of electricity, but a 400hp F-150 can only go 4.5 miles for $1 of gas. 50% more power at 1/3rd the fuel cost is a pretty significant benefit.
Not a Cybertruck fan myself, but unless you are going to tow or take many long road trips, an EV truck will work great for anyone who can charge at home. And most people don't tow, or take long road trips, with their trucks.
European units (`Energy/100km`) work nicely here, lots of EVs are around `20 kWh/100km`, and most residential housing around here consumes less than `20kWh/day`, actually averaging `20kWh/day` would probably cover a well insulated house including heating (heatpump).
Yes, driving, compared to living, uses ridiculous amounts of energy.
With dimensional analysis you can cancel it all the way out until it's just Newtons, which is actually just the average drag force times some efficiency multiplier.
Work (energy) is force times distance. Since we're talking about energy divided by distance, it's actually just average force.
Actually newtons are just a constant factor (3.6) compared to Wh per km, since there are 3600 seconds in a hour while there are 1000 watts in a kilowatt. For example 144 Wh/km (or 14.4 kWh/100 km) would simply be 518 N. This also means that pushing along a Tesla on the highway at constant speed is roughly as hard as holding a 50 kg weight, giving you an intuitive sense of how "hard" it is to keep things moving.
Of course, in everyday life, since we buy electricity from our utilities in kWh rather than joules, it's more convenient to talk about kWh per km (or per mile).
Thanks. Was there a particular reason I'm not grasping for noting that on the comment you replied to? Seems like a comment that could be stated about any comment tackling about energy/distance.
Actually, I guess the comment you replied to was also not really clear in it's point, so I'll blame that guy for maybe diverging from the topic somewhat :)
(not trying to be negative, really! but my brain is a bit fuzzy from being sick, so thus feeling a bit dimwitted as I ponder comments)
For comparison my cargo ebike, which is not particularly efficient, consumes about 30 Wh/mi (0.03kWh/mi) in medium assist while transporting an adult and two kids.
Surprisingly enough, this makes acoustic bikes less carbon efficient per unit distance than electric ones, depending on the details of your diet. Of course, once the emissions are that low, this is more a curiosity than actionable insight (beyond the typical "less meat/dairy = lower emissions").
What's in that sandwich though? The Cybertruck using California non-renewable energy creates 162g of CO2 per mile. A sandwich full of lamb generates 666g. A sandwich of lentils does 40g.
Driving uses a lot of energy. It's wasteful if you aren't getting a good use out of it (of which just driving around to relax could me considered a good use, but of which some manager requiring RTO might not be).
I own a pretty typical phev sedan (Gen 2. Volt), and I use more electricity on my 20 mile commute than the rest of my power usage combined.
All cars just use a ton of power moving a lot of mass. It is actually impressive, it's like 100KW at full tilt. I think i saw someone do the math for how much power transfer you would need to get EV charging as fast as gasoline refuelling: It's in the megawatts.
The only way you could signifigantly reduce power usage of vehicles is to reduce mass dramaticially with a motorcyle or autocycle. The Aptera is an interesting autocycle design based on this line of reasoning, but we are also seeing the emergence of a lot of electric motorcycles.
Yep, having each individual person commuting in their own car is just not that efficient in general. Another data point that amazes me is the NYC subway uses 4-5 million kWh per day. Sounds like a lot until you realize that around 4 million people ride it every day, that’s about 1kWh, or maybe like 20 cents of electricity, per rider. A person commuting 35 miles in an EV would take about 10 kWh daily. They’re never going to beat the efficiency of public transportation.
Also regarding filling up an EV as fast as gasoline, there’s a company in China that has demonstrated charging from 20-80% in 5 minutes. They’re using 3MW charging.
It makes you realize why gasoline has been so popular for so long, you can stop for 5 minutes and dump 500 kWh of energy into your tank. Unfortunately most of that is wasted as heat during the combustion process.
>Also regarding filling up an EV as fast as gasoline, there’s a company in China that has demonstrated charging from 20-80% in 5 minutes. They’re using 3MW charging.
Yeah that's the exact post I saw. I didn't believe the video at the time but I suppose it's possible with enough battery paralellism and cooling.
The subway has some great efficiency gains because it's use is so narrow. It can only transport humans and small amounts of luggage, and only goes from point to point with no variability or any real use for transporting any of the materials those people need to survive. You're just dumping the costs off to other areas.
Also, if you factor in the construction, idk what the timeline to pay that off would be.
ok, so then you should also factor in the environmental destruction cause by building roads, the cost of the roads, the environmental cost of burning petrol, the environmental damage of extracting and refining petroleum, and so on.
In addition to the Aptera, I think there's a potential market for the enclosed 2-wheel vehicles also like the MonoRacer. The aerodynamic efficiency gains of enclosed cabin motorcycles is huge and greatly improves range, especially at highway speeds. I'd like to see something similar at a lower price range and produced in greater volume.
meanwhile, my impression is the whole poor towing narrative (while true) is a big part of what killed the ev truck when how many people use trucks in the way they could otherwise use a four-door sedan.
Are they really that inefficient? My 94 Roadmaster sedan gets 14ish mpg towing 7000lbs at 60mph, which works out to a bit over 300 miles on a tank. I figured your average gas truck would do at least that well, and they have larger tanks.
The thing is that ICE vehicles are so inefficient to begin with, but a towed trailer needs the same amount of energy regardless of what is towing it.
Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.
Not so sure about that one, boss. I can fully-load up a Ford Ranger to its 7500lb rated towing capacity and lose ~10% in fuel economy/range while you just dropped something like 30% (from the base power package range of ~240 miles, platinum package at 300 miles you're losing half if you only get 150 miles out.)
You're talking about the difference between towing and not towing per vehicle, not the difference in energy used towing between vehicles.
To get their equal ranges, a Ford Raptor would have a ~4 gallon tank. The fact that the cybertruck can go so far while not towing is the miracle. How far do you think you're going to get with 4 gallons?
> Another way to view this is that driving a cybertruck every day is quite wasteful (no different than driving a full size gas pickup every day). One recharge cycle in a cybertruck uses enough energy to power a typical home for 8 days, 130kWh.
Driving in general uses a lot of energy. It’s the physically moving a 1,000 kg or more object that takes a lot of energy. Orders of magnitude more than a few lights or a phone. Same with flying of course; also moving a heavy object.
>For daily driving duty, a car or small suv is much more efficient.
I have a lightning and it averages 0.5kwh/mile and my electricity price is $0.15/kwh, so it costs me $0.075/mile to drive. At current gas prices that's pretty much the same as a very efficient hybrid compact car (55mpg @ ~$4/gallon). If I had solar I could probably offset almost all of the lightning fuel cost based on where I live (sunny) but it's so cheap it's not worth it.
Do you mean "much more efficient" in places where electricity rates are significantly higher than the national average? Or only much more efficient when compared to when you're charging at charging stations?
I mean efficient in engineering terms, not economics. A cybertruck is not as efficient as a small SUV (model Y) which is not as efficient as a sedan (model 3).
This is a feature on many new electric vehicles (such as the Kia EV 9). The obstacle is often the power company, which may require modifying your system to enable this.
I camped in a yurt in rural Maine last fall on a motorbiking trip. Needed to keep my phone charged for nav; woke up to find it hadn't charged all the way.
Went looking for the campground host and bumped into another camper, who was pissed the power went out. "Don't worry though - if you need to charge something, you can put it in my truck."
Ended up on a phone charging expedition that ended up with me hanging out in a local library for the first time since I was a child.
Came back and met the host: "Sorry about the power last night - some dumbass tried to charge his truck and tripped the breaker to the whole campground."
Charging a truck does that? What's that campground going to do with someone plugs in their 50A 43 foot-long tour bus RV?
(I'm sure there's more to the story, and the details aren't important, but if charging a vehicle is tripping breakers for the whole campground there's something wrong.)
Not uncommon for a private campground in Maine to have a few cabins (and maybe a yurt). And really common for them to have RV spots with shore power. Also most of them are in rural Maine because most of Maine is rural.
If pulling 24 amps through a TT-30 or 40 amps through a 14-50 trips a breaker, then it's the host's fault for the campground having a shoddy electrical system, not the truck driver's fault.
Lol in what world? Campgrounds routinely have next to no funding, if they even have power pedestals I wouldn't expect them to be wired for anything more than an RV.
The entire reason we have so many different types of receptacles is so to keep you from plugging in something that the circuit can't handle. They shouldn't be giving people 14-50's if they don't have 50A peak and 40A continuous available.
Since the whole campground went dark, presumably it was the main breaker. The branch circuit must be sized to the outlet type, but the total rating of all branch circuits usually exceeds the main breaker rating.
That would be a reasonable explanation if most of the campsites had people charging EVs at their max individual current, but it sounded like just one did.
Approximately zero campgrounds have the capacity to charge more than one EV. They are sized for intermittent loads, just because it uses a 14-50 does not mean it is intended to support 80% steady draw.
At the risk of saying something obvious, the socket and the breaker are sized for the peak load, not for average load. A typical home might have 300-400 amps if you total up all the breakers even though the mains are 200A or even 100A.
Also, a bog standard 14-50 is likely not suited for 80% steady EV usage anyway. They make EV-rated 14-50s now because people keep melting the older ones. And that happens even though the vast majority of chargers won't draw more than 32A on a 14-50 due to the historical popularity of using 40A breakers for a 14-50 receptacle.
I installed a Peak Design Qi charger for the trip. Turns out their charger and their phone case weren't electrically compatible. I was pretty mad about it.
Battery's not super useful if you want to put the phone on your handlebars while riding. Screen is a lot more helpful than audio cues. If you can only charge when parked, it's either charge from a battery and have to top up the battery later, or just charge the phone directly.
The friend I did the trip with was on nav for the first part of the trip, but he had to turn back early for family stuff.
If that’s the only thing you care about you can DIY (or buy dedicated battery backup systems) with 10x more capacity for the same price. With heavier but cheaper Na-ion batteries in the horizon near future backup systems will be even better
It's a cool car. I'm glad it exists. All SUVs look almost identical. I'm glad it was different, not for everyone but it was an attempt to make something innovative in a very stale market.
It's exhausting reading these kinds of articles from a tech publication none the less. It's just so negative. Here is a summary of paragraphs:
Cybertruck is ceasing production
Here's a mean tweet from some X account with 2,649 followers: "Fuck that shitbox"
This seems like an awfully niche case, no? How often does someone lose power at home for days, while also having a nearby and accessible charging station that stays functional the whole time? Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap, or things are bad and widespread enough that they aren't driving down the street to recharge their vehicle.
I saw it happen during Katrina. Neighborhoods within an easy drive of each other where one had power, and the other not. Not to mention the fact that vehicle charging stations may well be prioritized to restore power.
It’s niche just because natural disasters are thankfully relatively rare, but I still think having good contingencies is worth it.
> Not to mention the fact that vehicle charging stations may well be prioritized to restore power
Electric vehicles won't, ever, be prioritized over bringing up residential, commercial and emergency services. The fact that even on a super charger it's 20+ minutes to charge a Cybertruck means the two or three at the local gas station will just end up with 12+ hour lines. Even now generators are fueled before private vehicles.
Bringing up power after disasters is super dangerous as is. A lot of systems that hadn't been turned off in years do a cold start, and sparks fly. It's why the power company and fire departments coordinate very very closely on grid work.
You know someone's going to try and bypass any safeties and circuit breakers and end up taking down their house when they try to restore power after a flood or something. People already regularly die from running their generator in the garage and most of these aren't wired directly into house mains.
Also very important: the cybertruck is not the only vehicle capable of doing that (the keywords are V2H and V2L, V2H is the more convenient — the car just plugs into the mains and acts as a house battery — while V2L means you have to go and plug your stuff to the car's mains outputs directly)
> Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap
TBF an EV car has an absolutely massive battery relative to the electric consumption of a house, unless you're using resistive heating all around. Especially if you ration use.
I live in an area prone to high winds and we occasionally have pre-planned power shutdowns (I think PSPS is the term).
My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.
I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.
It’s only me and my partner and we run it every single day. To be fair we both work from home so we generate more dishes than two people that go to work I suppose but I just hate doing them by hand
The value of a used 24 KWh battery used in, say, an old EV non-tesla car - $2000 (note this still has plenty of life left). Example: a 2013 Nissan Leaf
The value of the same, repurposed to a "powerwall" - $10k per 10 KWh
The value of it once attached to a "movable powerwall" - :) add a few more zeros
You can get good batteries for a lot cheaper than a power wall. Just like when the Tesla family of companies tried to do home solar - big premium for the name.
First, 'nearby' can be a 1 hr drive and still be worth it to commute every few days. Second, tornadoes, storms, and floods have exactly that pattern where damage can be block by block.
But it is still cheaper to stockpile some generators and gas than stockpile a cybertruck. If there's an EV charging station up within a 1 hr drive, gas stations are also going to be up.
Not really. Some areas in California have multiple PSPS outages during fire season. Many people have gotten gas generators or powerwalls to deal with it, but using your EV would be ideal.
Why would that be ideal? I would be worried constantly about if I'm trading electricity in my house for the ability to go somewhere in an emergency. If it's such a real concern you even think about it when buying a car you should have a dedicated device.
Generators have solved this problem. My family used to lose electricity anytime there was a semi serious snow storm. We got a gasoline generator after the second time and it was always sufficient. We never needed to siphon gas from the car either. We later transitioned to a natural gas generator. The lines are all underground and tie into the existing system for the stove and dryer. No car involved.
First thing I thought of was if I had a gasoline generator, I'd probably invest the $5 or so into a hand siphon. You can even keep it running as you go to refill up your vehicle!
Even if you can’t easily recharge, it’s a great way to power your home for a few days. It’s arguably a very cost-efficient home backup solution, assuming you were already in the market for an EV.
A Cybertruck has nearly 10x the battery capacity of a single Powerwall, and to buy that much Powerwall capacity would cost at least as much as a Cybertruck. Even a Tesla Model 3 (which now supports home backup) is over 5x Powerwalls.
You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k), but you don’t need anywhere near the amount of very expensive supplemental home batteries.
Also, even an EV with a 120V outlet and no home backup support could be very useful for recharging a portable battery bank.
We priced this out when we bought our Ford F150 generator on wheels. It was maybe 3k including parts and labor. We opted to go without the fancy socket and breaker, and it cost us about 600 USD.
The cheaper version even, which may be what you are talking about, is literally just a piece of plastic or metal called an interlock on the breaker box that prevents the main from being on while the generator inlet is supplying power (backfeeding the line). Then all you need to do is install the inlet on top of that which when I did this a few years ago was around $1,000 USD all in parts and labor.
Electricians like their transfer switches because they are right sized and everything, e.g. they are more foolproof for the end user to operate, but the interlock approach actually gives you more control because every breaker is allowed (a transfer switch will only expose some small subset of all your breakers usually), you just have to manage the power supply yourself.
Sorry, that’s for a full Tesla Powerwall (which includes its own 13.5 kWh battery) which is required to use the recently-announced Model 3 and Y home backup feature. The Cybertruck only needs the gateway and wall connector, which is still $2k plus labor.
Other commenters are pointing out places where it isn’t that niche, but I just want to call out that there’s a whole cottage industry for preppers that would eat this up. I would consider a 30-pound bucket full of shelf-stable Mac and cheese “pretty niche,” but it flew off the shelves at Costco.
Actually, if my car worked as a whole-house UPS and base smart battery (charging at night when power is cheap, drawing during day when it's expensive), that's a pretty nice value-add for a vehicle purchase.
Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!
Most people (like me) don't have generators. But when I hear "oh, BTW this car can be a used as a generator for 48-72 hours in a power outage", that's a nice little selling point that might put me over the edge if i'm otherwise considering the car. No, this doesn't solve for Hurricane Katrina. But it does solve for a nor'easter.
It probably does though, unless you have stockpiled gas. If the power is down to the gas station, the pumps don't work.
My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.
Unless you are trying to race your car at the drag strip with charged air and hit your best times, that isn't true at all and I don't know why people keep saying it. You think everybody empties their lawn mowers, snow blowers, snowmobiles, generators, etc. every year of gas or before trying to start it up again the next year? No way.
Simpler gas equipment like mowers and generators don't have enough compression to really care about anything but ancient gas, and if you run any vehicle that is multi-fuel capable it can detect and adjust compression based on a fuel's capabilities.
Ive been repairing and fixing junkers of cars, mowers, ATVs, generators, and more for 30 years and not once has bad gas stopped something from running. I only remove it if it was clearly having water raining into the tank. In every other case where I couldn't start something after sitting around for 5+ years, it was from the gas gumming up in the carb or the shitty diaphragm pump, which generally means there is little to no gas left to start with.
I wouldn't even suspect gas of ever being bad unless it was atleast a few years old. If the tank was open it could have evaporated, if the tank was closed it probably ain't great gas but I bet it would still run in anything but a high compression application.
> If the power is down to the gas station, the pumps don't work.
In places where long power outages are common (hurricane areas), many gas stations have their own generators (they also have a convenient source of fuel to run them!)
Ford has had options like this forever and it's usually targeted at farmers and ranchers, I think the first I've found was like a 77 or 78 f250 'rancher' that had a generator option on the main belt off the motor. The adds show a guy cutting boards with a skill saw to mend a fence or something.
Had to look this up, not great pics but very cool:
"The generator was called the Electric Power Pak. From 1969 to 1972, Ford offered a 2,500-watt underhood generator, mostly on the Contractor’s Special, though it could be special ordered on other trucks. It also wasn’t driven off the engine’s belt. It was a separate Onan generator with its own 5.5 hp air-cooled single-cylinder engine, feeding an outlet in the bed. It sat on the driver’s side splash pan. The package the commenter calls a “Rancher” is likely the Farm & Ranch Special, which is one of the trucks that came with it.
The chainsaw was real. Ford sold Ford-blue chainsaws from 1970 to about 1976. They were rebadged Ohlsson & Rice saws: the Eagle I/II and the smaller Hawk. A mount was also sold that held the saw on the F-250’s driver’s side inner fender"
I almost purchased that truck, but I needed a higher cargo capacity for my travel trailer, and the added batteries reduced it by 250lbs or so. The ability to plug a travel trailer directly into the truck and run it is really cool.
I have one, and I have powered my house with it on a few occasions. I made the purchase after a friend of mine ran his for four days straight. I always fill up the tank if there are storms coming.
When I was shopping in 2025, this was the only truck with that kind of output.
2024 and later Toyota Tacomas (and 4Runners and Landcriusers, I think) with the hybrid iForce Max power train have a 120V 2400W outlet. It will run briefly from the traction battery before starting the engine to recharge.
Mine, too. It's pretty great as a car. Gas goes in one hole, exhaust comes out of another, and the wheels go 'round and round. It's awesome.
As an electrical generator, it's really not very good. The alternator is rated at 120 Amps (bigger than many, smaller than others).
At 13.8v, that's only 1,656 Watts -- on a good day, with the engine wound up. But the engine won't be wound up. It will instead be idling. The output will be less than 1656 Watts.
It burns right around 0.6 gallons of gasoline per hour (ie 22kW!) while idling and doing ~nothing else. It holds 21 gallons of gas.
So the unachievable best-case of idling-and-doing-no-real-work means that if it starts with a full tank of fuel, it will run out in 35 hours.
And in the real world, it will be doing work since that's the whole point of the exercise. It will therefore use somewhat more than its do-nothing 0.6 gallons per hour idle consumption.
We can ignore the longevity issues of treating a gas-fired vehicle as a stationary generator (these are expensive parts that are getting abnormally heat-soaked) because this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem, but as a practical matter: I'll still need to fill it up with gas, however I do that[1], about every day.
And, sure: That can be a way to solve some problems. With a decent inverter stashed out of the weather, connected with appropriately-big cables, I can probably use it to run the gas-fired furnace, the fridge and freezer, some lights, and some digital entertainment. Maybe it can't run all of that at the same time, but I'm smart and I'll manage.
The gas-fired car probably is useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and fill it back up.
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Or: I could just plug stuff into an appropriate EV. It can sit there quietly being the giant battery that it is, and I can drive it out every couple/three days, or maybe just once per week as some suggest, to fill it back up.
It won't have an idle baseload of anywhere near the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of gasoline and it will therefore respond well to intermittent, dynamic loads like heat and refrigeration.
The EV is probably more-useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and charge it back up.
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[1]: Sure, sure. I can carry a large quantity of gasoline to make the trips more-worthwhile. I can even store some locally (it's a pain to keep it fresh, but do-able).
If I were into that kind of prepping then what would be my practical limit? An extra 40 gallons, for ~60 overall? Great! Now I can run the car/house combo for 3 days before heading back out, and the EV still probably wins on this metric.
If you're already committed to owning a bigass $100K electric truck this is an inarguably awesome side benefit. It's a truck, so... you have a few hundred miles of range. Slightly better than "down the street."
But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways. A portable power station and solar panels are probably the better move unless you have some really massive power needs.
(Admittedly, a nuclear winter reduces the effectiveness of those solar panels somewhat)
> But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways.
Are you telling us that you are not planning to buy Tesla Roadster? But what about the situation when there will be huge snow storm and humongous tree will fall across the road, and you will be like really hungry and you could just to fly over it and not starve to death?
Because when you produce more energy than you need, you need to store it somewhere and if the cost is roughly equivalent for that place to be mobile vs a static construction, choosing the mobile one is superior.
Is this thread being astroturfed? This defence for the Cybertruck ITT is one of the least rational threads I've seen on HN in the past few years and if the CT was actually valuable tech it wouldn't be one of the worst selling vehicles of all time.
Are you maybe a bit overreacting? The question of emergency power is a rational one and no one here said they thinj a cybertruck is awesome because of it. Just that this is a selling point.
I am certainly overreacting. I was just dumbfounded by the question I was responding too. If the concern is emergency power there are so many better alternatives than a cybertruck. If the concern is storing an abundance of solar power there are much better alternatives than a cybertruck. I don't want to come onto HN and be marketed products; I come to HN for tech news and to see cool software that people build, not to be marketed a cybertruck.
> The question of emergency power is a rational one
And the additional value of Cybertruck in this question is about $1000 - $1500. $1k of additional value for $60k purchase is still a selling point, but marginally small selling point.
If you can choose between a truck that becomes a dead weight when the nearby power plant comes offline, and a truck that won't, the prepper mentality is to choose the latter.
Take it from a Ukrainian.
PS: my dual-fuel gasoline/LPG Renault Twingo in Poland will outrun any Cybertruck on the continent.
And, unlike electricity, you can stockpile gasoline.
>You can't stockpile gasoline for a long time without stabilizer.
If you have a vehicle that runs on gasoline, you don't have to store gasoline for a long time to have a stockpile.
The cost of a few empty canisters is by far smaller than the cost of solar batteries, and putting gas into a vehicle in case of an emergency within a span of seconds rather than hours is a huge asset.
Not to mention: not everyone has space for solar. City dwellers are particularly constrained (as in: people who live in apartment complexes).
God how I wish I had a dual fuel vehicle. In my fever dream my natural gas service entrance would double as a gas station and I could just gas up my car in a few minutes at home with a compressor.
With unlimited money, sure, but your typical prepper would be able to fund a decent portable gas generator and jerry cans (or even a natural gas line) without a need for financing.
I'm not sure it is. I've considered getting home batteries for power outages (due to fires), and frankly given the install cost, using a car is compelling. Not only do they have enormous batteries (a model 3 has a 57.5 kwh battery and can be acquired for 20k), but they can be driven to recharge every few days if need be.
Where I'm located, in most cases when there is an outage, neighboring areas do have power.
Specifically for my model 3, I've been considering tapping into the HV system manually to keep my Ecoflow battery topped up, but I wish there was a way to directly connect it.
An awful lot Elon’s products seem uniquely capable in extreme niche cases primarily caused by America‘s horrendous track record of maintaining, upgrading, and filling in traditional infrastructure.
Two observations with complaining about America's infrastructure:
1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.
2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.
I really should not engage with the bigotry you demonstrated in your point two, but I will still offer you a rebuttal.
Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.
I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).
Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry. For example, can you explain why remote tribes in the amazon rainforest don't all have space programs? I think it's because the lack the societal and individual development to have the productive capacity to do such a thing. Why do you think they don't? It's economic reality that if there is only a limited number of people who can do a thing, the amount of that thing is going to be limited. And when you abstract that through culture and modern life, the way you say that is GDP per capita.
You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.
> Acknowledging the existence of people without educations is not bigotry.
It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].
> You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states.
A Volcano erupted in the town of Grindavík, the main line which connected the town to it’s power plant, went under lava. The town was out of power for a maximum of 2 or 3 days.
But in any case, 2 week long blackouts are extremely common in the USA regardless of the severity of the natural disaster. When I first moved to the Seattle area in 2016 a common snow storm caused a blackout which lasted for 2 weeks in some areas outside of Seattle. The reason for the length of the blackouts in the USA is simply due to the quality and maintenance of the infrastructure and any lack of action plans to fix them when they break.
Comparing a volcanic eruption, a totally stationary event with predictable flows, that affected 3500 people in a town, where most of the residents have since left because of the problems living there, to a class 4 hurricane that crossed over six states, hundreds of miles, and affected millions of people, is dumb.
I've lived in the Seattle area since 2007. There has not been any power outage that affected 3000+ homes that has lasted longer than a day.
Additionally, Seattle area does not have common snow storms. It has extremely infrequent snow storms and thus has no reason to have lots of cold weather equipment. What we do have is frequent wind storms and lots and lots of trees (orders of magnitude more trees than all of Iceland, for example) and the wind often knocks trees into power lines and those are fixed in less than a day. In terms of neglect, that's not a problem. The longest outage I've ever had in the suburbs is 18 hours.
The real reason for the long duration blackouts is not failure to maintain infrastructure, it's because of natural disasters that damage and destroy entire swaths of infrastructure in a single event over thousands of sq km.
That someone, somewhere once used some accusation about a trait of populations as a form of discrimination does not mean that every recognition of that trait in a different population is also discrimination. Like, we can look at a person and say "oh, he never finished high school" that doesn't mean we're irrationally discriminating against him. You discriminate on exactly this basis every single day. You don't have people who don't know driving/cooking/medicine/engineering/automobile repair/etc. provide those services to you. I guess you're a bigot.
> Comparing a volcanic eruption, [...], to a class 4 hurricane [...], is dumb.
I agree. One can judge America’s lousy infrastructure and lack of action plan on its own merits. There is no reason to bring Europe into this. All I am saying is, America’s sparse population, nor the education level of immigrants is not an excuse.
> It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].
Modern Zimbabwe is not particularly known for having reliable electric infrastructure, even by the low standards of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a good argument against the parent commenter's point.
these are such classic american thought-terminating cliches. "we have more land and more people than anywhere else" "our population contains too many migrants who aren't as smart as americans used to be" etc etc. the different states and territories that make up the USA all have analogous counterpart countries whether you're comparing climate, population in the absolute, population density, GDP, or any other metric you care to name. many of the comparable countries will have a worse standard of infrastructure than that US state, but there will always be several which perform better, usually utilising fewer resources.
the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader
Actually no, and in fact almost all EVs are capable of powering a house for quite a while. It would be excellent if this was not just a Cybertruck-exclusive feature since here in the bay area we have shitty infrastructure too and power outages happen several times per winter.
That sort of thing happens all the time. All it takes is, say, a big fallen tree in the wrong spot. Its entirely possible for just your road to be SOL for days, if the local utility is otherwise completely swamped by bigger issues from whatever disaster is going on.
I've got a friend who does it simply to fuck PG&E and avoid an electric bill. He has workplace charging, a Cybertruck, and a powerwall + Tesla solar setup at home. He drives his truck to work, fills up on electricity, drives it home at the end of the day, and uses it to power his house. Repeat the next day. The Cybertruck was cheaper than the 13 PowerWalls or whatever that's the equivalent battery capacity.
Technically not stealing, it's a legal workplace benefit. Possibly abuses the spirit of the policy and may get the policy changed if enough people do it, but he's only doing what he's entitled to.
And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.
PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).
Not uncommon in parts of California where certain legs of the grid are shut down for high wind events. If you live in Pacifica, you might have your power out for 3 to 5 days, but there will be reliable power in San Francisco 20 minutes away.
Greetings from Northern California! Multi-day power outages are not at all uncommon (though I've never seen 14 days). We had one about a month ago. Most people just have generators, but if you wanted to use a Cybertruck instead, the nearest superchargers are one hour away and do not go offline when we lose power.
I suspect an hour's drive is getting close to the point where the supercharger solution gets frustratingly annoying. You have to budget 1/3 of your energy just to the round trip, which will take you at least 4 hours for a complete fill, and may only get you 2 days of power.
But it's not bad to ride out the first couple of days if you've got 120kWh just sitting in your garage.
Not niche at all. Loss of power for days is common in areas of strong storms with above ground power lines. States frequented by hurricanes and strong storms can experience days to weeks without power.
Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.
This is one of those things that happens in rural areas, "the city" (which is not actually a city in any sense but the legal one) gets power on in a day or so but your neighborhood 10 miles away doesn't get power for another week because the population density is something like 50/sq mile at most. And that's just for the people in actual neighborhoods, if you're on a farm or something where the nearest neighbor is a mile down the highway I don't even know how long it takes them to fix your power lines.
I grew up in the country, just not far from a town of 2000, but had friends who were more remote, and my power is, well not exactly less reliable now that I’m in the city, but not necessarily better. They would have power to my house or my friends house back pretty quick. Longest I remember was maybe 4 hours. We’ve had 36 hour outages in the city (more than half a million people). I do think we had more outages in the country, but never very long. Structure of the distribution network? Ease of accessing the lines?
>Structure of the distribution network? Ease of accessing the lines?
Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.
It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.
This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.
I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.
It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.
Yeah... even powerwalls and equivalent don't seem to be a good just-in-case solution. A gas generator costs 5% for the same capacity, and you can just go get some extra gas when the storm comes. I'm all for electrification, but after doing the math, it doesn't work for this particular corner case.
I think a powerwall or similar only makes sense with solar, but an EV can be a nice emergency supply for little extra cost as long as you don’t need it often.
Living in Ukraine, I can tell you it's not niche here. Most homeowners without power walls already consider buying an EV because you also get to drive it to an area that has electricity at the time.
Ice storms in the Midwest can knock power out for several days in rural areas. Urban areas usually get brought back online sooner than the rural areas. A few years ago a bad one knocked out power at a friend’s house for three weeks.
Preppers are just about as niche as you can get; they're still a valid customer prototype! I'm sure more than a few solar home owners chose it as a PowerWall.
At 6000lbs+ it's a section 179 write off; if you combine that with some of the previous incentives the car was not that expensive to the right population.
In about 25 years, I've twice been out twice for multiple days and one of those was in summer which was a nuisance rather than a potential really serious problem. (Worst case, I buy ice for coolers and maybe need to toss some food.) But I live just off a (major) country road so I'm probably pretty high on the power restoration schedule.
Yeah if you have to tow long distances it's not an ideal choice. Under normal use I get 250-350 miles (lower end for high speed cruising, higher for surface roads), which has been plenty. And at 50K (brand new) it was cheaper than any of the comparable gas versions. The unexpected bonus was that it hasn't depreciated much at all in the last few years.
This is nothing specific to the CyberTruck; 123 kWh is a lot of battery but a better use would be to add home solar and then you're completely self-sufficient in addition to saving tons of money.
Of course there are two issues that are completely solveable if we had reasonable governance:
1. Adopting an Australia-style solar installation regulation and permitting scheme, which is literally 1/5th tho cost of the US method, and pays their tradespeolpe higher salaries than US workers get
2. Allowing EVs to feed back into the grid. This is something that naysayers would never be useful because nobody would ever want to waste battery cycles on their home. Which of course has always been nonsense. Don't buy EVs without this basic capability, IMHO.
That's entirely due to the US scheme, where utilities have ensured that it won't make sense nearly everywhere. Which is then combined with the asinine permitting situation in the US, where every city and county does something on their own without any order or sense.
This combines to ensure that any solar installer will do lots of very expensive things: 1) have a large sales force to close the sale, which last I looked accounted for 30%-40% of the overall cost of solar in the US, 2) roll out trucks many different times during the planning and install, each costing lots of money, 3) never have to compete with a bunch of other hyper-competitive installers and find efficiencies like batching installs together in the same general area.
There are also massively high solar PV tariffs in the US, more than tripling the cost of the panels, but that's not even that big compared to the rest of the needless inefficiency in the system.
The F150 hybrid is/was also supposed to be really good for this, and when the battery ran down, the engine would switch on and recharge it. So, you were not dependent on a super charger. All you needed is a working gas station. (This is based on an old video from Alex on Autos). So, you could buy a vehicle that is both cheaper and doesn't look like a dumpster and still be able to do this.
> Before, I always wanted to install powerwalls...but I never considered in an extended event being able to drive my powerwalls somewhere to recharge them.
Depending on how much you want to power, there are 'rollable' battery packs that you can plug into a transfer switch. They can be recharged with (foldable) solar panels or a traditional generators (perhaps on cans of propane, which does not go bad like petrol can).
I think this is one of the coolest features of owning an EV. Everyone saying you should buy a 20 year old Camry and a diesel generator are completely missing the point. I want to drive a new EV. And I'm not interested in storing gas cans to run a noisy polluting generator. I also live somewhere that loses power for a few hours to a few days per year. A solar setup would be great but is way too expensive. Tapping into the giant batteries on the car is almost a perfect solution.
I really wish my Model Y had the V2H support... my next car definitely will.
If you need to worry about such extended outages, why not just do the normal thing and install propane tanks, a stationary generator, and a transfer switch?
A cyber truck as a prepper rig is laughable. EV's do a lot of things well, but if it's a prepper rig, you'd need to have a generator and the fuel set aside to charge it. You can't assume that there will be power near by. If there is power, you can't assume that you will have access to one of the relatively few chargers available.
You can get a generator that will get the job done for under 1000 bucks and you can store diesel or propane to get the job done.
That's before we factor in the likelyhood needing to travel quite a distance (and assume there is no access to grid power), and that you won't have any of the cybertruck defeating issues like heavy rains or standing water that might void it's warranty and fry it's electronics.
A prepper rig is a mechanical diesel that can be roll started or hand cranked without batteries, has no electronics to get fried except the radio, and can burn almost any combustible fuel source on hand. Slap a 200 Gallon transfer tank on the back and keep it full and you can drive across the country without fueling up. And if you also have that diesel generator to power your house, you've got a years worth of fuel for that generator.
You can get all that done for around 25k USD, so, not sure how a cyber truck even enters the conversation.
Ford did the same thing, but that truck was built during the height of parts shortages.
Ford came in and bought up all of the parts from our suppliers and I had to qual random suppliers for weeks. Even at the time, I was thinking there is too much disparity and this will haunt us for years.
We were a bit more agile and I made a lot of kernel hacks to compensate.
Ford didn’t fare better for all their choices. Recalls galore. Honestly, they made my life hell so fuck em.
On to the truck, they had a proprietary charger and power wall solution but it could run the house for days.
my jelly neighbor story is that when our neighbors replaced their ice truck with a cybertruck, a calm descended on our block. iso of getting woken up by the rumble of that damn thing when they started it, they just zoomed off, silently. its the first time i internalized that electric vehicles are inherently better than ice. more human.
Battery capacity is just one side of the equation. You also need a strong output capacity otherwise you won't much. Also if you are to inject current in your network like that, then you need at least a source inverter to isolate yourself from the grid, otherwise it would most likely be illegal and very dangerous for technicians and neighbors. Also
> They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story.
The cybertruck is $70k, which in a 14-day power outage is $5000 a day.
There are cheaper options to weather such a storm. Like flying first class to New York, getting a limo to the Central Park Ritz-Carlton and spending 14 days being waited on hand and foot.
Yes, drain your car to power your house, so in an extended outage your house will be out of power and you will be stranded. Risk management, people. You don’t know if power will go out in even more places, or stay off for an extended period of time.
Are the battery compartments water proof? We got hit by a hurricane a few years ago, and a few nearby teslas caught on fire from the floodwaters, torching people's houses.
A real pepper would want a car that runs on gas with a carburated engine and is also a common car. Not a niche one off that requires fussy infrastructure just to refuel.
You can buy the batteries installed at your home, charged during the day with solar or night with a small ICE generator. That plus a real same-class truck still costs considerably less than a CT.
that is not the only car who can reverse-charge the house. All EVs are theoretically capable of it, given proper power switching algorithm. (the hardware is already there, just how the four switches open/close to reverse the energy flowing direction.)
I agree that it’s cool, but is it practical? If your goal is to power your house, you can buy a whole-house backup generator for about 1/12th of the cost of a cybertruck.
The requirements for a home battery are vastly different than for a vehicle. For home, size and weight matter much less and capacity and discharge matter much more. Vehicle batteries would nearly always be the wrong solution to power a home.
I used to have an interter I installed in my vehicle, mainly to run powertools, and brew hot cocoa during stargazing events. During the great North American power outage of 2003, I ran an extension cord into the house and ran some basic stuff off it (I recall us being the only ones around who could watch TV to keep up with the news). It was only 1200W (though had an extra deep cycle battery hooked up), but helped enough for a few vitals.
Interesting, This reminds me a V2V energy transportation. There was a study in the past to investigate how could it be designed in the public transportation:
Currently in pilot on a small fleet of electric trucks in Australia (actual trucks - prime movers for road trains) - large standard swappable battery packs that can be removed and replaced with a fork lift.
What appliances exactly did the house have? And does it last couple of days even for appliances with compressors and heating coils? If it did that then thats pretty impressive! And your friend is a genius
This works for the wealthy that can afford it, but would it be better to be press for a better grid for everyone instead? It amazes me how individualistic and wasteful the usa is.
may I ask why would it not be more sensible to have solar panels, battery and generators? Is that not a viable project?
I'm consodering that for myself, never thought on a cybertruck
If you live in a sunny area, it's much cheaper to install solar with a hybrid inverter (like a Sol-Ark) with some batteries, and a generator for the extended outages. The cybertruck's battery is 123 kwh, whereas a gallon of gas contains approx 33 kwh of energy. A mere 5 gallon container of gas is more energy than the entire cybertruck.
It's worth noting that there are several other (nearly objectively better) EVs on the market with larger battery capacity than the CT and have V2H/Powershare tech.
I wonder if we will see less aggressive and generally hostile car designs in the future, now that public sentiment towards the tech oligarchs seems to have shifted.
Renault is designing cute things again, so that's a good development. So is Citroen, apparently?
I liked the styling. Thought about getting one. Got a chance to get in one the other day. and it was so uncomfortable. felt like sitting on a park bench. I thought this was supposed to be not a real pickup. Rather a suburban big old thing with blade runner styling and reviews said lots of comfort. No, just a big old vehicle, that's not even that roomy on the inside (hip room felt like that of my old integra), with the comfort of an 80's pick up. not much of a point to it.
I had a pre-order. The reason I canceled was because the delivered product had a lot less range and was much more expensive than previously announced.
There were other things that contributed to the decision, too: the announced "stressed skin" exoskeleton was panned in favor of adhering the body panels to the body with glue, it became clear that Tesla's profit and valuation were funding Elon's right-wing political project, and I would have preferred a solid-axle design.
The absurdity was not what was wrong with it. It's OK to be absurd. I really liked the stainless steel design. Less trail damage when off-roading and no need to worry about paint scratches causing body rust. The door wedge design? Meh. But it enabled the stainless steel body.
In the end, I want what the Cybertruck failed to deliver: a full-size electric pickup at a good price with excellent range. I currently have my eyes on the RAM REV. We'll see if that one gets axed, too.
I still remember the marketing for the Cybertruck. Tesla teased a neo-noir silhouette image of partial angle the truck which had everyone guessing which part it belonged to. Childhood fantasies about Blade Runner designs were conjured in people’s imaginations. People were truly generous with the design expectations. Finally, I went to the unveiling and when it rolled out I thought this must be a gag and the real Blade Runner would follow any second now, only to realize that this ugly thing was it. Then the boss had the designer throw a ball through the window. Twice.
I don't like the design but don't hate it either. At least the jaggedness is for a functional reason. There are uglier cars, about 10 of which are from Kia and Hyundai.
I'm convinced that Elon made it just because he thought it would be funny. "Let's make a truck that looks like it came out of a 90s low-polygon video game! That'll be hilarious!" He never cared for one moment if it was actually a good product.
The poor people that bought them were the butt of his joke.
My understanding is more that economy and safety standards have driven us towards these aerodynamic and impact absorbing shapes. I may be quite wrong though!
The cybertruck had good enough safety ratings, but kinda just decided to not care about the aerodynamics and economy side. Which freed Elon up a lot in terms of style.
Personally, I also agree that it was refreshing to see something bold out there on the road. It's just that the final product looked just 'off' enough to make it look bad in the end.
Like, it's wheel base is about 6 inches too long and the ride height is about 6 inches too low, making it look a bit toddler-y to my eyes. The bed was also just not practicable and too small (something I see on a lot of trucks these days). The speed was good, the torque was great, the giant screen you can't feel when driving was not. The seats were uncomfortable for my build.
Overall, the car was a statement, one that just barely missed the mark to my eyes, but it did miss
> The bodywork of the vehicle is particularly problematic: the sharp-edged, rigid stainless steel panels of the Cybertruck violate EU safety regulations, which primarily serve to protect vulnerable road users.
The US safety ratings are incredibly easy to game. I have a sibling who used to be a crash test engineer, and we used to get bored of them endlessly ranting about it at family gatherings.
In many other countries it wasn’t even street legal because it couldn’t meet minimum safety standards.
Except it is very ugly and the triangle profile created a impractically large windshield and caused the bed cover to completely block the rear window when closed.
Thr angular Cybertruck design was actually not primarily for show. It comes from the fact that its body is made from cold-rolled, full-hard stainless steel that can't be stamped into arbitrary shapes. Ordinary car bodies are made from steel that can be stamped but is not stainless, so they require paint.
The original design was that the body would be made from these panels. The exoskeleton structure.
The Cybertruck that was released did not have that, instead the panels are just normal body parts connected to a standard car frame underneath - like any other car.
This take is widespread on this venture capital fan forum, but it's both incorrect and a retreat. The Cybertruck was poorly thought out, sold teribly, and is now dead. By example it has discouraged future diversity in automotive design.
Good design that breaks the mold and then succeeds for that reason is what changes the world. Bad design that starts from the desire to be different without understanding the forces that led to the preexisting equilibrium is what we got. If you start out with hundreds of billions of dollars you can fake it for much longer, but if your premise is fundamentally economically incorrect then it will only last as long as you can subsidize it.
It is impossible for someone's statement of preference to be incorrect. You may differ in your opinion, but the gp is not wrong for having their own opinion.
I read their comment as meaning, "If you really care about design that doesn't look like anything else, you should be wary of the Cybertruck, as its commercial failure actually discourages future innovation in automobile design."
They weren't stating their preference for the form of the vehicle itself. They were stating their preference for designs that break the mold. But if what you desire is cars that break the mold, the Cybertruck has set the world back.
They didn't go for looks though. The whole premise was ease of manufacturing. An interesting idea that soon proved to be invalid. But they pushed forwards anyway for some reason (and we all know that reason).
I have very mixed feelings about the Cybertruck. Personally I absolutely hate it, it's just not my cup of tea and I would never in a million years buy one. However as a general lover of cars, I have to appreciate just how striking the design is and how it was a complete departure from pretty much any other car on the road.
There's nothing quite like the Cybertruck and I don't think there ever will be again.
Largely agree with your mixed feelings. When the Cybertruck was revealed, I thought it was atrociously ugly, but I appreciated something radically different in a market of converging (and IMO boring) styles. I could see the style being more successfully applied as a Cybercar / Cybercoupe.
Brings me to a point I'd like to make: it boggled my mind that Tesla decided to execute the 'Cyber' aesthetic via a pickup truck, particularly after the US auto industry ramped up marketing the pickup truck's familiar shape as a cultural facet during/after the Great Recession and the fuel economy regulation changes.
Tesla could've capitalized on the billions Ford, Chevy, Dodge, and others spent in the 2010s marketing pickup trucks as God's gift to humanity, but instead decided -that- was the best market to try a complete novelty in. It makes no rational sense -- I've heard it ultimately came down to Musk stubbornly wanting the Cybertruck, but I don't know if that's factual.
All the clown show at Tesla had to do is clone the F-150. This was one of the easiest product failures to predict in recent memory. Musk can't help himself. Tesla continues to desperately need a Shotwell at the helm.
At present all Tesla has propping it up is bubble dust and one car model (one increasingly dated car model). Somehow after 14-15 years (Model S released in Summer 2012) these people still can't release a real SUV of any sort. The model Y is a grotesque joke of a fake SUV, a mutilated model 3 that doesn't really look like an SUV in any regard. The model Y is an SUV like the Cybertruck is a truck. They might as well have unlimited money to do it, and they can't do it. Same reason they couldn't release the roadster even after all this time. It's a fundamentally broken company because Musk won't get out of the way. Whatever Musk is good at it, it's not running a large scale automotive company.
The absurdity is the best part of it. Finally it was something new, in a landscape where every car and truck has looked the same for the past 20 years. I'm happy someone designed and built something so crazy and different.
It probably would have been better had they not been mass produced, and maybe did a very limited quantity run - make it more like a collector item... I suppose thats what it'll be now. I see quite a few on the road, it takes away from the uniqueness.
A lot of what he's going on about with respect to the Cybertruck looking old is that it was—intentionally or not—an exercise in retro-futurism, not futurism. Elon attempted to make a truck that Schwarzenegger would have driven in the 80s. Or as he showed, the M577 Armoured Personnel Carrier from “Aliens.”
As Wikipedia points out: As opposed to futurism, which is an artistic movement anticipating upcoming technological advancements, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. So Cybertruck is actually a nostalgia product. "Remember when we thought that manly pickups would be stainless steel and low-poly and drive around silently?"
So, nobody looking for the truck of the future wants a Cybertruck. It does not represent what we anticipate the future will look like.
I'll stop here, because if I point out that the Roadster circus stunt featured a flying car with gas thrusters at night that was an exercise in retro-futuristic nostalgia for Blade Runner, this will turn into an essay.
I really agree with you here. I would never buy one (vw buzz is more my style) but I loved it in a weird “thank god something new and unique” way. Like my love for good brutalist office buildings even if I’d never want to live in a brutalist home.
The amount of hate it gets has been yet another clear indication to me just how annoyingly tribal people are. It shows you’re in the in-group and definitely-a-righteous-good-guy if you hate on the cybertruck. Not hating on the cybertruck is basically admitting you’re a fascist (I’ve had a friend literally tell me this non-jokingly). I think that’s really what 80% of the hate comes down to.
Hating the cybertruck might be tribal for some people, but definitely not everyone. I thought it was stupid and ugly from the moment it was announced, and I still think it's stupid and ugly, and it is demonstrably bad at the job of "being a truck".
You can celebrate Tesla for trying something new while still hating the actual thing that they tried for being bad.
I remember feeling that it was ugly when it was initially released, and then saw repeated messages on HN from people who said it "looked better than you think in person". I assumed they were right, and that it would actually come out for usd40k and have seating for 6.
The Ioniq 5 leans into the same aesthetic too and that car is everywhere now, so it's not like there's anything fundamentally keeping that from working.
Tesla's mission was never to built "something crazy and different". In fact it was kind of the opposite: when Model S came out, Tesla showed the world that EVs don't need to look or drive differently than traditional cars, because all EVs which came before Model S were either looked like a concept car or a small toy-like car. Tesla continued this success with Model 3 and Model Y. Then they started deviating from their mission and came up with Cybertruck. All they needed to do was to show the world that an EV truck can be just as practical and capable as a gasoline truck. They didn't need to go crazy with the design, make it bullet-proof, choose stainless steel which made the manufacturing harder... They shot themselves in the foot.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 99.9 ms ] threadHe wishes. Delorean is a modern classic, regardless of commercial success. Cybertruck will go down like the H1/H2; something entirely emblematic of the times it was conceived and marketed in, that later generations will go "did they really think that was cool?".
Setting aside JohnZ's personal failings, the car and its production was a catastrophe.
Not that the DMC-1's PRV v6 and tall Renault 5-speed were gonna make getting to 85 easy...
Who's doing the proofreading at Wired now? Is it all just AI?
Found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_scBKKHi7WQ
As someone who described himself in an earlier post as a "Big Elon fan boy", perhaps the source of bias here lies in a location other than the author of the WIRED article.
The answer was wait a long time since they’re sold out. Obviously someone wants them.
With numbers that small, any vagary of demand can lead to lots full of unsold vehicles or waiting lists.
Doesn’t the new ~flying car have similar design vibes?
But then I saw it in-person, and it looks indescribably weird and bad, akin to the uncanny valley. The problem is that it's a real vehicle and not in a video game.
The steel chassis provides rigidity instead of a traditional frame. They ended up having to be flat, not curved, to meet the design goal.
I guess we all just want something that “looks like a pickup”, is heavy, and guzzles $7 a gallon diesel fuel
No actually the lightning and the R1T are pretty well loved by the people who took a chance on them
I would say the issue is more that there has been little to no progress in mainstream consumer car aesthetics in the past 25 years. It used to be that you could clearly tell a 50s car from a 60s car from a 70s car from an 80s car, etc. Everything from the past 25 years or so is pretty indistinguishable, so something comes along with a clear but possibly misguided aesthetic vision, its naturally going to appeal to some people.
But where I live (deep blue territory) most people would not be caught dead driving Musk’s favorite car around
Don't speak too soon, we have a few more years to go.
DeLorean is the real life 80s reference of course, but in cyberpunk revival media like the coupe in Ghost in the Shell 2017, the spinner in Blade Runner 2049—those cars are all much smaller cabins than the cybertruck
It just looks too weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUV#1980s_to_1990s
I live in the PNW and you see people not using their trucks as trucks every single time you go out on the road. This includes urban areas.
I’ve owned an F150 and an R1T and for camping, overlanding, snow trips, etc the Rivian is hands down the most capable vehicle I have ever driven. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a Ford
It's basically irrelevant in pedestrian collisions because the pedestrian is already taking ~95% of the impact even from a lighter car and the <5% difference between that and an arbitrarily heavier vehicle is completely dwarfed by any of the other variables like the speed of the collision. For a pedestrian it's better to get hit by an 80,000 pound vehicle at 35 MPH than a 3000 pound one at 39 MPH.
Edit: okay I get it, the human acceleration from impact basically asymptotes.
If they have the same mass then they each take half. If one of them is 19 times heavier then the other one takes 95% of the acceleration. If one of them is six hundred trillion times heavier then the other one takes ~100% of the acceleration, but this is still only ~5% more than taking 95%.
Excellent thought experiment and this helped it click.
This is the silliest argument against the Cybertruck, IMO. Its forward visibility is significantly better than other full-sized trucks, yet people continue to bring up pedestrian safety every time the Cybertruck is mentioned.
The quality of the vehicle is actually quite high.
If we can get some affordable electric trucks in the US, it will be very interesting to see how the more rational segments of the market react once they are no longer priced out.
I'm a current truck driver and very excited to swap out my ICE truck for a Slate next year. I need something that can haul my trash to the dump, grab a load of wood chips for the garden, and bring home the occasional sheet good from the home store.
I agree with your assessment as it applies to the Cybertruck or F150, but not the idea of an electric truck. Some people buy trucks because they need a light-duty hauling solution; unfortunately, the market seems to only want to sell luxury SUVs that happen to have truck beds.
You just need to cover the bulk of uses, not every last thing you might need to do. I think the light SUV + utility trailer is a pretty good sweet spot, even better for many things than a pickup truck on its own. Like have fun lifting 20 sheets of plywood up onto a pickup truck and back down, assuming you've even got one with a full length bed that can support that whole pile.
And sure I'd think larger trailers get to be a hassle to move empty by hand, but isn't that what having more equipment is for? And isn't that well into the tier where you need a truck for a tow vehicle regardless?
On the other hand, I've never experienced being able to just haul something without a little planning first, so I don't miss it.
Work trucks are a very different market than for passenger vehicles. Their usage is a lot more consistent and known. This means that electric works very well for some work trucks and very poorly for others.
The other aspect of work trucks is that their generally purchased by very conservative businesses who don't want to buy the bleeding edge, they want several years of reliability data before committing. The F-150 Lightning was cancelled just as that data was starting to come in.
Of course, most F-150's are sold as passenger vehicles rather than work trucks. Along with almost all Cybertrucks.
1. People who need to haul stuff in the bed
2. People who need to tow stuff behind them
3. People who buy them for some form of self expression.
Electrics are probably fine for people in 1 & 3. But for 2 I have yet to find one that both tows and gets range.
They are going to be very valued collectors items in 30 years once the kids of today have enough disposable income to buy whichever are left roadworthy by then.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Mostly I've seen younger kids love it. I was at the park and a little girl saw a Cybertruck pull up -- "Look, Dad, it's from the future!"
I think Cybertruck is probably ultimately a failure, but the amount of hate it gets when they are at least trying to push things outside of the normal makes me sad. The amount of negativity towards anything new that's not perfect is insane.
A significant portion of the hate they get is for what they represent and who they’re from, not because they’re “new” or “different” or “not perfect”.
If the CyberTruck were the size of a Honda Ridgeline or Ford Maverick, I think truck folks (who skew conservative) would look at it a lot less derisively. There are entire swathes of the half-ton truck market that the Cybertruck simply cannot compete in due to a seeming fundamental misunderstanding by the design team of what the vehicle needs to be capable of and amenable to. This is especially evident in the fleet/work truck market where the unibody design immediately shuts out folks who need to put an aftermarket bed replacement (think plumbers, welders, and other trades).
It straddles the 1/2 to 3/4 ton segment in terms of specs, but it is fundamentally impossible to tow a 5th wheel or gooseneck trailer with a Cybertruck.
Again, there is "think different" and there is "misunderstand the market."
Because adults around them groomed them for that. Kids don't just start booing at objects out of the blue, they parrot the learned behavior of the adults around them.
In which case I'd probably gasp at meeting those "adults" IRL.
Let’s keep in mind that Tesla invested in this truck to be the next F-150, which is the best-selling vehicle in the USA for the past multiple decades.
Even the hated Edsel is worth quite a bit today.
Of course it might be harder to keep a Cybertruck running for 50 years due to all the computerized components. Restorers will probably be relegated to rebuilding Cybertruck bodies with new components.
Really no different than any classic car, really. GM isn't selling OEM parts for a '57 Chevy, for example. If you need replacement parts on those, nowadays, you're likely going to specialty manufacturers given there really aren't any "parts cars" around anymore.
Good book on the subject: https://www.sup.org/books/history/disaster-dearborn
Tesla’s corporate leadership would be much happier if the Cybertruck was selling 100,000 units a year and was not at all a collector’s item.
Best selling truck of all time. Not really about rarity.
This is interesting to say given that by most objective measures of what constitutes a good truck, the cybertruck is a bad truck.
It's always an excuse and everyone else's fault that things are politicized. The same people telling us to leave every social problem to the Invisible Hand get fussy when it actually manifests.
God you people are retarded.
Yep. This is the world the Supreme Court handed us with Citizen's United. Now that money is speech, we all have to accept that when we buy things, our money can be used against us.
This is the world they wanted, and if you hate cancel culture, then you need to get on board with fixing the damage from Citizen's United... not raging against regular people who are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, and using their money as speech.
What you buy is your politics now. It fucking sucks, but look at it with clearer eyes.
Not all HNers are good parents
The classroom of kids Ive seen (my kids attend 3 different schools), all of them are amazed by them - age ranges: 3, 7, 9 all their classrooms loved them. Same with some of the older kids I've been around. They're all boys, I do imagine it's a very boy-friendly car.
I personally don't have a cyber truck, not big on it personally, but never put my own opinions into my kids. The kids may not "like it", but they are amazed by it.
I'm in an area that doesn't really hate Musk, so I think that does have an impact.
Do you have anything empirical to back this up? This feels like someone kind of hoping something is true. It's like the Harley rider sure that everyone thinks they're super cool with their super loud bike.
In the same way that I'm entirely certain kids don't look at a monstrous mobile trash bin and say "wow, cool!". But the owners of those ugly abominations sure think they look cool.
Unsurprising, as they look like they were designed by an 8 year old.
There's going to be 3 owners perpetually going to Cars and Coffee with theirs, rotating with their pristine Pontiac Aztec.
And that's all they'll do with it because there is no way a CyberTruck is going to last 30 years otherwise.
You don’t see that with a Ferrari or Rolls Royce.
It is definitely going to be a collectors items, if it isn’t already.
That’s not gonna pay the bills for Tesla, but I guess it’s something.
https://youtu.be/L3oO510dyVI
The size is just too impractical. It would never fit in my garage. On top of that, the standby drain was significant. Just sitting idle, it would lose 10 to 20 miles of range.
The battery capacity on those things is equivalent to 9 Tesla Powerwall units or something close to it.
They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story. Before, I always wanted to install powerwalls...but I never considered in an extended event being able to drive my powerwalls somewhere to recharge them.
It’s unclear to me how a vehicle battery can be 9-10x the size of a house battery, be used as a house battery, include an highway safe cabin, motors and wheels and only cost 4x what a single home battery costs. Oh, and at least Kia rates their battery warranty based on miles driven, so using it as a home battery does not impact any 10-year capacity guarantees.
AI tells me they are completely different though, so I must be missing something.
They want ~9k for a freaking 13.5kwh pack.
I can buy a UL certified, 16kwh, outdoor rated pack for 3.5k (ex - EG4 allweather)
I can buy just the LFP batteries themselves for the new powerwall 3 LFP version (no BMS, no shell, no certification) for $1116... https://18650battery.com/products/byd-302ah-3-2v-lifepo4-pri...
Powerwall is a scammy product. WAY too expensive for the storage it provides.
---
So the summary is: Cybertruck is using a different battery chemistry, Powerwall is a scam.
(I mean - to be clear, the Cybertruck is also a scam, but it's a different kind of scam not directly related to the battery capacity, since it's hauling around a 123kWh NCMA battery pack)
Propane generators here have the same problem.
That still doesn't explain the price gap. You can literally just get a V2H EV and use it instead of a home battery (or, you could if the ecosystem was more mature).
5kWh of battery cells at the moment run around $500. The rest of the cost of production is in the power electronics (probably around another $500).
It's why you can buy 4kwh worth of battery backups from Amazon for about $2k right now. Yet the same thing sold as a home battery backup costs $5k.
Lack of competition and likely low amount of sells is what's causing the margins to be so high.
I just bought a kit to convert to natural gas though. Most people who've done it are happy to not change bottles all the time. It won't help after an earthquake but the regular PSPS outages I get make natural gas a better fit for the moment.
It’s possible to get larger propane tanks and refill them more cheaply (rather than exchanging expensive grill tanks at the store). Some hardware stores will refill tanks directly. You can even get very large tanks (refilled by a truck that comes to your house) if you want weeks of power on tap. But this is probably overkill for most, unless you’re very remote.
The whole comment comes across as an AI agent that is lacking severe human context by posting a complete non-sequitur, regardless if it is actually an agent or not.
First time I’ve been compared to an AI agent.
Most people just plug an extension cord into the onboard inverter. You have to manually flip it on and plug it in, but 240V30A is plenty for an emergency. Doing it this way isn't any different from any other vehicle with an onboard inverter though.
On the other hand there are no tricky rules for an electric truck to have extra power outlets in it.
If you are concerned about riding through a 14 day+ event you need a generator. Even a fully off-grid solar / wind setup could be compromised in these kinds of storms. I've seen entire roofs cleaned off by a <100mph storm. Anything not bolted down to a concrete slab cannot be depended on.
https://www.tesla.com/powershare/#vehicles
> Powershare allows you to draw power directly from your compatible Tesla vehicle to power your devices, your home or the grid.
> Powershare is currently available for all Cybertruck vehicles, and all new Model 3 and Model Y2 vehicles ordered on October 1, 2026 or later.
> To verify if your vehicle has Powershare, navigate to ‘Software’ > ‘Additional Vehicle Info’ > ‘Powershare Support: Enabled’ on your vehicle touchscreen.
To power a house directly from an EV, the main options now are the EV trucks -- Lightning, Silverado, Cybertruck all can have this ability, 240V 30A typically
> Model 3 provides a maximum draw of 11.5 kW.
You can't run your heating or air conditioning at full tilt, but otherwise that will get you at lot, this is 240V at ~45A.
I don't think the residential power generator is needed anymore if you have an electric car.
Completely missed opportunity. I won't be buying an electric vehicle that doesn't allow powering my house, ever again.
Don't give the USB consortium any ideas...
We have a 12v port that we can get ~200W out of, so that could power our internet.
But I agree, a real joke to have 150KwH (two EVs) in my garage and no way to even plug in a fridge.
V2H/V2L is a must have in my next EV.
As you probably know, there's a 12 volt battery in these cars. That battery is automatically recharged by the big 100kWh main battery.
Some years back, I bought a 12 volt, 2000W inverter and connected it to this 12 volt battery in the Tesla, ran a couple of extension cords, and powered our refrigerator, extra freezer, and a number of other things with it for many hours. The main battery percentage in the car showed an appropriate drop. This actually wasn't during an outage, it was contingency testing. We already have a natural gas, 3600 watt generator that connects to one of our panels and use that during (unfortunately frequent) outages.
In my 2017, it's a bit of work to get to that battery, but it's quite doable and seemingly quite safe. The obvious, very rough/estimated/simplistic math is the 100kWh main battery divided by 2kW is about 50 hours. Different factors would push that number up and down of course.
I will definitely try this again. If it works, that'd be great.
1) if you're permanently modifying your home or electric panel you're over $1k. (General Motors "Vehicle2House" is ~$10-20k for hardware + installation... an EXTREME investment unless you plan on regular "emergency" usage of it)
2) if you're buying some portable solar panel "battery boom box" you'll likely run out and the folding solar panel it comes with is more gimmick than reliable
3) if you're buying a "real" gas/diesel generator, you have to run it + change the oil every 6 months otherwise it might not start in your emergency situation
...just buy a thing that clips to your car battery and dangles out the front hood of your car!
You already maintain your car every 3-9 months, you already (should) have at least 1/2 tank of gas at all times (especially in a weather / outage situation), you can generally idle your car for at least 2 days off a tank of gas in an emergency, and if this thing can charge your phone/battery packs, keep your fridge running (kindof?), and run a small space heater overnight...
It makes soooo much more sense to buy a $500-$1000 emergency accessory that piggybacks off the car you already maintain than trying to stand up a whole extra distribution mechanism for "survival-ish power, maybe 1-2 times over 3-4 years".
Despite the dealer saying the used one I bought supported it, it turned out to not be available in the trim I got. My fault obviously for believing something a car dealer said.
It sounds amazing. Only thing I wonder if it can even be set up so that it will be like an Uninterruptible Power Supply. So that when there is a blackout, the V2H supplies all the power without any interruption.
I have several computers but no UPS yet. Imagine if I could buy an electric car and when I am not using it, my car is UPS for my whole house including my computers! :D
That's the point of V2H (or a residential battery, which it emulates). Although you still want a UPS for computers. Although "without any interruption" is probably not at the scale of a UPS, and possibly not at the scale a desktop computer will require. So you'd still want UPSes for that. Notably it depends how the grids cuts off, if it cuts off in one shot (like throwing the breaker) the failover should be almost instantaneous, but if it fluctuates before failing the battery might need a lot longer to engage.
If power loss is a regular event you probably want V2H, but if it's just a remote fear or something that happens once every 5~10 then V2L and a few extension cords will do.
As soon as we got the adapter for our Ioniq 5, I sold generator to a neighbor. The car will run what we need for four days, which is longer than the generator and five gallon can of gas is going to last.
If you're after the V2L feature, you can get for much cheaper: for 16% of the price of a Cybertruck, you can get 86% of the battery capacity (about 8 powerwalls) by buying a used Fisker Ocean Extreme (107kWh vs. the cybertrucks 123)
I think this is why these EV trucks don’t do well (ford also cancelled the F150 lightning). For truck things, they aren’t particularly capable (you’d get less than 100 miles towing). For daily driving duty, a car or small suv is much more efficient. You can power your home during a storm from most EVs these days, you’d just have to top it up more often
Yes, but the energy density of the energy storage mechanism in the cybertruck is substantially lower than a gas pickup truck
Not a Cybertruck fan myself, but unless you are going to tow or take many long road trips, an EV truck will work great for anyone who can charge at home. And most people don't tow, or take long road trips, with their trucks.
Except for everyone who owns an RV trailer.
Of course the Prius Prime on electricity is way more efficient than both, but it still uses a lot more energy than a house.
- the Cybertruck uses almost twice as much energy as your Niro EV
- the 40% efficient Prius uses about 4x as much energy as your 95% efficient Niro EV.
what seems off?
Yes, driving, compared to living, uses ridiculous amounts of energy.
Actually newtons are just a constant factor (3.6) compared to Wh per km, since there are 3600 seconds in a hour while there are 1000 watts in a kilowatt. For example 144 Wh/km (or 14.4 kWh/100 km) would simply be 518 N. This also means that pushing along a Tesla on the highway at constant speed is roughly as hard as holding a 50 kg weight, giving you an intuitive sense of how "hard" it is to keep things moving.
Of course, in everyday life, since we buy electricity from our utilities in kWh rather than joules, it's more convenient to talk about kWh per km (or per mile).
Actually, I guess the comment you replied to was also not really clear in it's point, so I'll blame that guy for maybe diverging from the topic somewhat :)
(not trying to be negative, really! but my brain is a bit fuzzy from being sick, so thus feeling a bit dimwitted as I ponder comments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5b8_KBtT8
I thought you were autocorrected badly but I guess this is a term people use?
Using energy is not bad. Creating excess carbon emissions is bad.
All cars just use a ton of power moving a lot of mass. It is actually impressive, it's like 100KW at full tilt. I think i saw someone do the math for how much power transfer you would need to get EV charging as fast as gasoline refuelling: It's in the megawatts.
The only way you could signifigantly reduce power usage of vehicles is to reduce mass dramaticially with a motorcyle or autocycle. The Aptera is an interesting autocycle design based on this line of reasoning, but we are also seeing the emergence of a lot of electric motorcycles.
Also regarding filling up an EV as fast as gasoline, there’s a company in China that has demonstrated charging from 20-80% in 5 minutes. They’re using 3MW charging.
It makes you realize why gasoline has been so popular for so long, you can stop for 5 minutes and dump 500 kWh of energy into your tank. Unfortunately most of that is wasted as heat during the combustion process.
Yeah that's the exact post I saw. I didn't believe the video at the time but I suppose it's possible with enough battery paralellism and cooling.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/new-ev-technology-cha...
Also, if you factor in the construction, idk what the timeline to pay that off would be.
https://www.peravescz.com/electric-version/
ICE trucks are equally inefficient for towing. People just don't seem to be able to factor it in.
Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.
The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.
The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.
So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.
Not so sure about that one, boss. I can fully-load up a Ford Ranger to its 7500lb rated towing capacity and lose ~10% in fuel economy/range while you just dropped something like 30% (from the base power package range of ~240 miles, platinum package at 300 miles you're losing half if you only get 150 miles out.)
To get their equal ranges, a Ford Raptor would have a ~4 gallon tank. The fact that the cybertruck can go so far while not towing is the miracle. How far do you think you're going to get with 4 gallons?
Driving in general uses a lot of energy. It’s the physically moving a 1,000 kg or more object that takes a lot of energy. Orders of magnitude more than a few lights or a phone. Same with flying of course; also moving a heavy object.
I have a lightning and it averages 0.5kwh/mile and my electricity price is $0.15/kwh, so it costs me $0.075/mile to drive. At current gas prices that's pretty much the same as a very efficient hybrid compact car (55mpg @ ~$4/gallon). If I had solar I could probably offset almost all of the lightning fuel cost based on where I live (sunny) but it's so cheap it's not worth it.
Do you mean "much more efficient" in places where electricity rates are significantly higher than the national average? Or only much more efficient when compared to when you're charging at charging stations?
Cybertruck — 2mi/kwh
Model Y — 3.8mi/kwh
Model 3 — 4mi/kwh
Went looking for the campground host and bumped into another camper, who was pissed the power went out. "Don't worry though - if you need to charge something, you can put it in my truck."
Ended up on a phone charging expedition that ended up with me hanging out in a local library for the first time since I was a child.
Came back and met the host: "Sorry about the power last night - some dumbass tried to charge his truck and tripped the breaker to the whole campground."
(I'm sure there's more to the story, and the details aren't important, but if charging a vehicle is tripping breakers for the whole campground there's something wrong.)
Also, a bog standard 14-50 is likely not suited for 80% steady EV usage anyway. They make EV-rated 14-50s now because people keep melting the older ones. And that happens even though the vast majority of chargers won't draw more than 32A on a 14-50 due to the historical popularity of using 40A breakers for a 14-50 receptacle.
Battery's not super useful if you want to put the phone on your handlebars while riding. Screen is a lot more helpful than audio cues. If you can only charge when parked, it's either charge from a battery and have to top up the battery later, or just charge the phone directly.
The friend I did the trip with was on nav for the first part of the trip, but he had to turn back early for family stuff.
It's exhausting reading these kinds of articles from a tech publication none the less. It's just so negative. Here is a summary of paragraphs:
Cybertruck is ceasing production
Here's a mean tweet from some X account with 2,649 followers: "Fuck that shitbox"
The car rusts sometimes
Truck sold very few units
Even with low sales they're still going down
Wildly unpopular with design flaws
Mention embarrassing demo from 7 years ago
It just goes on, truly exhausting.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a36715409/why-does-...
It’s niche just because natural disasters are thankfully relatively rare, but I still think having good contingencies is worth it.
Fuck being seen in a cybertruck though.
Electric vehicles won't, ever, be prioritized over bringing up residential, commercial and emergency services. The fact that even on a super charger it's 20+ minutes to charge a Cybertruck means the two or three at the local gas station will just end up with 12+ hour lines. Even now generators are fueled before private vehicles.
Bringing up power after disasters is super dangerous as is. A lot of systems that hadn't been turned off in years do a cold start, and sparks fly. It's why the power company and fire departments coordinate very very closely on grid work.
You know someone's going to try and bypass any safeties and circuit breakers and end up taking down their house when they try to restore power after a flood or something. People already regularly die from running their generator in the garage and most of these aren't wired directly into house mains.
> Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap
TBF an EV car has an absolutely massive battery relative to the electric consumption of a house, unless you're using resistive heating all around. Especially if you ration use.
https://youtu.be/yO5fJ8z66Z8
My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.
I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.
The value of the same, repurposed to a "powerwall" - $10k per 10 KWh
The value of it once attached to a "movable powerwall" - :) add a few more zeros
Clearly, I am in the wrong business...
When we got solar we asked for quotes, but ‘No Tesla’. The sales rep said ‘We get that a lot’.
I wasn’t interested in hearing any advantages of a Tesla Powerwall, that brand is toxic to me now.
There’s plenty of good alternatives that don’t fund criminals like Tommy Robinson and Russell Brand.
We have Sigenergy. Are they better than Teslas? Unsure, but at least I have no idea what the owner(s) think.
It was also really hard to work with them to even get the bid.
It was quite the premium.
Best practice would be to build a separate structure and physically separate the battery from your house.
But it is still cheaper to stockpile some generators and gas than stockpile a cybertruck. If there's an EV charging station up within a 1 hr drive, gas stations are also going to be up.
Not really. Some areas in California have multiple PSPS outages during fire season. Many people have gotten gas generators or powerwalls to deal with it, but using your EV would be ideal.
Generators have solved this problem. My family used to lose electricity anytime there was a semi serious snow storm. We got a gasoline generator after the second time and it was always sufficient. We never needed to siphon gas from the car either. We later transitioned to a natural gas generator. The lines are all underground and tie into the existing system for the stove and dryer. No car involved.
If you are concerned about that, you get solar panels and a battery. You still do not have to worry about losing your means of transportation.
A Cybertruck has nearly 10x the battery capacity of a single Powerwall, and to buy that much Powerwall capacity would cost at least as much as a Cybertruck. Even a Tesla Model 3 (which now supports home backup) is over 5x Powerwalls.
You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k), but you don’t need anywhere near the amount of very expensive supplemental home batteries.
Also, even an EV with a 120V outlet and no home backup support could be very useful for recharging a portable battery bank.
$10,000 to install a socket, a breaker, and a transfer switch?
Surely not.
Electricians like their transfer switches because they are right sized and everything, e.g. they are more foolproof for the end user to operate, but the interlock approach actually gives you more control because every breaker is allowed (a transfer switch will only expose some small subset of all your breakers usually), you just have to manage the power supply yourself.
No. It's like a generator except way more power and mobile. Rechargable via solar. So basically just a much better generator.
Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!
It has another downsides, obviously. But the notion of "emergency power for your house" is kinda moot.
My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.
And are regularly rotating that stockpile, because gasoline has a shelf life measured in months
Simpler gas equipment like mowers and generators don't have enough compression to really care about anything but ancient gas, and if you run any vehicle that is multi-fuel capable it can detect and adjust compression based on a fuel's capabilities.
Ive been repairing and fixing junkers of cars, mowers, ATVs, generators, and more for 30 years and not once has bad gas stopped something from running. I only remove it if it was clearly having water raining into the tank. In every other case where I couldn't start something after sitting around for 5+ years, it was from the gas gumming up in the carb or the shitty diaphragm pump, which generally means there is little to no gas left to start with.
I wouldn't even suspect gas of ever being bad unless it was atleast a few years old. If the tank was open it could have evaporated, if the tank was closed it probably ain't great gas but I bet it would still run in anything but a high compression application.
Spark, not compression.
In places where long power outages are common (hurricane areas), many gas stations have their own generators (they also have a convenient source of fuel to run them!)
I am guessing that one of the use cases is a support unit to charge an EV just enough to get it to a charging station.
"The generator was called the Electric Power Pak. From 1969 to 1972, Ford offered a 2,500-watt underhood generator, mostly on the Contractor’s Special, though it could be special ordered on other trucks. It also wasn’t driven off the engine’s belt. It was a separate Onan generator with its own 5.5 hp air-cooled single-cylinder engine, feeding an outlet in the bed. It sat on the driver’s side splash pan. The package the commenter calls a “Rancher” is likely the Farm & Ranch Special, which is one of the trucks that came with it.
The chainsaw was real. Ford sold Ford-blue chainsaws from 1970 to about 1976. They were rebadged Ohlsson & Rice saws: the Eagle I/II and the smaller Hawk. A mount was also sold that held the saw on the F-250’s driver’s side inner fender"
https://www.fordification.com/tech/images/onan_brochure-phot... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5601f99be4b059... https://www.fordification.com/tech/onan.htm
When I was shopping in 2025, this was the only truck with that kind of output.
You would need to add an accessory generator (which probably won't fit under the hood) and possibly upgrade the cooling system.
As an electrical generator, it's really not very good. The alternator is rated at 120 Amps (bigger than many, smaller than others).
At 13.8v, that's only 1,656 Watts -- on a good day, with the engine wound up. But the engine won't be wound up. It will instead be idling. The output will be less than 1656 Watts.
It burns right around 0.6 gallons of gasoline per hour (ie 22kW!) while idling and doing ~nothing else. It holds 21 gallons of gas.
So the unachievable best-case of idling-and-doing-no-real-work means that if it starts with a full tank of fuel, it will run out in 35 hours.
And in the real world, it will be doing work since that's the whole point of the exercise. It will therefore use somewhat more than its do-nothing 0.6 gallons per hour idle consumption.
We can ignore the longevity issues of treating a gas-fired vehicle as a stationary generator (these are expensive parts that are getting abnormally heat-soaked) because this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem, but as a practical matter: I'll still need to fill it up with gas, however I do that[1], about every day.
And, sure: That can be a way to solve some problems. With a decent inverter stashed out of the weather, connected with appropriately-big cables, I can probably use it to run the gas-fired furnace, the fridge and freezer, some lights, and some digital entertainment. Maybe it can't run all of that at the same time, but I'm smart and I'll manage.
The gas-fired car probably is useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and fill it back up.
---
Or: I could just plug stuff into an appropriate EV. It can sit there quietly being the giant battery that it is, and I can drive it out every couple/three days, or maybe just once per week as some suggest, to fill it back up.
It won't have an idle baseload of anywhere near the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of gasoline and it will therefore respond well to intermittent, dynamic loads like heat and refrigeration.
The EV is probably more-useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and charge it back up.
---
[1]: Sure, sure. I can carry a large quantity of gasoline to make the trips more-worthwhile. I can even store some locally (it's a pain to keep it fresh, but do-able).
If I were into that kind of prepping then what would be my practical limit? An extra 40 gallons, for ~60 overall? Great! Now I can run the car/house combo for 3 days before heading back out, and the EV still probably wins on this metric.
But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways. A portable power station and solar panels are probably the better move unless you have some really massive power needs.
(Admittedly, a nuclear winter reduces the effectiveness of those solar panels somewhat)
Are you telling us that you are not planning to buy Tesla Roadster? But what about the situation when there will be huge snow storm and humongous tree will fall across the road, and you will be like really hungry and you could just to fly over it and not starve to death?
If you can choose between a truck that can’t power your house and a truck that can, prepper mentality is to choose the one that can.
Is this thread being astroturfed? This defence for the Cybertruck ITT is one of the least rational threads I've seen on HN in the past few years and if the CT was actually valuable tech it wouldn't be one of the worst selling vehicles of all time.
And the additional value of Cybertruck in this question is about $1000 - $1500. $1k of additional value for $60k purchase is still a selling point, but marginally small selling point.
If you want your solar panels to be operational during an outage, you have to do it with permanent batteries physically connected to the house.
Take it from a Ukrainian.
PS: my dual-fuel gasoline/LPG Renault Twingo in Poland will outrun any Cybertruck on the continent.
And, unlike electricity, you can stockpile gasoline.
Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.
If you have a vehicle that runs on gasoline, you don't have to store gasoline for a long time to have a stockpile.
The cost of a few empty canisters is by far smaller than the cost of solar batteries, and putting gas into a vehicle in case of an emergency within a span of seconds rather than hours is a huge asset.
Not to mention: not everyone has space for solar. City dwellers are particularly constrained (as in: people who live in apartment complexes).
Finding space for a solar battery installation is a bit harder.
Not to mention: your Cybertruck isn't going to power your 7th floor apartment. You can probably figure out why.
Where I'm located, in most cases when there is an outage, neighboring areas do have power.
Specifically for my model 3, I've been considering tapping into the HV system manually to keep my Ecoflow battery topped up, but I wish there was a way to directly connect it.
1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.
2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.
Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.
I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).
You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.
It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].
> You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states.
A Volcano erupted in the town of Grindavík, the main line which connected the town to it’s power plant, went under lava. The town was out of power for a maximum of 2 or 3 days.
But in any case, 2 week long blackouts are extremely common in the USA regardless of the severity of the natural disaster. When I first moved to the Seattle area in 2016 a common snow storm caused a blackout which lasted for 2 weeks in some areas outside of Seattle. The reason for the length of the blackouts in the USA is simply due to the quality and maintenance of the infrastructure and any lack of action plans to fix them when they break.
1: https://youtu.be/SLmD23UpLOo?si=hnyOlxPqDmWwQfRp&t=1299
I've lived in the Seattle area since 2007. There has not been any power outage that affected 3000+ homes that has lasted longer than a day.
Additionally, Seattle area does not have common snow storms. It has extremely infrequent snow storms and thus has no reason to have lots of cold weather equipment. What we do have is frequent wind storms and lots and lots of trees (orders of magnitude more trees than all of Iceland, for example) and the wind often knocks trees into power lines and those are fixed in less than a day. In terms of neglect, that's not a problem. The longest outage I've ever had in the suburbs is 18 hours.
The real reason for the long duration blackouts is not failure to maintain infrastructure, it's because of natural disasters that damage and destroy entire swaths of infrastructure in a single event over thousands of sq km.
That someone, somewhere once used some accusation about a trait of populations as a form of discrimination does not mean that every recognition of that trait in a different population is also discrimination. Like, we can look at a person and say "oh, he never finished high school" that doesn't mean we're irrationally discriminating against him. You discriminate on exactly this basis every single day. You don't have people who don't know driving/cooking/medicine/engineering/automobile repair/etc. provide those services to you. I guess you're a bigot.
I agree. One can judge America’s lousy infrastructure and lack of action plan on its own merits. There is no reason to bring Europe into this. All I am saying is, America’s sparse population, nor the education level of immigrants is not an excuse.
The EU invested about 9% more relative to GDP, while the U.S. invested more dollars per resident because its economy is much richer.
American infrastructure is bad, the boomers in charge have no idea how to get anything done anymore, with California being the case study of nimbyism.
Modern Zimbabwe is not particularly known for having reliable electric infrastructure, even by the low standards of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a good argument against the parent commenter's point.
the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader
And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.
PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).
But it's not bad to ride out the first couple of days if you've got 120kWh just sitting in your garage.
Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.
Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.
It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.
This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.
I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.
It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.
In what universe is backup power a niche use case?
I'd have animals too but society is still stable enough to provide me with food.
At 6000lbs+ it's a section 179 write off; if you combine that with some of the previous incentives the car was not that expensive to the right population.
This is a pretty common feature in High capacity cars.
Even my mid-range BYD came with power strip attachment so you run basic electrical appliance with it.
Of course there are two issues that are completely solveable if we had reasonable governance:
1. Adopting an Australia-style solar installation regulation and permitting scheme, which is literally 1/5th tho cost of the US method, and pays their tradespeolpe higher salaries than US workers get
2. Allowing EVs to feed back into the grid. This is something that naysayers would never be useful because nobody would ever want to waste battery cycles on their home. Which of course has always been nonsense. Don't buy EVs without this basic capability, IMHO.
This combines to ensure that any solar installer will do lots of very expensive things: 1) have a large sales force to close the sale, which last I looked accounted for 30%-40% of the overall cost of solar in the US, 2) roll out trucks many different times during the planning and install, each costing lots of money, 3) never have to compete with a bunch of other hyper-competitive installers and find efficiencies like batching installs together in the same general area.
There are also massively high solar PV tariffs in the US, more than tripling the cost of the panels, but that's not even that big compared to the rest of the needless inefficiency in the system.
What the fuck
Depending on how much you want to power, there are 'rollable' battery packs that you can plug into a transfer switch. They can be recharged with (foldable) solar panels or a traditional generators (perhaps on cans of propane, which does not go bad like petrol can).
I really wish my Model Y had the V2H support... my next car definitely will.
You can get a generator that will get the job done for under 1000 bucks and you can store diesel or propane to get the job done.
That's before we factor in the likelyhood needing to travel quite a distance (and assume there is no access to grid power), and that you won't have any of the cybertruck defeating issues like heavy rains or standing water that might void it's warranty and fry it's electronics.
A prepper rig is a mechanical diesel that can be roll started or hand cranked without batteries, has no electronics to get fried except the radio, and can burn almost any combustible fuel source on hand. Slap a 200 Gallon transfer tank on the back and keep it full and you can drive across the country without fueling up. And if you also have that diesel generator to power your house, you've got a years worth of fuel for that generator.
You can get all that done for around 25k USD, so, not sure how a cyber truck even enters the conversation.
It was. Everything was pathetic. The claims of being bullet proof, being an amphibious car, being all-terrain, rugged, etc.
Sometimes it sounded like it was all for political theater.
https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/franklinwh-...
https://gmenergy.gm.com/vehicle-to-home
Ford came in and bought up all of the parts from our suppliers and I had to qual random suppliers for weeks. Even at the time, I was thinking there is too much disparity and this will haunt us for years.
We were a bit more agile and I made a lot of kernel hacks to compensate.
Ford didn’t fare better for all their choices. Recalls galore. Honestly, they made my life hell so fuck em.
On to the truck, they had a proprietary charger and power wall solution but it could run the house for days.
Weird looking truck, glad they took the risk
The cybertruck is $70k, which in a 14-day power outage is $5000 a day.
There are cheaper options to weather such a storm. Like flying first class to New York, getting a limo to the Central Park Ritz-Carlton and spending 14 days being waited on hand and foot.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
Still imaginary though. (how come vehicles can exchange energy quickly?)
Currently in pilot on a small fleet of electric trucks in Australia (actual trucks - prime movers for road trains) - large standard swappable battery packs that can be removed and replaced with a fork lift.
Swap time ~ 3 minutes.
Renault is designing cute things again, so that's a good development. So is Citroen, apparently?
So that's a good development
There were other things that contributed to the decision, too: the announced "stressed skin" exoskeleton was panned in favor of adhering the body panels to the body with glue, it became clear that Tesla's profit and valuation were funding Elon's right-wing political project, and I would have preferred a solid-axle design.
The absurdity was not what was wrong with it. It's OK to be absurd. I really liked the stainless steel design. Less trail damage when off-roading and no need to worry about paint scratches causing body rust. The door wedge design? Meh. But it enabled the stainless steel body.
In the end, I want what the Cybertruck failed to deliver: a full-size electric pickup at a good price with excellent range. I currently have my eyes on the RAM REV. We'll see if that one gets axed, too.
The poor people that bought them were the butt of his joke.
The cybertruck had good enough safety ratings, but kinda just decided to not care about the aerodynamics and economy side. Which freed Elon up a lot in terms of style.
Personally, I also agree that it was refreshing to see something bold out there on the road. It's just that the final product looked just 'off' enough to make it look bad in the end.
Like, it's wheel base is about 6 inches too long and the ride height is about 6 inches too low, making it look a bit toddler-y to my eyes. The bed was also just not practicable and too small (something I see on a lot of trucks these days). The speed was good, the torque was great, the giant screen you can't feel when driving was not. The seats were uncomfortable for my build.
Overall, the car was a statement, one that just barely missed the mark to my eyes, but it did miss
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/18/tesla-cyb...
> The bodywork of the vehicle is particularly problematic: the sharp-edged, rigid stainless steel panels of the Cybertruck violate EU safety regulations, which primarily serve to protect vulnerable road users.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cybertruck-remains-banned-in-Ge...
In many other countries it wasn’t even street legal because it couldn’t meet minimum safety standards.
And that's not just in cars but technology, furniture, lighting choices, clothing, etc, we're just converging to the same styles globally.
That’s a platform we can all get behind.
The Cybertruck that was released did not have that, instead the panels are just normal body parts connected to a standard car frame underneath - like any other car.
Good design that breaks the mold and then succeeds for that reason is what changes the world. Bad design that starts from the desire to be different without understanding the forces that led to the preexisting equilibrium is what we got. If you start out with hundreds of billions of dollars you can fake it for much longer, but if your premise is fundamentally economically incorrect then it will only last as long as you can subsidize it.
I prefer to believe that this statement is incorrect.
There's nothing quite like the Cybertruck and I don't think there ever will be again.
Brings me to a point I'd like to make: it boggled my mind that Tesla decided to execute the 'Cyber' aesthetic via a pickup truck, particularly after the US auto industry ramped up marketing the pickup truck's familiar shape as a cultural facet during/after the Great Recession and the fuel economy regulation changes.
Tesla could've capitalized on the billions Ford, Chevy, Dodge, and others spent in the 2010s marketing pickup trucks as God's gift to humanity, but instead decided -that- was the best market to try a complete novelty in. It makes no rational sense -- I've heard it ultimately came down to Musk stubbornly wanting the Cybertruck, but I don't know if that's factual.
At present all Tesla has propping it up is bubble dust and one car model (one increasingly dated car model). Somehow after 14-15 years (Model S released in Summer 2012) these people still can't release a real SUV of any sort. The model Y is a grotesque joke of a fake SUV, a mutilated model 3 that doesn't really look like an SUV in any regard. The model Y is an SUV like the Cybertruck is a truck. They might as well have unlimited money to do it, and they can't do it. Same reason they couldn't release the roadster even after all this time. It's a fundamentally broken company because Musk won't get out of the way. Whatever Musk is good at it, it's not running a large scale automotive company.
It probably would have been better had they not been mass produced, and maybe did a very limited quantity run - make it more like a collector item... I suppose thats what it'll be now. I see quite a few on the road, it takes away from the uniqueness.
A lot of what he's going on about with respect to the Cybertruck looking old is that it was—intentionally or not—an exercise in retro-futurism, not futurism. Elon attempted to make a truck that Schwarzenegger would have driven in the 80s. Or as he showed, the M577 Armoured Personnel Carrier from “Aliens.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism
As Wikipedia points out: As opposed to futurism, which is an artistic movement anticipating upcoming technological advancements, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. So Cybertruck is actually a nostalgia product. "Remember when we thought that manly pickups would be stainless steel and low-poly and drive around silently?"
So, nobody looking for the truck of the future wants a Cybertruck. It does not represent what we anticipate the future will look like.
I'll stop here, because if I point out that the Roadster circus stunt featured a flying car with gas thrusters at night that was an exercise in retro-futuristic nostalgia for Blade Runner, this will turn into an essay.
The design aesthetics for automobiles can be stale and this could also be a terrible, unworkable, ugly design.
The amount of hate it gets has been yet another clear indication to me just how annoyingly tribal people are. It shows you’re in the in-group and definitely-a-righteous-good-guy if you hate on the cybertruck. Not hating on the cybertruck is basically admitting you’re a fascist (I’ve had a friend literally tell me this non-jokingly). I think that’s really what 80% of the hate comes down to.
You can celebrate Tesla for trying something new while still hating the actual thing that they tried for being bad.
Sadly, all three of my assumptions were false.