120 points | by jdenquin4 天前
Someone who is an enthusiast will most likely know about those things because they were widely reported in the automotive news sphere, and thus they will have a much higher chance of being against the Cybertruck. The wider public doesn't know, and so the novelty factor draws them in.
In a world that has been stagnant for decades in terms of design and doing things out the box, it's something at least trying to be different. Don't get all the hate
Ultimately ignorant terminally online people complain and dismiss what is the best selling ev truck.
You can disagree, but you would be objectively wrong.
Add in the requirement of "electric" and there are cheaper options but none that are cheap that are also allowed to be sold in the USA (remains to be seen how much you can get away with temporarily moving a BYD Shark over the border from Mexico and never bringing it back)
Check out a Salesforce, apple or Google event where they flex about adding a heart rate monitor to their watch ir similarly banal improvement.
Ill never understand the hate
Also, the robots that are controlled remotely by humans without disclosuring it is hilarious.
They’ve not even met the goals they said they would meet 3 years ago.
A goal not some metric that has to be met. It’s a goal, an aspiration to do something, not a deadline.
Most businesses ran by people who use goals as deadlines fail horridly.
This is one thing many of the major companies that are ultra successful have in common. They are ran by people who set goals, failed to meet the goal - and continued to move forward.
The gymnastics this cult does is infuriating. The dude lies. Constantly.
I own 3 teslas. I like the cars. Doesn't mean the CEO doesn't constantly lie and under deliver.
It doesn't matter if the car cures cancer. It doesn't make his past lies become truths.
You can’t. What you can do is name cases where Tesla says they aspire to make “X” and er got “Y” by the time we could buy it.
The closest thing we have to what you describe is FSD or whatever they call it. And it was sold as hardware that would be used once they got it working.
The only gymnastics we have here is you trying to make a case for fraud. You are the one acting cult like, and yes it is infuriating to us who are not obsessed with Elon.
I don’t know dem own a Tesla product, and probably never will.
Furthermore my comment was completely disconnected from Tesla and was an attack on a style of thinking related to all companies. Then you who are obsessed with Elon brought all that baggage into it simply because you worried that a sound and logical comment might not align with your view of the person you are obsessed with.
If we put the Musk Twitter/Trump/right wing stuff aside, there's still a big problem with Tesla and Musk in general: poor build quality especially on new product launches, exaggerations and lies about product capability, pricing, and the upcoming product roadmap, and the cult-like following that places Tesla's somewhat mundane product achievements on a pedastel.
For example, the idea that only Tesla is doing things out of the box, that they're the only ones who aren't stagnant...well, that's only true if you're in the cult and you ignore all the other carmakers. I don't think Kia/Hyundai's design is stagnant. I don't think the Chinese car industry is stagnant. I don't think the host of other EV startups like Rivian or Lucid are stagnant.
The Cybertruck doesn't have any unique features that other carmakers aren't doing besides having stainless steel panels that are literally glued on to the unibody frame and can't be painted. Toyota, the most boring car company, has steer by wire (Lexus RZ). If you buy a Rivian you get better range and capability. The Cybertruck isn't even the best EV truck, never mind the best truck of any powertrain.
And the final part of the Tesla hate is all the ways in which their "innovation" has been basically dangerous bullshit. Putting beta versions of self-driving code on the road, making a car with stainless steel panels that are not pedestrian safe, all their documented issues with plant safety and labor issues, removing physical controls for critical car functionality like gear shifting and turn signal stalks to generally deliver a car UI that encourages distracted driving more than perhaps any other brand. These types of things are the place where the "hate" becomes "justified outrage over corporate neglegence."
I think unless you're the kind of person who specifically spends time online looking for reasons not to buy a Cybertruck, you probably wouldn't know _any_ of that.
I play the lottery every day and I haven't won a dollar.
Etc etc
The chance of a consumer encountering any of those issues is equivalent to winning the lottery? We should all run and get a cybertruck! :-;
People who have problems with their cybertruck will go and post about it. Understandably, they are also frustrated, the posts sound angry, and then any journalist can repost/compile all those to make it sound like these are just dumpster fires on wheels. But just as in the lottery case, we never get to hear from every loser, only from the winners; here we don't get to hear from the "winners", only the "losers".
I mean they may well be dumpster fires on wheels but without solid statistics it's hard to be sure exactly so any kind of story can be made up about it.
https://datahub.transportation.gov/Automobiles/NHTSA-Recalls...
You are describing likelihoods in time series, we are discussing the likelihoods of exceptional defects, period. Which is actually low.
Etc etc
The temporal component doesn't matter at all, the point is that an individual's experience is pretty meaningless when trying to understand statistical phenomena. Which is why we invented statistics and do things like "collect data"
The suspension stuck in lowest issue.. really doesn't ring a bell. Maybe it was before my time? Or I glossed over the update notes when I did get it.
The point I was trying to make is that this vehicle's issues are widely reported to a disproportionate degree due to how notable and polarizing it is, to the point that random Cybertruck anti-fans know more about its flaws than the average owner.
Mine isn't flawless either, the tonneau cover requires some finagling to close, which is kind of annoying. So I'm not going to sing Tesla's praises about their QA standards either.
Also, I’m sure we are all familiar with the value of anecdotal evidence vs data, the response of “I’m a ____ and I don’t _____” is limited at best and meaningless in the aggregate
That's essentially just a QA and reliability design failure which is indicative of broader issues with Tesla but it also means that until someone's vehicle starts having problems they will have nothing but a positive experience which can leave them blindsided by said problems.
In terms of the negativity, I'd say that unlike other cars of similar design (like the Aztek) -- a way higher percentage of the panning I see online is about it not living up to its promised capabilities. There's loads of videos of Cybertrucks needing to be towed out of bad spots by other trucks, problems even when it isn't stuck because of how little its frame flexes, the additional torque wearing away tread on the tires much faster, etc. Some of those things can be engineered around and I'm sure Tesla engineers are working on it.
I'd hazard a guess that the market share the Cybertruck is taking isn't any existing trucks but rather more "luxury-class" SUVs like Mercedes, Land Rover, and BMW.
You should give sashank_1509 enough credit to be able to distinguish between the jokey/mocking questions your friend's Prowler gets, and the enthusiastic ones he reports receiving.
>It's tempting to point to its position as #3 overall as an overwhelming success
There is no other way to spin a $100K car being the #3 overall EV vehicle of any type other than a success, especially given that a) #1 and #2 are also Tesla vehicles, and b) one of them was the world's best-selling car of any kind, EV or not, in 2023.
they have the US government block competition
In that case our tarrifs are just protectionism, is what.
Excellent, then they won't have an issue with losing their export markets to tariffs, because they can just sell their EVs to the "insatiable demand" of the local consumers.
>what if China is undercutting us because their cars are just better
Price/performance they ARE better, China can produce cheaper because of their years of (government aided) investments and economies of scale. Of course, we aren't obligated to buy from belligerent states engaging in strategic mercantilism producing the goods of the future. We aren't obligated to prop up the Chinese export-oriented economic model in pursuit of one generation of cheap EV cars.
that’s what happened but the point in discussion here is why Tesla does not have competition in the US and the answer is simple
Welcome to reality.
>Only from China. Non-communist non-dumping, friendly states are welcome to compete.
>50% of Telsas are made in China. China built Teslas are noticeably better built, too.
Please explain how your comment relates to mine, because I see no connection.
I got to drive one… it’s an objectively terrible car. I would imagine that as the look gets let’s novel that attention will wane quickly. When they get the inevitable prominent pedestrian collision on video, it has Pinto potential.
It’s weird because the last “new” Tesla was the Model Y I think, and that is an incredibly well thought out car — probably the 2020s equivalent of the 1980s Taurus or Camry.
To be fair, it’s very typical to hear people revving up their crappy SRT Chargers or sport bikes constantly there all day and night. I’m not sure who’d be interested in the extremely-overpriced apartments that they have, given the noise and lack of proximity to anything else outside of the malls there. I believe there used to be Cars and Coffee events hosted there but I’ve heard they got kicked out due to too many incidents of bad behavior.
The income cap on getting the clean vehicle rebates is $135k ($200k joint filers). And I'm not sure about the federal rebates. Tesla doesn't offer 0% financing, current Cybertruck APR deal is reported to be 5.29% for up to 72 months. So I don't see how someone with the income under the rebate cutoff can afford that $100k car or the financing option. The delta between the number of rebates (Federal EV vs Clean Vehicle/CA) may allow to estimate, how many of these are corporate (pre-income tax + rebate?) purchases.
And these "Cox Automotive estimates", are these reliable numbers that had been confirmed by Tesla earnings, or it is a "best guess by influencers" type of information?
I looked into that and there was exactly one vehicle available and it was something like $7500 due at signing to get that $849/mo payment, IIRC on a 36-mo term, so really it’s more like ~$1058/mo, which makes more sense.
Still a lot of discounts on EVs if you know where to look. Definitely lease; these will depreciate like bricks after the batteries get used up and are down below 70% capacity. I’m not sure how financing companies are doing the math but their expected values at the end of lease terms feel wildly optimistic. My guess is some degree of mfg incentives to push EVs combined with models that took too much pandemic pricing into account for used vehicles. If you can get a good money factor on the lease, go for it.
The business model is weird, it’s almost like you’re capitalizing the cost of gas, except the gas tank leaks after a few years.
I figure they’ll either deal on a buyout at the end of the lease, I’ll turn it in, or gas prices will go nuts and I’ll be able to flip the car. My brother did that with a Volt - bought it for $18k pre-pandemic sold for $23k in 2021!
The point here is that you're using generalities that are wayyyy too broad.
There's no reason a body on frame vehicle can't be stout. See every unibody fullsize van for example.
The fact that you think the Chevy Avalanche[1] has unibody problems says everything I need to know about your opinion
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with unibody construction for a vehicle like this some work vans have been that way basically forever (though it makes me want to go postal when the OEMs graft a really shitty frame onto the back of a unibody van and call it a "cab and chassis").
[1]https://www.gmwholesaledirect.com/v-2009-chevrolet-avalanche...
Still, nowhere near as bad as a unibody like a Ridgeline or maverick
Your sampling method is flawed. Only Cybertruck fans are approaching you. Most people aren't going to come up and tell you they think your car is ugly.
In my experience that’s the closest thing I could describe to the cyber truck experience and how most people look at it.
But honestly, I don’t know what point you’re trying to make here but I’m not talking about language, I’m talking about the reaction people have when they see people in cyber trucks.
I did also get many positive interactions when it was new as well. But boy did those random negative encounters stick out!
I'm an introvert so the constant attention (almost all positive, even in the Seattle area, surprisingly) was definitely an adjustment for me. Trust me, I'd be perfectly fine without the constant attention but people just keep giving it! Now I actually kind of enjoy it. My son waves at people from the back seat, I get asked questions by curious people all the time, and I get the occasional thumbs up randomly.
There’s almost no precedent for a “hit” vehicle at that price point. Toyota stopped selling real Landcruisers in the US because Americans won’t pay that much for something with a Toyota Badge (hence the current real Landcruiser is sold as a Lexus in very low volume).
Tesla are claiming a hit after making people wait 5 years for a vehicle they couldn’t see and then shipping preorders. The preorders have been massively less than they claimed and now the vehicle is with people it is being shown to be of low quality and low capability. Unable to manage tasks Subarus and much cheaper vehicles can.
The proof of its success will be in the coming year. Now buyers are walking in to buy a real vehicle at a real price. The current owners bought a paper spec sheet at a fantasy price and are a self selecting group happy to pay 2-3x over what they were promised.
There are tons of deals like this in the car world. While peons paid insane markups on the RAV4 prime, intelligent people were getting the Lexus variant for MSRP and they had an actually good interior on top of it!!!
The truck is extremely fast, with excellent steering, suspension and lots of other groundbreaking technology.
But it is basically user-hostile. No dashboard, no stalks for turn signals or gear selection, and everything is on the central touchscreen. And that is super cluttered and impossible to do important things without looking away from your driving and jabbing at a moving touch point.
It makes you a worse driver, and you're spending 100k.
Honestly, give it a dashboard. Add stalks for turn signals, wiper, headlight, gear selection. Give it a few dedicated buttons for things you need to reach by touch (defrost, mute/volume, internal/external lights) and lots of animosity would go away. Make it an option for $5k! people will pay.
EDIT: they are learning. The wrapped black ones don't look terrible.
I don't know why. It's the reason they don't indicate when leaving a roundabout.
It was a week of beating off people approaching me and asking about it. It looked weird, I thought people wanted to beat me up but they were genuinely curious about it.
That some weird truck with a formerly 3 year waiting list is at the top of the charts a couple months into shipping should be surprising? Wait a year. Nobody is looking at the 500L now.
So I don’t think it’s much of a measuring stick.
Second only to the MB EQS. Down almost half in 12 months. This is why EVs are lease-only vehicles right now IMO.
Some pickup truck work is high mileage, but a surprising amount of it is low mileage. It varies a lot, there are lots of trucks that do less than 100 miles a day.
Work trucks are also usually much more predictable than consumer vehicles. Most of them do the same thing every day. The predictability should make buying an EV easier.
Entirely objective, not misleading?
I'm sure there won't be multiple publications completely debunking this video too like they did the 911 video.
It's honestly a absurd and funny to me how fast the truck is. It's like seeing an elephant fly. It's even funnier to see people get angry at it.
I definitely don't like marketing and ads, but that's literally how all ads work. It doesn't debunk some of the insane performance characteristics.
No, I'm talking about the debunking videos and articles that show:
"We ran six quarter-mile drag races, and each one had the same outcome: The Porsche 911 Carrera T wins and the Tesla Cybertruck Beast loses... it’s not a particularly close race, either."
Re the 1/8: "We can say confidently that Tesla didn’t show the Porsche 911 Carrera T’s quickest possible run. In four out of six MotorTrend drag races, the Porsche 911 Carrera T beat the Cybertruck to the eighth-mile mark."
"The manual-transmission Carrera T has a 3,500-rpm limiter at standstill, and on a sticky, prepped drag strip, launching quickly requires getting off the line without letting the revs fall. Drop the clutch too fast, and the engine will bog, falling out of its powerband. It takes a slow, carefully modulated clutch release to get the perfect launch, which keeps the engine on boil and extracts a small amount of slip from the tires."
I'm sure Tesla was quite eager to make sure that they launched the Porsche optimally.
Yes. I get it. EVs have amazing acceleration. My brother in law has worked for, and owned, both Teslas and Rivians, so I'm no stranger to this.
But this was just another Tesla self-congratulatory event that needed "simulation" and "we didn't actually do it but we think it would go this way" puffery.
Then you get to lateral grip and uhh, yeah 0.76G is worse than the average minivan.
911s are not designed for drag, especially the base model. If they wanted to compare it to something that’s good in a straight line but no good in corners, a Dodge Demon 170 stickers for under $100k. Comparable horsepower, too.
I stand by everything I said, but I will add your research to my own repoitoire.
This has to be hyperbole. There are many in the middle class areas I spend a lot of time in, and even $100K cars are a rarity here. No-one is thinking "oh, wow, sure are a lot of people who just bought million dollar cars, here where the median home price is $500-600K!"
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see this thing in small alleys and especially with the crazy speeds you can accelerate with. But it's definitively an interesting model.
However if people are buying the cybertruck despite all its faults, then I'm glad to be proven wrong.
Thankfully our road laws won't allow the hideous monstrosity that is the Cybertruck though.
There are a lot of terrible cars that impress non car people
Honestly one of my lottery dreams would be buying a DMC-12 and converting it to electric.
But yeah, I had a nice conversation with a guy who kitted his out as a movie replica at a outdoor showing of the film. He said it was fun to go to events, but it's terrible as a car. And some of the parts are unobtanium, like the flux capacitor. Not that that's unique for cars in that era, try finding a federal EGR filter for an early Vanagon; just gotta hack around it.
If the power steering on that was inoperative (maybe the pump died or the fluid level was empty, etc), I'm sure it would be a beast to turn in a parking lot though.
In the US, most trucks sold do very little hauling, towing, or off-reading or anything else that might justify the giant form factor.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
And yet, trucks and SUVs are the best-selling cars in the US, and have been for a long time. There is a weird loophole for fuel efficiency in mileage standards for large vehicles, but obviously that doesn’t apply to the Cybertruck. There is definitely some psychological appeal to having a very dominant-looking vehicle.
So just as a business move, the Cybertruck makes sense. But there’s more overlap with Musk’s politics than you might think.
I read a book a long time ago by this very weird product marketer Clotaire Rapaille, who, several decades ago, was trying to convince executives to put a gun mount on an SUV. His argument was his research showed that the people who loved big cars saw the world as dangerous, and had fantasies of cutting through the hordes with a powerful vehicle. Rapaille’s methods are somewhere between the usual consumer panel interviews and guided meditation, so it’s hardly scientific, maybe more like poetry, but I found it compelling.
Musk actually tried to demonstrate the Cybertruck’s resistance to guns and sledgehammers. Its actual durability is, I gather, more debatable, but he was definitely trying to reach people’s darkest fears and impulses.
And to put this even further: most people even in America are not "car people" and therefore don't know shit about cars, where they come from, what goes into them, etc. My parents are great examples of this. They've owned something like 4 of the 10 worst cars of the new millennium list put out by Forbes, but like, an awful car in 2024 is still generally fine for an undemanding casual user. Sure, people buy tons of trucks here, but the vast majority of them aren't used for anything more strenuous than hauling a dozen bags of fertilizer, and my Corvette can handle that. A Cybertruck is a terrible truck, but most people don't do truck shit with the trucks they buy, and it's a perfectly middle-of-the-road SUEV. I think it's a bad option if that's what you're after, chiefly because you're gonna spend a LOT of money on tires you don't really need to, and the panels aren't aligned right, and if anything goes wrong with it you're liable to spend months playing vehicular ping-pong with your Tesla dealership, and it's (IMO) ugly as sin... but you do you. Assuming it doesn't have some kind of catastrophic failure that an unfortunate number do, you'll probably have a fine experience.
The videos of it struggling to move in snow and "bravely" fording a creek of 5 inch deep water are funny as hell to see, because it's shocking what Cybertruck owners think "hard going" in a truck is. They'd probably lose their minds seeing some of what I've seen modified trucks crawl up, through, and across in the course of off-road competition if they think driving through a fast stream makes the Cybertruck a feat of engineering, but again, most people who buy these things aren't driving through a blizzard at 90mph to get medicine to the good children of the village so they live to see Santa come Christmas morning. They're going across town to the Good Denny's, or to the local mall for shopping, or to their kids soccer game. And on that journey, a Cybertruck and virtually any vehicle you can buy new right now, will suffice. Just don't get it wet.
So it's a bit crap then?
The most striking thing was how tall it was. Half the kids attending the PGW were smaller than its front bumper. I hope these things never, ever get allowed in France.
I'd appreciate EU citizens writing to their MEPs about this.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/tesla-cyb...
Not in the part of Europe I'm in. I can't recall the last time I've seen an American car here in the streets of Vienna. Also: Don't large American SUVs consume a lot of petrol? Considering the gas prices I'd assume not many people can/want to afford them.
> Large American SUVs are flying off the shelves in Europe.
If they were truly “flying off the shelves,” I’d expect the frequency to be so obvious that it would be unmistakable. So I’m asking you to support your claim with data or at least more detailed anecdotes. Which city? Which models?
Their European division was a bit similar to what GM/Opel had going.
What are these? Have you seen a hummer or a ford F2 or f350? What about a Lexus LS or GX? Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator?
What about a Camry other than its size specifically is for pedestrians when hit?
Then we have the smart car. A small bubble designed to not crush. Fairly sure if that thing hits somebody they are not going to be “gee I am glad that the car makers made this car so safe for me being hit by it”
I can think very hard what a car would look like that would be pedestrian safe, and what features it would have. And none of any cars today look like they would be safe.
As for features for safety only one comes in mind, automatic breaking for pedestrians.
As for the cyber truck. The bend up front looks a lot more safe than most of the other pointy cars.
Normally new cars should come with emergency braking. As I remember, emergency braking is the only new technology to challenge the seat belt in efficiency. All the other safety features are almost marginal on how effective they are.
I don't know if the cybertruck has it, but I think the EU regulations might be a little behind the times, not yet recognizing the efficiency of emergency braking.
Emergency breaking system have been a mandatory assistance system for a while now (afaik it was introduced mid 2022). Admittedly, I don’t know how efficient they actually are in preventing injuries from pedestrians.
I just know that from my experience driving with these systems, they occasionally do seem not quite there. I’ve had my car warn me from hitting a guy that was happily walking on the sidewalk but completely ignore people taking a pedestrian crossing (maybe because I was already breaking myself).
So yeah, tech is great and all. But having design considerations as a completely passive system like your front bumper breaking off on colission still seems essential
TL;DR it’s about being low enough to not smack people of different heights in the head and cause massive acceleration of their brains against their skulls. Same with internal organs, and for legs it’s more about having some of that energy transferred into rotational energy, then having a soft-enough bumper and hood to again minimize acceleration forces and energy transfer.
There are also airbag-based solutions where it either inflates under the hood to give some cushion for the hit person to decelerate more gradually before stopping against something less forgiving, or kinda like a giant couch / Wacky Races cartoon catcher’s mitt inflating on the hood and front of the vehicle before they’re actually hit.
The pushback is, of course, mostly cost-based.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2007/12/the-truth-about-eu...
https://americawalks.org/vehicle-safety-for-pedestrians/
I just wish that the US would stop allowing people to build and operate killdozer pickups with bumpers well above where other vehicle bumpers are. When those crash into other vehicles, the other vehicle ends up with a differential, tires, and probably skid plates smacking into their vehicle, which it’s not designed to handle. Combined with how larger tires require more braking power to slow at the same rate, plus modified suspension geometry, higher CG, increased weight, and decreased driver intelligence, it makes for a much more dangerous vehicle for others to be around. Why do we continue to allow this, just like all the obnoxious modified exhausts and ECU tunes that massively increase the pollution being put out by one vehicle so they can feed their egos and intimidate other road users?
Higher bumpers are also a lot less safe for pedestrians, obviously: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15949454/
Stuff like this has no legitimate purpose off-road and no business being operated on public highways: https://www.tiktok.com/@leanqueen6.7 but it’s become some idiotic macho culture thing.
> a 10cm increase in the front-end height of a vehicle led to a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk, most strongly affecting the survival chances of women, children, and older people.
Kid killer cars
[1] : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F31121
Serious question: have you looked? Or is there any special reason you imagine that if such evidence existed, you would have seen it?
I say this because I spent 10-15 minutes looking for information and gave up because I’m not sure of any tests which I could use to compare the two, or any testing bodies that focus on pedestrian safety. If that information exists, I’d be interested to see a side by side comparison.
I predict if after some years a statistical analysis is done on pedestrian crashes by car model the Cybertruck will just be some kind of average. It has decent AEB and it is a new car driven by young people. Would other cars have caused less injury in the crashes that do occur? Probably. To a degree that it justifies calling it a pedestrian killer? I doubt it.
Up until you’re sticking Mad Max type spikes on the front, I am not sure that I’d be able to say with confidence anything other than “I think probably trucks with high bonnets are worse for pedestrians than sedans with low bonnets”.
But as you say, there’s also a bunch of interesting side concerns: what if the vehicle itself twice as bad (i.e. causes twice as many deaths at the same speed in collisions with pedestrians), but where other vehicles are getting into one collision with a pedestrian every 100 000 miles or whatever, Cybertrucks only get into collisions every 200 000 miles due to advanced AEB (or use of self-driving, etc.)? Are they even?
I dunno. Just an interesting thought to chew over.
That said do you see those in Boston or NYC a lot?
So not most European cities? Unless you only count villages and old towns of larger cities.
Europeans have been building and designing towns around cars almost since after the end of WW2. They just used a somewhat different approach (since European cars were tiny compared to NA ones in the 50s and 60s). There has also been a reversal with more focus on pedestrians and public transport over the last 20-30 years.
Even so there is research on how car design impact road safety, and if there’s a sliver of doubt that that’s sufficient to justify banning the Cybertruck from public roads the tests to prove its safety should be done in a way where gathering statistics doesn’t mean killing people.
There are also far fewer of them per capita than passenger vehicles.
At the end of the day they're a necessary evil while the ever growing number of vanity pavement princess pickup trucks are not.
From the article: "Tesla sold almost 17,000 Cybertrucks in the third quarter"
and I believe the total sales volume for last quarter was 400k EVs in the US and about 3.5mio worldwide.
That means Cybertruck sales were like 2-3% of total sales in the US and <0.5% worldwide.
Relevant snippet:
"Tesla sold almost 17,000 Cybertrucks in the third quarter, according to Cox estimates, making it the third most popular EV in the US during the period. The only other EVs that sold better were the Tesla Model 3 and Y.
So far in 2024, more than 28,000 Cybertrucks have been sold. That's more than Ford's F-150 Lightning, Rivian's R1T, and Chevy's Silverado EV, Cox data shows."
"BYD was ranked as the best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer worldwide after selling over three million units in 2023 after overtaking Tesla as the best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer in the previous year. BYD's sales volume translates into a market share of around 22 percent. Tesla and the Volkswagen Group were among the runners-up. "
Plug-in car registrations in Q1-Q4 2023 (vs. previous year):
BYD Group: 3,012,070 and 22% share (vs. 18.4%)
Tesla: 1,808,652 and 13.2% share (vs. 13.0%)
Volkswagen Group: 994,403 and 7.3% share (vs. 8.2%)
Geely-Volvo: 925,111 and 6.8% share (vs. 6.0%)
SAIC (incl. SAIC-GM-Wuling): 791,521 and 5.8% share (vs. 7.2%)
I'll admit the design has grown on me, and we need more mainstream vehicles challenging the boring design "norms".
I would love to see a cross between the Model Y and Cybertruck in the future.
I'd argue that we need to start treating cars like the utilitarian objects they are and stop associating our personalities with them.
Freeze peach to drive my unsafe taaaank. Americuuuuh.
I really wonder if people are unaware of how absurd, stupid, and unsafe many American vehicles are, or if it really is just down to selfishne-, er, I mean individuality.
Not really the case for PCs.
The concept version was awesome. Somehow the production version got tweaked just enough to break the effect for me. I had no idea that Space Porche and Standard Sedan were so close in my mental space.
She had about two or three tires slashed or had the air nozzle cut off and sentry mode didn't catch anything except the back of the persons head. The self-driving jerked itself into a barricade on the interstate when someone cut her off, she wasn't able to stop it from doing so fast enough, it was all just faster then her reaction time (thankfully the other driver admitted fault but if they had contested I wouldn't put my faith in self-driving laws to side on a drivers side in a dispute). We have put roughly 10k into this truck for service.
We bought the truck because she lives in the mountains, she drives 200 miles a day for work if not more 5 days a week (regularly up at 4am on the road at 6am and home around 7pm - 9pm depending), and its probably the biggest purchase regret of our lives.
She needed a vehicle and I just spent 15k on a used RAV, we made the decision for her to get the truck because self-driving sounded very exciting (its all 'corporate puffery' now though), and her being in the mountains left us looking at roughly 80k vehicles anyway so we figured let's take a chance on the truck and self-driving. I mean most cars you get a good five years out them anyway right? Turns out that paint it black tesla ad was even faked, and my personal opinion is Tesla used the reservations to get this news piece.
I truly don't see the cybertruck as being desirable for the average American, I believe it's a novelty which will die once Teslas early adopter advantage for self-driving dies up. I believe it should. We are currently looking to buy her a 8k commuter beater for local 60 - 120 mile work days and using the cybertruck just for the work out of state. We'd sell the truck but its depreciated so much and she still travels out of state once or twice a month minimum and all over the place once there so we still want something electric for those trips. We would sell it if I had about another 50k in the bank to be comfortable with taking the quick loss from doing so, we still might once the relatives house sells. Don't buy Tesla, that's my advice. We never will again.
I think the bigger problem here is the inconvenience. You don't get much value out of the thing you purchased if it's in the shop most of the time. Plus you have to take time out of your day to bring it to the shop (if it's even possible) or wait for a tow truck to come get you if the vehicle is immobile or unsafe to drive, and then find a way to get home.
Warranties pay for parts and labor, but they don't cover incidental expenses, or more importantly, your time.
Car insurance companies know the costs, and they have open listings of the car brands. They have literally all incentives in play to stay truthful. Compared to whatever PR we are force-fed a jour.
On a repair invoice, the shop usually lists the cost, then it's paid for by the manufacturer at the bottom. It's all normal accounting for the back office. If you've ever owned a car that had warranty repairs, regardless of make or model, you'd see this.
The post in and of itself is clear and convincing evidence.
>On a repair invoice, the shop usually lists the cost, then it's paid for by the manufacturer at the bottom. It's all normal accounting for the back office. If you've ever owned a car that had warranty repairs, regardless of make or model, you'd see this.
That's not how any of this works for Tesla though, there are no "shops" you take it to, only Tesla service centers do warranty work. The prices listed for warranty work are always "$0.00", never listing how much any of it costs. The post is clearly a LARP.
I'm pretty sure no jury would agree with that.
> That's not how any of this works for Tesla though, there are no "shops" you take it to, only Tesla service centers do warranty work. The prices listed for warranty work are always "$0.00", never listing how much any of it costs.
I admit I'm not a Tesla owner and don't have direct experience, but I do see posts that contradict this assertion:
* https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-service-invoic...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/17wnts6/commen...
I'm pretty sure every jury would agree with that.
>I admit I'm not a Tesla owner and don't have direct experience, but I do see posts that contradict this assertion:
Those posts prove my point exactly. One of them literally states:
"Yes, but usually when I sign something for warranty work. The dollar amt on the paper is $0."
Yes they did:
We have put roughly 10k into this truck for service.
Who is doing this? Anti-Musk people? Anti-EV people? I’m not from the US so I’m not familiar with the politics.
Not that this helps you...
IMHO, current CyberTruck is in the alpha testing phase. It has multiple disruptive innovations. Tesla wisely chose the relatively low volume CyberTruck to mitigate risk.
I'm concerned (but not surprised) Tesla is aggressively ramping up production.
Esthetics aside, CyberTruck has so many exciting, long overdue technology innovations. Better gigacasting, modular etherloop (replacing CAN bus), switch to 48v, drive by wire, no rear view mirror, etc.
(I think the stainless steel exterior will prove to be a mistake. Mostly for safety reasons.)
See what needs to happen to qualify, document what's already happened, and get an idea of the process and recent interactions between your lawyer and the specific manufacturer.
I had a probable lemon on a new model that I didn't do that for because we liked it despite its faults, and some of the early problems reasserted themselves before (after warranty) engine problems led me to get rid of it. I regret not pursuing a lemon law return and replacing it with a later in production model. Might have still ran into early engine troubles, but they probably figured out how to apply paint in the meantime.
Uhh no? You should absolutely expect a good vehicle, hell most vehicles, to exceed 10 years without serious failures. Many vehicles come with 7 year warranties on manufacturing defects… It sounds like you need to take better care of your vehicles or buy better vehicles. I did notice that you said she drives 200 miles a day and that will certainly contribute but if you take care of it, most cars would probably do that for 10 years assuming it’s mostly cruising. Either way that statement of 5 years is nuts. I bought a 5 year old car with 80,000km on it and it was in damn near new condition!
I’ve owned 6 vehicles, including one motorcycle, none of them from brand new mind you, and all of them were still reliable after their 10th year lol. Currently I have a 5 year old car which you can’t tell apart from the brand new 2024 models because it has no wear and the model hasn’t had a face lift, and I have a 35 year old ute (truck)… 5 years is nothing. I think the average age of cars on the road would be older than 5 years
I do that with cars, usually 10 to 15 years (camaro-15, ford exploder-12, wife's chrysler sebring-14 (which was surprisingly problem free considering chryslers quality stats)).
One of my friends loves to get new ones every few years, but I'm more focused on the cost.
"People buying a car with a lifespan of their smartphone batteries is beyond me."
These batteries are subject to extreme temperatures routinely including fast charge/discharge cycles and we simply can't escape the physics with our wishful thinking alone.
Especially with modern battery tech, you should easily get 200,000km out of the battery before it drops to below 80% of its original capacity
Not to mention that such heating/cooling would additionally draw energy thus taking a toll on both the range and battery life.
Before just claiming no EVs do this, you could have typed “Tesla battery cooling” into Google and gotten this from the AI thing:
> Tesla vehicles have a built-in battery cooling system that uses an electric pump to circulate coolant and keep the battery's temperature within an optimal range. This helps the battery perform well and last a long time.
Here’s the battery cooling system theory-of-operation from Tesla, for their _first_ car almost two decades ago: https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/Roadster/TheoryOp/1.2....
Here’s someone tearing down a Chevy Bolt battery talking about the coolant system: https://insideevs.com/news/341527/weberauto-examines-the-che...
Here’s an F150 Lightning battery apparently leaking coolant: https://www.lightningowners.com/threads/rear-motor-area-leak...
Please, do a bit more research before spreading damaging falsehoods about EVs.
With the conclusion that such cooling/heating wouldn't be free lunch and would take it's toll on the battery itself reducing both range and requiring more charge cycles because all those compressors need power too.
> whereas every tear down I have ever seen of EV batteries contains nothing as such.
You've either pretty much never seen any recent-ish battery teardown or you just weren't paying attention to them. Acting like active cooling is some rare oddity in EVs is pushing a falsehood. It's an argument not based in reality clothed in the slightest amount of deniability by acting like you're someone who would be informed (supposedly watched some significant amount of teardowns) but just haven't happened to see it at all.
> would take it's toll on the battery itself reducing both range and requiring more charge cycles because all those compressors need power too.
You're largely misunderstanding the amount of energy needed to actually operate the car at highway-ish speeds and the amount of energy needed to keep a battery pack somewhere in the range of acceptable temperatures. You'll use far more energy maintaining the cabin than what you'll spend managing the battery in the majority of climates. And even then the actual locomotive power needed to drive the car still dominates the overall energy usage.
And FWIW when it's really cold or hot my battery preconditions using wall power so it's leaving the house at a good temp. Then it's a pretty solid mass of stuff, a good amount of thermal inertia. So it's only those trips where it's been parked for a long while and it's fully cold/hot soaked that it's really using much of the battery. And even then it's still far less than even 25% for all cooling (cabin + battery) energy use of it's overall usage even when it's >100F out here and is totally heat soaked.
And even then, assuming it's not over 100F or under freezing a lot of the cooling needed for the battery can be done by regular radiators and airflow without needing compressors. If it's 50-90F outside it's probably just cooling itself by airflow over a radiator for the liquid cooling loop so all it needs is a water pump circulating, maybe a fan. It's not like there's massive amounts of waste heat being generated like in an ICE.
You're massively misinformed. Practically all EVs have active liquid cooling through their batteries and have for quite some time. You should actually research them instead of being so confidently wrong.
You aren’t going to be able to find legit data that says EV batteries regularly fail around the 3-5 year mark, like phone batteries.
The memefication of reality is happening right under our eyes, and the Cybertruck is the perfect vehicle for it.
Expect more such memetic design across everything. From people to products, the meme is the atomic unit of attention. Beauty is a secondary goal; to sprout memes is how you win in twenty twenty four - and beyond.
The Ioniq 5 looks way better than both and of course it is doing numbers as a result.
i3 was just expensive, low range, and overall not a competitive EV in the NA market.
They dropped the Volt which you can only pry out of owners cold, dead hands. They dropped the Bolt EUV which seems to be similarly adored.
What dumbass metric is causing these stupid decisions?
Sales and margin for the most part. The sales part, I imagine it's largely a failure of successfully marketing the vehicles, but I could be wrong.
The Volt to me was largely a failure of marketing at the time. Practically no normal people I know have any clue about what the Volt was. I went to a few dealerships to look at one and most salespeople didn't have a clue about the car (common though with car sales) or didn't even have any on hand to show. There was practically zero mindshare of GM equating with hybrids; the vast majority of car buyers I knew interested in hybrids essentially only knew/cared about Toyota. With declining sedan popularity in the US the writing was on the wall.
The Bolt was seen by many US car buyers as too small of a car and often confused for the several years older PHEV Volt. The amount of normal people I've heard use Volt/Bolt interchangeably is incredibly high. The people I talked to about the Bolt EUV figured it was just a different trim level of the same car, not realizing it was a good bit bigger.
Three different cars with different capabilities and yet so many people would just think they're the same V/Bolt thing GM talked about a decade or so ago.
Yes, this is / was a real issue and might be the biggest fuck-up for GM. I’m an EV nerd and when I talk about these cars I emphasize the first letter like I’m moderating a spelling bee…
I'm waiting for the Colt, the Jolt, the Molt, the Dolt...
Don't understand at all why GM doesn't make a PHEV SUV. They would be the perfect car for lots of people in the US.
We had a generation of globalism. It gutted the middle class.
TikTok is a direct channel for Chinese propaganda into the western infosphere.
That is hardly "no stakes".
Yes, the same concerns should also get the other social media giants wings clipped. The EU should keep taking bites out of YouTube, Facebook, etc. too.
TikTok can set up shop in the West. Setting up shop in the West means you are subject to Western laws. We have seen China demonstrate over and over that it will not comply with that.
There is a huge difference in people employed here vs in China--the self-censorship, for one. China relies on the fact that social pressure causes self-censorship even without the intervention of the higher-ups. This is vastly less effective when all the employees are from the US.
Then, in the 1981, Japan signed the Voluntary Export Restraint (VER) agreement where they agreed to limit auto exports to the US to 1.68 million vehicles annually. [0]
The US is the second largest auto market in the world.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_export_restraint
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/08/tesla-cyb...
The linked Kelly Blue Book report tables are probably more-useful, and state that in Q3, 4.8% of the vehicles sold were Cybertrucks.
I'm not familiar with pickup-truck-adjacent vehicles, but I notice the "Ford F-150 Lightning" was 2.1%, and the "GMC Hummer Truck / SUV" was 1.2%.
You can't even find middling used EVs for sub $20k. They're all just Chevy Bolts people were desperate to unload.
Level 3 charging aka DC fast charging was an option on them, so not all have the extra pins needed for a CCS charger.
I'm pretty happy with my 2017 Bolt which has the DC fast charging option. I wish it had distance-keeping cruise control; it's frustrating because it has the cameras and will even report following distance on the dash, but doesn't have the adaptive cruise feature for whatever reason. I also wish it charged a bit faster; 50 kW max is a little slow for road trips.
Next car is probably a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5, which has has both features and is also pretty reasonable. Prices on the used models are slowly coming down.
I don't like the look, personally, but my kids love it.
People buy them as big toys.
Don't know which part of the country is buying the cybertrucks but I don't think it's here.
Rivian now has dedicated charging stations now out in wilderness-type places (i.e., at the entrance to national parks).
Those numbers are going to crater hard in the coming months
To compare, 3.9 million cars sold in Q3.
Honestly I fully expect to see these things crisping in the sunlit parking lot of a predatory auto lender in about five years, or rolling through the rough part of town on an 84 month co-signed auto loan with liability insurance only, wagon wheels, a lord beerus wrap and aftermarket stereo.
Like Range Rovers and Hummers they will be gobbled up by people who (with petite-bourgeoise socialism) can afford to buy the vehicle, but not maintain it. And if Youtube is any judge of build quality, this vehicle will start to fall apart the minute it exits the factory floor.
You wanted to buy the vehicle anyway, you were going to buy it anyway, but for some absurd reason you get to count a personal vehicle against your company's tax liability.
Most companies literally don't have the margins to be solvent if all their purchasing activity is subject to 20%+ tax.
It’s obvious that most businesses can’t survive if their revenue is hit with income tax before expenses are paid, that’s why revenue is not taxed as income.
Musks resent policial turns fits the Cybertruck image too.
It would be wonderful irony if suddenly buying EVs has become trendy among the right-leaning crowd.
https://pristineautospa.com/the-benefits-and-advantages-of-c...
It's the unfinished metal look that absolutely baffles me.
Granted, this was a few years ago. I would hope they got their quality control processes dialed in by now
I mean, I guess I do get it: politics have poisoned people's brains and the fact that they don't like Musk's politics means that they have to have extremely strong opinions on everything connected to him, but it just doesn't seem worth the emotional effort.
And while I personally wouldn't ever buy one, it also is not surprising to me at all that a lot of people are buying them. I have no illusion that my personal tastes reflect the broader tastes of the car-buying public (if they did, then I would find it much easier to find a car that conforms to my preferences).
He must have fired his PR team and gave up on the visionary genius schtick. Many people will hate that he’s revealed his true self to the world and it isn’t pretty.
But the car sucks too.
I do have a model that still has the stalks though, haven’t driven the stalkless type enough to comment.
Normally I'd agree with you, but driving a car brings with it with pretty extreme externalities - it's not the people driving these behemoths that I'm worried about, it's everyone else. Distracting touchscreens, an erratic self-driving AI, and a car made of sharp points. Doesn't bode well.
Never could figure out if they actually had really good reasons for it or were just trying to justify having bought an Aztek.
The Aztek had some similar positive properties, but was from one of the particularly bad eras of GM malaise and was highly unreliable. It's had a tiny bit of a cult resurgence recently, but it was never popular in the way the Element was.
They all pale next to the true King of Vehicles - the Minivan.
It feels like the Aztek was ahead of its time and many mid-size SUVs have since caught up with its aesthetic.
But it had all of the stupid GMisms. Every expense was spared. It turned out to be like the malnourished love child of a Nissan Xterra and a Ford Windstar.
But I was driving with a non-tech, non-online friend and she blurted out “Wow what an ugly car”, I looked over and it was a cybertruck - so I felt validate in my views
Source: https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q3-2024-ev-sales/
Percent of total auto sales is a far better metric.
[0] https://www.coxautoinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Kelley...
My kids probably had the best comment: If Tesla had designed a real truck they would have sold millions.
Keep in mind this is the comment of teenagers who don't have a sense of the size and scale of markets. The point, however, should not be missed: There was an opportunity to enter a truck into the truck market, not an Ikea trash can on wheels.
Sometimes it is a good idea to listen to kids. I remember when one of Apple's original guiding principles of OS design was to make the computers usable by anyone, even young kids. A kid, in this case, does not see the utility of a truck that does not seem to fit the "form and function" of a truck, like an F150 or variants by other manufacturers.
This to me implies that EVs have peaked and only the market for vanity vehicles remains at this time
Edit: I also have a suspicion that this is primarily due to them filling all the preorders. It’d be good to see a breakdown as to how many new orders people are placing after seeing this POS in real life.
That might be true, if the #2 selling car, and the #1 selling car were not also EVs.
The Model Y is currently the second best selling vehicle of all kinds, and it very likely is about to overtake the F-150 as the most-selling vehicle, the first time the F-150 has been dethroned in 46 straight years.
The sales numbers are saying we have not reached peak EV.
I’m interested in the customer base once that market is exhausted.