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Tesla Releases Stripped RWD Cybertruck: So Much Worse for Not Much Less Money
- greatgib 2y agoI really can't understand why people pay around 100k for something so ugly. Maybe just to show off that you can have one. But really looks stupid.
- pornel 2y agoThe point of the design wasn't to be pretty, but to be different, edgy, and look rugged. But they made a mistake by announcing the design long before they were able to produce it. By the time they had built it, the hype cycle was over, and the design was already old news. It was also supposed to be bulletproof (presumably looking like a tank), but in reality, it turned out to be a brittle underbody with glued-on panels that were peeling off. At the $35K starting price that Elon hyped, it could have been excused as a utilitarian design. But Tesla instead released a beta-quality product at a luxury price. The revolutionary new cheap Tesla batteries that were supposed to make that price point possible turned out to be as real as all the other stuff Elon promised.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIn 50 years cybertrucks are going to be worth something, just because they're different enough to be recognizable. Same as the DeLorean.
- agildehaus 2y agoThe DMC-12 has a classic movie attached to it. If it didn't, most every single one of them that exists today would be in the scrap heap.
- throwaway48476 2y agoInstead of a movie the cyberpunk is attached to a highly polarizing political conflict, which ignoring the nuance, is highly memorable.
- woodruffw 2y agoI hazard you that there's little to no market for things that are solely "highly memorable," especially politically polarizing ones. Most people don't want to own a Hitler Youth knife, for example.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThere is actually a market for HJ knives.
- woodruffw 2y agoSure; emphasis on "most people."
- Gud 2y agoBut in this case, what’s interesting is if there is a market, not what “most people” will do. I predict that in 50 years, the cyber trucks in mint condition will be worth a decent amount of money. It is the first of its kind(electric SUV). It’s still a crappy car.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoHardly will be worth more than just plonking that $ into an investment account and letting it accrue interest for 50 years.
- throwaway48476 2y agoOf course, most collectible categories underperform the market. But people like to collect things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pengaru 2y ago> In 50 years cybertrucks are going to be worth something, just because they're different enough to be recognizable. Same as the DeLorean. Nobody would know anything about the Delorean if it weren't for its starring role in one of the most famous movie franchises ever.
- Ekaros 2y agoI wonder will they run or be fixable in 50 years. Not just the big battery, but every other such component too. In the end DeLorean is relatively simple car and you could even install different engine in it if you have to.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 2y agoTeslas are more locked down software-wise than iOS, so their worth in half a century should be around whatever scrap metal is going for then.
- asadotzler 2y agoI hear ya, but I think 50 years is wildly generous. I give it 20 years before they're entirely gone except for a few novelty chasers. It's the Yugo of the 21st century, except at luxury prices, actually, then maybe like combining a Yugo with the Cadillac Cimarron or the Pontiac Aztec. Garbage in every way that won't survive a human generation.
- slashdave 2y agoDeLoreans are rare (only 9,000 were built).
- beloch 2y agoA better comparison would be the AMC Gremlin. The DeLorean was not a particularly good car, but it featured prominently in a movie series that remains a cultural touchstone. The AMC Gremlin was just endearingly ugly. Today, it has a bit of a cult following, but that has not made it a particularly valuable car.
- pornel 2y agoThis style is coming back — Rivian R3X looks eerily similar, just with more even proportions.
- asadotzler 2y agoNot really. The point of the design was a single sheet of heavy steel folded origami style into an exoskeleton that the powertrain, suspension and other bits all hanged off of. That completely novel design would have been neat to see, and perhaps worth the required aesthetic. But that was not to be. They dropped the origami single steel panel, then they abandoned the whole idea of an exoskeleton design and opted not for a body on frame like all good pickup trucks, but a unibody that puts them in the Ford Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz category, light duty, but at 4 times the price with a pretty awful aesthetic, and from a company whose owner has become a pariah among decent people.
- disqard 2y ago> a company whose owner has become a pariah among decent people That's the "cherry on top" of this dung-heap.
- Muskisapuss 2y ago[dead]
- wincy 2y agoI think they look super cool. I’ve thought that since they were first announced. Just the coolest looking vehicle I’ve ever seen. My kids go “look dad, a Cybertruck!” Every time one passes. I bought a Toyota Sequoia around the time they first started rolling out, but seriously considered the Cybertruck but it didn’t seem like it’d be able to haul a travel trailer as well as we’d have liked.
- dyauspitr 2y agoIt’s subjective. I think it’s currently ugly but subtly so. I think with a few changes (that I can’t articulate) it would be a pretty good looking vehicle.
- Muskisapuss 2y ago[dead]
- Austiiiiii 2y agoI mean, I'd buy it if it was like $5000, a compact car, and the person running the company wasn't an unlovable sociopath. Some people like the janky cheap aesthetic. But $100k for a car like that is a complete insult to good taste. It'd be like selling a luxury 1.5m container home. The low price tag is the entire point of the jank aesthetic. You're supposed to be communicating that you reject the idea of "keeping up with the Joneses" and wear the aesthetic imperfections of the lower economic class as a badge of honor. Of course, as with every cultural movement of any nuance, real world Dr. Eggman completely missed the point here and shat all over everything with his tone-deaf Rich Frat Boy With Asperger's schtick.
- danans 2y ago> why people pay around 100k for something so ugly. Maybe just to show off that you can have one Showing off has been a well understood reason for buying luxury cars from the very beginning of automobiles (when they were all luxury). The CT just happens to be on the extremely ugly (or unconventional looking) end of the spectrum.
- asadotzler 2y agoIt was supposed to be a novel structural design with an affordable price tag. Instead it's a unibody with heavier than needed panels slapped on it. Might as well be a Ford Maverick for its value as a pickup truck. It's an Edsel. How many of you all have ever seen or even heard of Edsel? That's CyberTruck in half a century. It's not going to be remembered by most, much less collected. Those who do remember it will scoff like we do Edsels and would have done for that coked out* car maker, John DeLorean's monstrosity, had it not got a starring role in one of the greatest movies of all time and the franchise that followed. * To be fair, we were nearly all coked out in 1975 :D
- danans 2y ago> It was supposed to be a novel structural design with an affordable price tag Who buys a car for its "novel structural design"? Most buy a car for some combination of transportation/utility, comfort/performance, and social signaling, in varying proportions depending on their needs/circumstances, desires, and personality. The CT's appeal seems to lean heavily on the last 2 of those characteristics, since as you point out, a common pickup truck would be more functional and far cheaper.
- asadotzler 2y agoHad it been the exoskeleton design they promised, or even a classic truck body on frame construction, and had they actually built it from a few large "origami" folded structural metal panels, all the things they said it would be at the outset, that kind of novel design would have made the aesthetic at least interesting. Instead, they failed at the exoskeleton design. They failed at the origami several large folded panels structure. And they kept the ugly design that those novel approaches to car building led to, but slapped it on a barely-a-truck unibody that can't compete with any other real trucks in its price range, in any dimension, and then rushed it out with serious quality issues. A $100K unibody truck with silly aesthetics that don't actually separate it at any fundamental level from actually useful trucks, well, that just doesn't work at any scale that could make Tesla whole on the investment, much less provide them some edge in the market. So, it's a novelty for people who enjoy getting flipped off a lot. I especially love pulling in front of them on I280 and slowing to a crawl while flipping the bird out my sunroof--and it brings extra joy when those "alpha males" have their families along.
- Gud 2y agoI agree with your overall point but please don’t fuck around in traffic. You are putting peoples lives at risk just for your own egos sake.
- cyberax 2y agoThe design was meant to be functional. Tesla wanted to use stainless steel that doesn't need paint, which is a significant part of the car cost. But stainless steel is much milder than normal steel, so you need to use thicker panels. But thicker panels are more difficult to stamp. So why not then double down on thickness, and make the panels structural? It makes them impossible to stamp, so double down on the "flat" design. Well, it didn't work out as intended. The whole flat panel look ended up being a total gimmick.
- asadotzler 2y agoThe structural panels never happened. That idea was shitcanned when they dropped the exoskeleton design for a unibody. Now the extra heavy panels are a stupid vestige of a design that never came to fruition. The truck is a damned unibody auto structure, hardly worthy of being called a truck, much closer to a Hyundai Santa Fe than a Ford F-150 and worse for having to carry all those heavy bolt on panels that do absolutely nothing for the truck functionality of the vehicle.
- bloopernova 2y agoIt sounds like a few software projects I've worked on. Incorrect base assumptions and not swapping out the components that were made unwieldy by those assumptions not reflecting reality.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoSeeing your other comments you seem to be a passionate cybertruck hater. Did you actually drove one or seen reviews? My impression from reviews was screaming "WANT". This is one of the most advanced car, not just truck on the market. There's literally nothing like it out there.
- cyberax 2y ago[flagged]
- itsoktocry 2y ago
- comfysocks 2y agoThe way I imagine it, it was designed to look like a wireframe vector graphics video game tank, a la battlezone 1980. The design is based on the sci-fi “rule of cool”, the origami exoskeleton is retconned justification that turned out to be too tall of an ask for Elon’s engineers.
- solardev 2y ago"So much worse for not much less money" is a pretty apt description for pretty much everything today...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- monero-xmr 2y agoI’m rich and cars don’t cost me anything really. But I keep 1 sports car at a time which I buy new. Everything else I buy used because no one knows the quality of new cars and how long they will last. Daily driver has to be bullet proof. Why anyone other than wealthy people buy brand new cars is nonsensical to me.
- Workaccount2 2y agoAt my company, as you go up the pay scale, the age of the car they drive also increases. Our president drives a 2013 Subaru with 220k miles. Our receptionist drives a $50k 2024 Honda Pilot black edition. The engineering director drives a stock 2020 Elantra and the lab shift manager a 2025 GMC Sierra. It seems people who work more with money know how to value things better, and others just look at how much of a reach the lowest monthly payment is.
- monero-xmr 2y agoPeople just look at the monthly payment. Never think about what an 84 month loan means, what it costs to repair, the insurance. So absurd
- bloopernova 2y agoA large part of the USA, for a myriad of reasons, lives paycheck to paycheck.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
- 999900000999 2y agoIf we just look at these cars purely on their merits, I think they’d still struggle. You’re talking about a very expensive car with tons of basic quality control issues. The EV market has stalled. I don’t need a car, but I’d probably stick to a classic gas car. Charging stations are still too few in the US. Teslas feel like luxury secondary cars. With the economy the way it is they won’t sell well
- delichon 2y agoIf and when autopilot achieves level 3, the economic equation changes substantially. Whoever does it, I'd be in line demanding that they take my money. After years of false promises I understand the skepticism, but think that the industry is finally getting close. Tesla's large Cybercab bet depends on it so they are demonstrating their confidence in cash. From the beginning it has been Tesla's strategy to leverage the luxury market to fund their market-wide ambitions.
- moogly 2y ago> If and when autopilot achieves level 3, the economic equation changes substantially. How so?
- horsawlarway 2y agoYeah, but there are actually autonomous cabs rolling out to my metro, and Tesla didn't build them... So it won't be a monopoly. Which means you're right back to a cutthroat, low margin business. Personally... I'm generally a "buy the whole market" kind of investor. But I'm actively looking to exclude Tesla. It's shaping up to be a complete and total bust.
- throwanem 2y agoThey want to boost the used market by increasing supply? What about having undershot their sales projections 20x suggests the vast sea of unmet demand this strategy depends on to work?
- asadotzler 2y agoThey'll fail in the used market until they're so hated that the price drops to scrap metal levels and then a few people will snatch them up for the novelty or literally for the scrap value.
- throwanem 2y agoSo, the batteries and a pile of plastic garbage, then. Good grief, from how awful the "stainless" veneers look with just a few days too many parked under a pine tree, I can't imagine there being any serious use for the stuff as raw material. It might not even really be worth the money to resmelt. If iron stops being cheap, we're all well and truly f——d. Dunno, though. Haven't seen a Cybertruck in this neck of the woods for a while. Can't think why, but being the center of that whole parking lot's attention certainly didn't seem to be doing the fellow with the pine-besmirched one as much good as you'd have sort of thought it might, for someone who'd spent so much on something so flashy.
- Corrado 2y agoThat makes me wonder ... what could you do with a cheap Cybertruck? Take all the panels off and remake them in something else? Maybe put a 3D printer to work and create something really unique. Sure, you'd still be stuck with a CT but a lot of the tech in that vehicle is pretty good. Could you turn it into a sand buggy? What about a flatbed truck? Maybe a repair truck with welders and other electrical equipment?
- throwanem 2y ago> a lot of the tech in that vehicle is pretty good Not what I hear...
- 2y ago
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> said to have a starting price of under $40,000 back then (and then around $61,000 last year when it was available to order but never actually entered production), you'll now have to pony up $71,985 for it, including $1,995 destination. Tesla's pre-sale prices have always been hilarious.
- karlgkk 2y agoI was seriously considering a cybertruck, but by launch (and directly after), it became clear that it was a lifestyle truck, not an actual utility vehicle In case you’re wondering, motorcycles are a hobby of mine, and the most common negative review I’ve heard is that the gate weight is just low enough that two people trying to get a big bike in, occasionally, can do many thousands of dollars of damage
- asadotzler 2y agoRight, because it's not actually a real truck. Real trucks are body on frame, a structure that doesn't distort under load. The CT is a unibody (monocoque) which can't support a real load from above or behind without deforming or snapping into pieces. It's a joke. It's a Hyundai Santa Fe that's been jacked up and weighed down with overthick steel panels that bring no value to the vehicle as a truck. It's a car pretending to be a pickup truck, which is fine for the suburban family that needs to grab a few bags of lawn fertilizer at Home Depot once a year, but it's not a real pickup truck and any comparison to even a 20 year old F-150 would be a crushing defeat in all normal pickup tasks.
- QuiEgo 2y agoYou can get two (lightly) used Model Ys with money left over for that price, or a lightly used Model Y and a slightly older, lightly used F150 as a backup car for when you need a truck and/or need to be off charging infra (e.x. towing a boat or RV long-range). Don't get the value proposition at all.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoOr, like, an actual truck.
- QuiEgo 2y agoRight. If you want to go EV for your daily driver, you can buy a myriad of good choices (including from Tesla) *AND* a whole actual gas truck (say an F150 or a Taco) for what they are asking for this thing.
- Marsymars 2y agoIt’s too bad there’s not like... Uber Truck. If you need a truck only say, every few months, you’ll never come out ahead by owning a separate vehicle for that, but the overhead of renting a truck via traditional means is really a disincentive to doing so.
- thatguymike 2y agoDoes it still make you look like a ding-dong and get you mocked behind your back? Yes? Oh, guess they didn't fix that yet.
- yubblegum 2y agoThat has to be the ugliest car ever.