Posted by jdenquin 1 day ago
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...
HN has gone down the gutter ...
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.
That said do you see those in Boston or NYC a lot?
Fearmongering instead of logically approaching things doesn't belong on HN imo.
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.
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
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
They’ve not even met the goals they said they would meet 3 years ago.
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.
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.
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! :-;
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"
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
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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?
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. "
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.
Not really the case for PCs.
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.
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.
Who is doing this? Anti-Musk people? Anti-EV people? I’m not from the US so I’m not familiar with the politics.
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.
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.)
"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
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.
Those numbers are going to crater hard in the coming months
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?
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.