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
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
I did also get many positive interactions when it was new as well. But boy did those random negative encounters stick out!
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thankfully our road laws won't allow the hideous monstrosity that is the Cybertruck 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...
> 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.
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.
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. "
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
To compare, 3.9 million cars sold in Q3.
Those numbers are going to crater hard in the coming months
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.
It would be wonderful irony if suddenly buying EVs has become trendy among the right-leaning crowd.
Musks resent policial turns fits the Cybertruck image too.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.