RIP Cybertruck. You Were Unloved, Unwanted, and Utterly Absurd

After Helene knocked out power in parts of my area for a little over 14 days, I found out that a friend of ours used his cybertruck to power his house through the entire mess. He'd run the house on it for a couple of days, then drive the cybertruck over to a super charger station, recharge, then come home and plug the house back in.

The battery capacity on those things is equivalent to 9 Tesla Powerwall units or something close to it.

They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story. Before, I always wanted to install powerwalls...but I never considered in an extended event being able to drive my powerwalls somewhere to recharge them.

The absurdity is the best part of it. Finally it was something new, in a landscape where every car and truck has looked the same for the past 20 years. I'm happy someone designed and built something so crazy and different.

It probably would have been better had they not been mass produced, and maybe did a very limited quantity run - make it more like a collector item... I suppose thats what it'll be now. I see quite a few on the road, it takes away from the uniqueness.

Kids really love these things and get very excited to see them on the road.

They are going to be very valued collectors items in 30 years once the kids of today have enough disposable income to buy whichever are left roadworthy by then.

Electric trucks in general seem terrible. You only see Rivians and Cybertrucks in urban settings, the electric F150 was discontinued. Anybody who knows how people that actually need trucks use trucks saw this coming, I never once saw a cybertruck used as a truck.

Discussion (194 points, 240 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391456

As much as I dislike Musk, it was nice to see someone try something that didn't look identical to every other car/truck on the road.

The dimensions felt off to me. I had it as a loaner and enjoyed it a bit, especially since it had HW4. But I would never buy one.

The size is just too impractical. It would never fit in my garage. On top of that, the standby drain was significant. Just sitting idle, it would lose 10 to 20 miles of range.

I liked the styling. Thought about getting one. Got a chance to get in one the other day. and it was so uncomfortable. felt like sitting on a park bench. I thought this was supposed to be not a real pickup. Rather a suburban big old thing with blade runner styling and reviews said lots of comfort. No, just a big old vehicle, that's not even that roomy on the inside (hip room felt like that of my old integra), with the comfort of an 80's pick up. not much of a point to it.

I noticed that the cyberpunk wedge cars that inspired it are 2 seaters… maybe this shape isn't right for much larger cars?

DeLorean is the real life 80s reference of course, but in cyberpunk revival media like the coupe in Ghost in the Shell 2017, the spinner in Blade Runner 2049—those cars are all much smaller cabins than the cybertruck

That’s unfortunate, I quite enjoyed the brutality of its aesthetic.

I have very mixed feelings about the Cybertruck. Personally I absolutely hate it, it's just not my cup of tea and I would never in a million years buy one. However as a general lover of cars, I have to appreciate just how striking the design is and how it was a complete departure from pretty much any other car on the road.

There's nothing quite like the Cybertruck and I don't think there ever will be again.

Truly one of the most baffling stories in recent automotive history. All they had to do was make a normal pickup truck with Tesla tech. Hell, go ahead and use it as the testbed for 48V, steer-by-wire and whatever else if you want to - but the amount of time and money wasted to make what was in the end an absolute monstrosity that failed to deliver on any of its price, performance and range promises strains credulity. Cybertruck is the most visible inflection point marking Elon's descent into madness.

Truly the peak of 2020s antisocial car design. The car looks designed to plow through other vehicles, barriers, and pedestrians without slowing down to count the bodies. "Bulletproof bodypanels" is only a selling point on a mass production car if you routinely piss people off enough to make them grab iron. Folks who need pickup trucks for the utility they provide have stuck with trucks that are actually fit for purpose. It was a way to signal to the world that you had extremely poor judgement and low standards.

I still remember the marketing for the Cybertruck. Tesla teased a neo-noir silhouette image of partial angle the truck which had everyone guessing which part it belonged to. Childhood fantasies about Blade Runner designs were conjured in people’s imaginations. People were truly generous with the design expectations. Finally, I went to the unveiling and when it rolled out I thought this must be a gag and the real Blade Runner would follow any second now, only to realize that this ugly thing was it. Then the boss had the designer throw a ball through the window. Twice.

(Edit: the actual genius designer had the assistant designer throw a ball through the window.)

  >blaming the problem on the wrong type of glue, a new adhesive “not prone to environmental embrittlement.”

That quote was about the new glue, not the old glue?

  >some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along could be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels.

If they read their own link, that never happened?

Who's doing the proofreading at Wired now? Is it all just AI?

I'm convinced that Elon made it just because he thought it would be funny. "Let's make a truck that looks like it came out of a 90s low-polygon video game! That'll be hilarious!" He never cared for one moment if it was actually a good product.

The poor people that bought them were the butt of his joke.

Unloved and unwanted is outright false. Go to cybertruckownersclub.com for a more balanced take. Somehow Wired managed to completely miss the best U-word description of it: Ugly.

All the clown show at Tesla had to do is clone the F-150. This was one of the easiest product failures to predict in recent memory. Musk can't help himself. Tesla continues to desperately need a Shotwell at the helm.

At present all Tesla has propping it up is bubble dust and one car model (one increasingly dated car model). Somehow after 14-15 years (Model S released in Summer 2012) these people still can't release a real SUV of any sort. The model Y is a grotesque joke of a fake SUV, a mutilated model 3 that doesn't really look like an SUV in any regard. The model Y is an SUV like the Cybertruck is a truck. They might as well have unlimited money to do it, and they can't do it. Same reason they couldn't release the roadster even after all this time. It's a fundamentally broken company because Musk won't get out of the way. Whatever Musk is good at it, it's not running a large scale automotive company.

I wonder if we will see less aggressive and generally hostile car designs in the future, now that public sentiment towards the tech oligarchs seems to have shifted.

Renault is designing cute things again, so that's a good development. So is Citroen, apparently?

So that's a good development

No Wired love for the Incel Camino? The Deplorean?

Elon truly was inspired by Delorean

I had a pre-order. The reason I canceled was because the delivered product had a lot less range and was much more expensive than previously announced.

There were other things that contributed to the decision, too: the announced "stressed skin" exoskeleton was panned in favor of adhering the body panels to the body with glue, it became clear that Tesla's profit and valuation were funding Elon's right-wing political project, and I would have preferred a solid-axle design.

The absurdity was not what was wrong with it. It's OK to be absurd. I really liked the stainless steel design. Less trail damage when off-roading and no need to worry about paint scratches causing body rust. The door wedge design? Meh. But it enabled the stainless steel body.

In the end, I want what the Cybertruck failed to deliver: a full-size electric pickup at a good price with excellent range. I currently have my eyes on the RAM REV. We'll see if that one gets axed, too.

I have very little interest in electric vehicles, Tesla, Elon Musk, etc. But I still think the Cybertruck, at least the design, looks awesome. It looked like something you'd see in the "Another World" or "Out of this World" intro cinematic.