Tesla's new Cybertruck smashed during demo | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's new Cybertruck smashed during demo

bbc.com

94 pointsthread_id74 comments

Automotive windows have been a solved problem and commodity for a while. I don't really understand the point of this demonstration, except for two possibilities:

1. They're gaslighting the Tesla faithful with "super strong" windows that are just normal. Or

2. Demonstrating they are still wasting tons of r&d dollars on non-problems and ought to bring in an adult who can design and manufacture commodity things efficiently.

I think maybe the target audience for this is people with old trucks not people who know about Teslas

Sure, but they explicitly advertised to not go for the commodity version but more durable/damage resistant ones.

This is not really very new tech (bullet proof glass for VIPs, bank transporters etc.) but also not a commodity.

> I don't really understand the point

Congrats, you are not the target market. It is a demonstration of a feature some people want (though these peoples are wrong to want this according to your authoritative judgement).

Can you explain why 'super strong windows' is a useful feature to have? I've never owned a pickup so I wouldn't know, but do the windows regularly break or something? Never happened to any of the cars I or anyone I know ever owned. Is it against car thieves or something? Because I imagine they would find a way around this anyway.

What I'm wondering about is personal safety in case of an accident (water, fire, etc). How do you get out? In some EU countries a safety hammer to break the glass in case you are trapped is actually mandatory on new cars, how does unbreakable glass deal with that?

Same goes for the sharp angles by the way, as demonstrated, this design will never be road-legal in the EU because new cars are not allowed to have sharp features for pedestrian safety.

Never had a chip in your windscreen? Happens to our cars with annoying regularity here on flat well maintained Dutch roads. Imagine what happens to your windows if you regularly drive on construction sites or unpaved roads

> Can you explain why 'super strong windows' is a useful feature to have?

I am also not the target market and it is not something I personally find useful. But the post I was replying to was nonsensical (I don't see why they didn't pick the commodity option -> must be gaslighting).

Your argument would be far more compelling if someone could actually tell us why exactly the target market wants extra strong windows. I might not be the target market, but if someone says "Well I have a Ford and gravel flicks up and smashes my passenger side windows" I would be able to understand. The problem is that even the people doing the demonstration didn't actually tell us why you would want stronger windows.

> new cars are not allowed to have sharp features for pedestrian safety

Do you have more information on this. I know there's minimum radius for blunting sheet metal panel edges on the fascias that are prone to pedestrian collision. Seems pretty trivial change to smooth things out a little, though I wonder how much of the sharp edges here is value engineering vs desired aesthetic.

The EU (and Japan and Australia) has a range of rules now for increasing pedestrian safety, including softer materials on the front bumper, hoods that give so that they cushion the impact if a pedestrian is hit, and limiteing sharp protrusions / edges on the front of the vehicle. The new G-wagon, for example, has turn signals that flex down into the vehicle on an impact. https://www.autonews.com/article/20120423/OEM03/304239967/eu...

Having a damn near indestructible rear window on a pickup would be nice. I can't count the number of times I've not thrown something into the bed of my truck from a distance for fear of it bouncing into the window.

Had to scroll way too far to see this. I personally have broken my dad’s rear window in his truck pushing equipment too hard into the back of the bed.

Trucks need to be built to take abuse, and this truck has a lot of glass. Hence they want the glass to be practical, which means not replacing sheets every time you go off road and take impacts from road debris.

Any engineer who has live demo’d a beta product should know exactly what Elon was feeling in that moment. “Oh my fucking god” just about sums it up.

No, they didn’t expect it to shatter, there’s no way Elon planned on standing in front of a damaged Cybertruck for the rest of the event.

I got the impression the live impact tests on the real product where a last minute edition. Franz, “Are you sure?!” before throwing the bearing about sums it up.

The same mentality that lets Elon decide to hit his Cybertruck with a sledgehammer on stage is the mentality which gets us Cybertruck in the first place. You have to appreciate the beauty of the whole approach / package.

IMO you absolutely do not get to pick and choose all the innovation that comes from Tesla/SpaceX/Elon without all the drama, and failures, and missteps. This is the thing people don’t understand. You do not get to have one without the other in the world we live in, they are flip sides of the same coin.

Have you ever driven off-road before?

Whatever glass they put in there will essentially be a commodity. They will have lots of options for getting it manufactured and so on.

Which affects the final price and also the mechanical requirements.

Bullet-proof glass isn't an exotic item, but you're not going to find it in most consumer products.

3. They buy phone screen protectors on Amazon and stick them on the windows to make them stronger.

And since Amazon commingles inventory, they got a counterfeit batch.

3. It's a PR stunt.

It invites people who don't care much for Tesla or the vehicle itself to share the video, it softens the seriousness and tension of a launch, and it helps to humanise the brand and the presenter.

Do you bleieve they are playing that type of self-deprecating meta?

seems on brand for Mr. Musk to me.

I believe that they are PR and marketing experts. They've created a big buzz that has everyone talking about this car.

"Armor glass" that completely shatters when you throw something at it by hand? Come on...

Also, why would it need armor glass in the first place? They picked a gimmick that is irrelevant to the product so that this "failure" does not hurt at all.

If you think Tesla's PR and marketing is done by experts, please explain Musk's Thai cave rescue pedophile fiasco last year.

What has Tesla's PR team to do with Elon Musk's personal tweets? This is a very poor argument...

Sure, it seems plausible.

It's slapstick comedy applied to PR.

It's either clever marketing or a happy accident.

SpaceX failed launches are marketing too, but they're not stunts. They are live tests that are filmed anyway. The fact they share the video is secondary to the main goal of the tests.

But this? It's a staged marketing event. It's not a test procedure. The point is to get as many people to see it as possible. Smashing the windows doesn't cost much or stop a potential buyer in their tracks.

The windows break easily in a highly visible but safe way (no broken glass fragments spilling onto the stage, no projectiles bouncing back into the audience). They repeat the “demonstration” with the same “accidental” result instead of just moving on. Musk knows it's fun to watch things go wrong, and it boosts the already high newsworthiness of the event.

It would have been fun to watch anyway because company founders don't tend to let people throw things at their latest vehicle on stage, but that alone wouldn't make as many headlines as an accident.

4. It's stock price manipulation.

I mean, as long as we're rejecting Hanlon's razor, we might as well consider that someone could exploit the way TSLA fluctuates wildly every time Elon so much as tweets.

(No, I don't believe this.)

Wait a second, you are telling me that Elon may be trying to increase the value of his company through these product releases. Hard to believe, but I am coming around to it

It's a PR stunt.

Very likely since now everyone knows about Tesla's new truck and I doubt anyone in the market for such a thing really cares about indestructible side windows?

If all it takes is "an adult who can design and manufacture commodity things efficiently", it should be pretty easy to set up some competition for Tesla with a team of competent "adults", right?

He is talking about a very specific issue not about telsa engineering as a whole. The issue is wasting over-engineering small irrelevant stuff that provide no real benefit.

He is criticizing a part of Tesla not Tesla as a whole. A company can do many great things and can still be crap in some others.

The phrasing makes it clear that this was a character attack on Elon himself, not Tesla.

The hard part is finding "investors" who are happy to keep buying your bonds while you run a massive cash burn. Anyone can run a "successful" business as long as the supply of other people's money holds out.

Elon sounded hurt for real. I think it just happened. They went on banging on car doors with sledgehammers that went fine, it was just one piece as part of the show around the same theme that it's a strong car.

yea, i believe it was for real too. they guy throwing the ball did so with much, much less force the second time.

"...have been a solved problem and commodity for a while"

So there's absolutely no room for improvement? Should we just move on from everything that we've deemed "a solved problem and commodity"?

Another possibility: they want to foster an image of a product designed to last, with very little maintenance cost. I'm not suggesting car windows are a maintenance cost, by the way - just that it adds to the overall image of reliability.

Additionally, I'm not sure where you draw the line at what are "non-problems" and what exactly is and is not "wasting tons of r&d dollars". Or, as others have suggested, what constitutes a "PR stunt". Is it wasting time and resource to select Tesla-specific paints, interior designs, wheel designs? After all, every other car has those. They are "solved problems" - just do whatever the other guys are doing!

They have close ties with AGP a company that specializes in high tech glass, the model X windshield is one of the most complex in the industry. AGP also specializes in bullet resistant glass and use many of their techniques in regular glass as well. I believe what musk said, they threw wrenches, a kitchen sink, just about Avery thing and it didn’t break. A metal ball is probably the worst case scenario. A solid ball will be very heavy, but even worse, there is only ONE point of contact. All the kinematic energy has to be stopped at ONE incredibly small point. What is the area of contact? It’s infinitesimally small! Even a bullet would have more contact area, and suffer plastic deformation. A metal sphere? Worst case scenario.

Those windows are not normal. As far as I know, front windows always stay together when they break, and side windows scatter to little pieces.

I understand why you would make the front window super strong. But the side windows, why can't they not scatter like in all the other cars?

Automotive safety glass is usually the same in both windshields and side windows, but windshields are laminated together with plastic layers so when a front impact shatters them, they don't shred the people inside.

As I understand it, the force of a (non-fatal) side impact in a car is generally less--reducing the danger of the above--and occupants need a way to escape in case of non-functioning doors, and so glass that can be broken free from the inside is the norm for cars.

That looks like they laminated the side windows. I'm not sure I'd want to be in that even if it didn't have Musk's...musk...all over it.

Conspiracy theory: that incident was on purpose to generate massive PR.

Argument: seriously, how hard would it be to rehearse that thing so that it does not happen live twice?

They could have rehearsed too often.

For example, Duralex drinking glasses, which are made from tempered glass, dropped on a hard floor have a habit of bouncing once and exploding on the second impact (cause: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_glass_breakage. Classical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert's_drop)

These windows could have a similar weakness, being fine on x huge impacts, to shatter on a relatively weak later impact.

I actually believe this is probably the case. Watching MKBHD's ride on YT indicated they replaced the glass prior to riding the press around, so they probably had this planned in advanced to some extent.

I don't think anyone should have realistic expectations of the outer layer of glass not shattering. That is why there are multiple layers. If you threw a big metal ball really hard at the president's limo, it would likely crack the outer layer as well in similar ways. What fundamentally controls the strength of armored glass is how many layers you have.

ATTENTION CITIZEN

Your online transmission contains material deemed threatening to the United States of America:

"... threw a big metal ball really hard at the president's limo ..."

Please volunteer yourself immediately to the nearest CYBERTRUCK for autonomous transport to a Security Processing Facility.

Elon is a lot of things, but a good actor he is not. Watch the livestream for a few mins before to a few minutes after the throw. He was noticeably thrown off and flustered. The audience knew he was uncomfortable and cheered him for support. The whole thing was cringe inducing.

The truck needs a better GPU so they can increase the polygon count.

Poly count is low so our roads won't lag.

:0 So that’s how it can go to 60 so fast, damn

It's to increase safety. If other drivers are using bad graphics cards they won't lag and crash into you.

Pretty much all cars in the US are implementing laminated side glass to comply with FMVSS 226 occupant ejection mitigation requirements.

They just figured out an interesting way to demonstrate a feature that nearly every car sold in the US since 2017 already has.

I haven't yet seen a car on the road with anything other than tempered side glass.

Here’s a list of a few:

https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/AAR/files/Laminated-Glass-Veh...

Well that's a handy list of vehicles that won't be on my list when I'm shopping for my next car.

You sure? I'm glad I had laminated glass when some projectile hit my driver side window on the highway last year.

There are a far greater number of realistic and common scenarios where a windows pose a safety benefit by operating as a safety barrier than there are scenarios where they pose a safety benefit by being easily penetrable.

Reminds me of BillG presenting Windows 98 on live TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKy9fV_zX_o

They also hit the door with a sledgehammer as hard as they could and didn't dent it. The video for that is pretty amazing.

It looked to me like the guy was clearly not swinging his hardest.

You mean like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L91_K-s4pMM

Imo, this is not the problem. The glass passed the test when it was not fixated on the car. (assuming the glass used on the freefall test is the same used in the car).

The freefall test height is pretty significant, so either: 1. They were not using the same glass and lying on the freefall test or 2. They mistakenly put another glass type on the demo car. Which is a really bad mistake for the guys staging the demo.

I expect Tesla to give clarifications as well as put the tech specs for their glass.

Or the non-fixed glass was fixated on a flat surface that might have absorbed much of the energy or the tester is the fastest baseball pitcher in history.

If you notice, on the second test, he was hitting much weaker and the glass still shattered.

I thought the way they handled a failed demo was cool. Most companies would have rolled the product off stage or put something in front of it, but Elon rolled with the punches and continued the presentation with two shattered windows. It lowers the probability the truck was hardened or altered for a better presentation.

He did look a bit shaken up by it. As if he was less concentrated on the presentation after the incident.

Apart from that, I do think he handled it quite well. Best to laugh it off and not make a big deal.

Title is a little dramatic. Saying they smashed the truck when the window glass broke when it shouldn’t have but everything else was the same is inaccurate.

Perhaps they did it on purpose as a marketing gag.

Yeah. Any press coverage is good press coverage with this thing.

The thing is so outlandish, like something Philip k Dick dreamt up, you'll either love it or hate it. The outcome seems determined by your taste, to me it is not influenced by what happened in the demo.

As an aside... What a fucking cool car.

It's possible. Peter Thiel has called Elon Musk, "the master marketer."

It's honestly amazing how debased our society has become where even outright fucks are excused as "Oh well maybe they're just so clever that their success looks indistinguishable from a normal person failing"

That doesn't have to be the thinking behind it. I agree it could be a PR stunt. They're not clever - they're just abusing marketing edge cases hoping that more eyes is better than an irrelevant staged failure. (Possibly true given this post made it to the top of HN) It's still terrible, but I wouldn't say clever. Maybe sleazy.

That's what you get from buying the newest, shiniest ad without the customer caring about the product itself.

This approach has been glorified and happily adapted by everyone in the past decade just for the purpose of getting external validation on social networks.

We are just witnessing late stages of that.

This should be the top comment on this thread. The entire presentation was a shambles. Elon Musk mumbling while trying to read stats off the screen behind him, attempting to answer hecklers and ending sentences that he'd forgotten to start. Then some tediously long demos of a man dropping a ball down a tube with amateur magician flourishes. That anyone could watch this and then conclude that he's a genius who did it on purpose is truly mine boggling.

Guessing they tested before the live shot, which worked, but weakened the glass. Though the back window gives too, so maybe not.

It happens, and it happens more than anyone would like to admit. Remembered me about https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LfNQOOr9aR8

With a design like that they're going to completely miss their target audience: the F150 buyers of America.

The whole reveal was such a shitshow that I doubt this was a PR stunt. It’s just par for the course for Tesla.

AFAIK Ford did a similar thing with hemp based plastic car body.

This incident should be a good argument against making live product demos (particularly those that test product 'ruggedness'), especially for a brand new/untested class of product.

I'd rather let the broader 'tech reviewers' community test it out for themselves once the product launches to public -- that'll certainly look more authentic and less staged.

This is a minor detail in a full event.

The worst case scenario he made a fool out of himself on that moment, which is something he is most definitely used to.

The best case scenario he will get a lot of PR, even haters will be talking about the Cybertruck.

If there are products that deserve live product demos are these that break the mold and leave people scratching their heads.

If you left it to tech reviewers they would probably bitch about the design. When what happened was a truck with an odd design that at first leaves you uncomfortable but by the end of the event you've grown to like it.

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