Something Changed at Tesla | Hacker News Reader

Something Changed at Tesla

jalopnik.com

112 pointsjaytaylor162 comments

The author is trying pretty hard to pull this narrative. When I first saw it, I thought the Cybertruck looks hideous. But then, I don't care much what my car looks like. I often wished the outside of my Golf was more scrappy, rougher, something I don't need to care about denting. The Cybertruck would be perfect for me in that sense: you can use that truck and do a lot of work with it without having to worry about the paint or breaking something. It's a perfect design for it's intended purpose. To me, it doesn't paint a dystopian future. It paints a future where appearances serve an intended purpose, instead of the current opposite. A pickup truck is an utilitarian object. The cybertruck design is purely utilitarian. I love it.

Now if they could make a Cyberhatchback, I'd buy it right now.

Yeah, the author is really making a mountain out of a molehill. They're moving into a new vehicle class, and that vehicle class values durability, resilience, and power more than most, so they made something that embodied that. It's not a vehicle for everyone. It's a vehicle for a certain set of someones who already value that stuff in the present day.

The Roadster is also a future vehicle (well the new one is at least) they're bringing to market, and it's got a pretty different design. So either you interpret it as the future might be as multifaceted as the present, or that actually cars don't forecast the future... but rather reflect the present.

There is absolutely nothing utilitarian about the design.

Trucks in the 1920s and early 1930s were utilitarian. This thing is 100% about the look.

Agreed. In fact one of my biggest arguments against the design is that it will NOT appeal to the average truck owner, because the design gets in the way of the utility. For example, a lot of trucks have toolboxes on the front side of the bed. Due to the triangular sides that pitch at the front of the bed, you can't reach into the bed there from the side of the truck. That's already a nonstarter for a work truck. Another thing is bed rails. The triangular design again prevents the installation of horizontal rails that keep things relatively level. Same story for a roof rack. It's nearly impossible to craft a roof rack for this design that doesn't look goofy and ride extremely high.

Look we can argue about stagnation in truck design but there's something to be said about a timeless design feature, like the classic truck bed. I think Tesla misses here and so their main market for this will be competing against off-road SUVs like Jeep Grand Cherokee or Range Rover. The Cybertruck will not compete directly with say, Ford's F150 and the Silverado.

Don't know if it was designed this way, but if it has a "frunk" like most electric vehicles do, that would ideally be where the tool box goes. Much more accessible.

> it will NOT appeal to the average truck owner

Clearly it's not meant to appeal to anybody average. It is supposed to make extremists salivate. Have you seen what pick-up truck buyers are buying, lately? Nothing about them says useful.

I don't doubt they will sell. Just not to people with work to do.

>> It's nearly impossible to craft a roof rack for this design

I think it is too early to make this call, especially given the fact that they haven’t event gotten around to side mirrors and windscreen wipers (legally required in some jurisdictions)!

Your opinion contradicts everything reported by https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pi.... The article was written by auto journalists who had access to the design team and the truck, and who studied it weeks before it was revealed to the public.

What do you imagine they had to sign to get in weeks ahead of time? Very obviously, something deeply compromising.

Car news is, first of all, a business.

So you're imagining that Tesla went to various publications and only let Motor Trend access their new product because MT consented to spread lies? What did the other media do, they turned the offer down and still keep their mouths shut about that deal?

They would all have more to gain by revealing these kind of practices (since Tesla is the only company not to buy ads in the media) than publishing bullshit articles that you didn't even read or that you can't trust because... they discussed the design with the product's team.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

The Business is far more mature and sophisticated than you imagine. All the kinks were worked out long before you were born. The gravy train depends absolutely on a reliably massive wave of hype, each year. Everyone knows their lines. Anyone without a sterling portfolio doesn't get hired by Motor Trend. Anyone who ever gets out of step does not make Editor.

So, no, Tesla never "went to various publications". Nobody else did, either. That is not how the machine works.

> you can use that truck and do a lot of work with it without having to worry about the paint or breaking something

No. The flat shiny surfaces are more expensive, harder to manufacture, more brittle and more susceptible to denting/scratching than a normal curved car surface.

That thing is a nightmare to take care of. Best keep in the garage unless someone breathes on it and ruins the look.

For those downvoting, this comment does have a nugget of truth: it holds if the materials are equivalent. Curved surfaces are a lot stiffer and deform less easily than flat surfaces because they have some out-of-plane depth to their overall shape.

If you formed curved sheets out of this steel, it'd be tougher again than it is with flat surfaces.

>No. The flat shiny surfaces are more expensive, harder to manufacture, more brittle and more susceptible to denting/scratching than a normal curved car surface.

Where do you get that? How do you explain that the design team chose these flat surfaces in steel precisely for their lower cost, solidity and ease of manufacturing (source: https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pi...)

> Where do you get that?

An easy analogy to explain why curved surfaces are stronger: imagine an egg that is a cube instead of a spheroid.

You see how an eggshell cube would be vastly more brittle than an egg, right?

> chose these flat surfaces in steel precisely for their lower cost, solidity and ease of manufacturing

To make an equivalently robust structure out of straight edges you need the steel to be much, much thicker. So yes on 'solidity', but no to the other two claims.

Did you just ignore the entire article I linked in the comment you're replying to?

I think the author is reading way too much into the design.

It looks the way it does to drive down production costs and because of the limitations of the processes used to manufacture it: https://electrek.co/2019/11/24/teslas-cybertruck-looks-weird...

If there is some concern that Tesla is predicting some dystopian future it should have begun the moment they introduced 'Bioweapon Defense Mode'.

While the idea that this design is all about reducing costs does make a lot of sense, it doesn't explain the near-bullet-proof windows. Also, while the stainless exo-skeleton reduces some manufacturing costs, it seems like it would increase weight significantly which would increase battery requirements. Considering batteries are still one of the biggest cost components of these things, that doesn't really sound like a cost reducing measure.

I try not to read motivation behind events, but personally, I'm down with buying a vehicle designed for the apocalypse. Maybe he's trying to target the prepper demographic here. Once you add in the solar option, this thing becomes fully self-sufficient (with the obvious caveat that it's only recharging 10 miles per day)

The fact that the windows and doors were compared against bullets and sledge hammers seems a marketing stunt. The specs for the materials are no doubt from the requirement "make trucks extremely rugged".

That doesn't really fit with the idea that the design choices were based on aggressively keeping prices down though.

You can read through the replies from Elon's tweet a year ago asking people what they want from a pickup, and being rugged was one of the answers actually.

> it doesn't explain the near-bullet-proof windows

That doesn't need explaining. They aren't near-bullet proof. A standard car window can easily resist a steel ball being thrown at it. They were just capitalising on the fact that not many people realise how strong toughened glass is.

They were just capitalising on the fact that not many people realise how strong toughened glass is.

Which is understandable as they didn’t realise it either!

(with the obvious caveat that it's only recharging 10 miles per day)

Well, not that I take this prepper thing particularly seriously, but presumably one of the benefits of the post-apocalypse lifestyle is that you no longer have to commute for a daily 9-to-5.

Yeah, you just have your bi-weekly trip from the bunker to the gun shop to get more ammo.

If you’re buying ammo after the apocalypse, you didn’t prep correctly.

Ya, you need to go there to sell your overstock of ammo.

The design is a statement, it's even a declaration of war.

I think they are targeting people who do not care for environmental issues and who still think that electric vehicles are something for beaus and weaklings. If these people can't be convinced to transition to EVs for ecological reasons, just give them another reason. It doesn't matter why they drive EVs, just that they do. (Well, and to give other car companies a kick in the butt in this market segment).

It is a design you can't ignore, it looks metal af and no matter what your pickup currently looks like, it will appear wimpy next to it.

Also observe that it no longer sports a Tesla logo. The teaser image [0] that Musk posted before still had one. There is none on the inside either, as far as I could tell, so maybe they are moving the Cybertruck away from the Tesla brand. The presentation was on SpaceX' premises as well, if I remember correctly. (Compare that to Zuckerberg who thinks that Facebook isn't credited enough for the success of its daughter platforms WhatsApp and Instagram and is moving them closer to the (imo) toxic brand of Facebook).

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1106714774694297601

Just thinking out loud:

I wonder if people are underestimating how much the design was driven by the fact it was fun to make something that looked like it was from Blade Runner.

Maybe the whole thing started out as “Let’s make something shit cool like a blade runner cop car” and then the idea that it would bring down production costs, look different, etc, developed after they designed something that they really liked.

Elon seems to be quite motivated by having fun, one of the things I like about him.

I feel like the design process went like:

Elon: wow, stainless steel is an underrated material, it solved my starship rocket design problems. and it's cheap!

January 2019 (https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a25953663/elo...)

Elon: what if I used stainless steel for cars?

Elon: well there was the delorean, and blade runner...

Elon: you've got 6 months team.

(note there was no need for a dialogue partner)

> I think they are targeting people who do not care for environmental issues and who still think that electric vehicles are something for beaus and weaklings. If they can't be convinced to transition to EVs for ecological reasons, give them another reason because it doesn't matter why they drive EVs, just that they do

This actually opened my eyes, I haven't thought about it that way

Exactly. Nothing has changed at Tesla: their plan has never been to release model after model that cannibalize their business in the the electric-car-driver milieu; they aim to eat the classic demographics, one by one. For this niche, they broke out of their box and embraced a different aesthetic. Striving for that meant there was a lot they couldn't reuse--even the strength of their brand--but it's the most important niche by a longshot. It gets its own box.

If this is indeed their thinking then cybertruck is a terrible name in my opinion. It's far too nerdy for the anti-environmentalism manly man who cares about wimpiness.

Cybertruck isn't nerdy, cyber-anything always sounds wrong to me.

Do nerds call the web cyperspace?

When anybody calls anything cyber-whatever it used to be a red flag that they were probably clueless. Unfortunately cyber security has become a de facto term in industrial control networks.

Only seen it used in a useful way when discussing legal matters.

That said, at least around here military seems to have adopted it which might give the name a boost with parts of the truck buying demographic?

“... no matter what your pickup currently looks like, it will appear wimpy next to it.”

I have to disagree. That is your opinion not a fact. I think it looks like someone who just started out at whittling tried to make a Delorean and used the result as the design for the “truck”. Personally, I think the tesla “truck” looks wimpy. I’m really disappointed by it.

I agree, any existing truck of comparable size (aside from actual working trucks with wheels bigger that whole F350), looks wimpy next to tesla's truck. Like an office cowboy with $500 tastefully torn jeans and designer fleece shirt next to a coal miner at the end of his shift.

That’s good for you? But it doesn’t matter. The comment I was replying to implied that its/your view was a fact.

By replying with my point of view I’m proving that is not a fact.

By replying with your point of view... I actually don’t know why you replied. Why did you?

I tried to arrive at a stricter definition of whimpiness by throwing another analogy into the mix.

Of course matter of taste is entirely subjective, but that shouldn't stop us from making fun of it when warranted. Or even when not, such unimportant distinctions shouldn't be taken seriously.

Here's another user who thinks it looks awesome.

Most people I've heard however thinks it looks weird.

Importantly however none of those others I talked to ever owned a pickup truck or even talked about wanting one... :-)

I’m not sure how your anecdote is important.

You could have no friends, and only talk to the crazy guy that hangs out by the liquor store.

You could work at a senior center so most the people you talk to aren’t allowed to drive, but hate new fangled technology.

Or...

You could have a horrible sample size of anecdotal evidence (which is horrible evidence itself) to draw any reasonable conclusion.

:-)

And thus PR strategy may work. To give this truck's toughness credibility, they need to "leak" a few videos how this electric truck easily outperforms military Hummers in Utah mountains. In addition to that, they can shoot this truck with ak47 and say that thanks to its steel frame, none of the bullets went thru, while the supposedly tough Hummers and died pickups look like a cardboard target now. After this, the cybertrucks toughness will be undisputable.

It can resist low powered 9mm bullets. It won't even come close to resisting a rifle round. So minimally more protection than any other vehicle.

Maybe. BMW's new armored car is rated at Vehicle Resistance 6, which means it can withstand fire from an AK-47 among other things (such as lightly thrown metal balls):

https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/armored-car-bulletproof-ca...

Mercedes does an armored car rated at VR10:

https://www.motor1.com/news/61225/mercedes-maybach-s600-guar...

So let's see what the Cybertruck's VR rating is in a couple of years.

When I'm thinking of armored vehicles I'm thinking of at least 7mm steel to protect against machine guns and even that is paper thin! I got taken down too many times in War Thunder...

What would framing it as a "leak" do for Tesla, vs just doing those videos/tests as a branded marketing stunt? I'm not sure what the obfuscation gets Tesla. Like, oh no, we didn't intend you guys to see our truck being awesome?

In case they had to change something at a late stage.

If the videos were official they'd catch more negative press for it.

> it's even a declaration of war.

Yeah, it is a declaration of war against pedestrians. Thankfully this thing will never catch on here in Europe and I'll continue being safe while crossing the street.

IIRC there is a regulation in the US that ensures the front of a car is designed so that a pedestrian is thrown over the car instead of under it. It is one reason so many new cars look alike.

Does a truck have any such requirements for pedestrian safety ? Is the highest part of the Cyber truck's front end any lower than a F-150 for example ? That could make for a safer design.

> Is the highest part of the Cyber truck's front end any lower than a F-150 for example ?

They look like they're the same height, although it's a bit difficult to compare. The top of the F150's grill does look a bit more curved; not sure how much of a difference that makes.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1198751258384818176

I agree. The edges look awfully dangerous for anything that's not another Cybertruck. I'm sure they are planning to build and sell them as often as possible but I wouldn't underestimate the butt-kicking idea that I mentioned. I think at least part of the goal is to make other companies produce electric pickups too.

How is a Ford F150 safer for a pedestrian?

Because they're absent from most of Europe, because of their huge cylinder-volume the tax-related costs are pretty big in many European countries (there's only 2 F150s that I know of in the 2-million European capital I live in). This being an EV car will probably have close to no taxes attached to it so chances are some EV-enthusiasts will buy this instead of a Model 3 or Model S.

I live in Europe (Ireland) and F150s, Rangers, and other pickups are very common as work vehicles here. There's also a lot of 4x4s like Land Cruisers and Defenders with bull bars, which are presumably less safe for pedestrians.

Is that really a problem? Most of the pedestrian fear of trucks in europe is likely just fear of the unknown.

It's really a problem.

Fear of large cars is justified in Europe and anywhere else because they kill more pedestrians[1].

1. https://www.curbed.com/2018/9/27/17909270/pedestrian-deaths-...

I've had cars slightly touch me while I was crossing the street, but because they were generally small cars they were only touching my feet. Not at all a pleasant feeling but survivable. A truck, well, it would go straight for the belly/chest, a lot more vulnerable area.

There’s a much bigger problem if cars are touching you while you are walking than a big flat front end.

Hearing a lot made of this pedestrian problem. Are trucks more likely to hit pedestrians? I was not aware of big vehicles being more dangerous. Personally, I don’t want to get hit by any motorized metal no matter the size.

Big vehicles are more dangerous, obviously. They have more mass, so they hit people with more force.

https://www.curbed.com/2018/9/27/17909270/pedestrian-deaths-...

Not necessarily, but hitting your body and especially your head on a sharp edge is much more dangerous than a flat or curved surface. Compare hitting your head on the edge (or even corner!) of a table vs. hitting it on the bottom of the table.

> Yeah, it is a declaration of war against pedestrians. Thankfully this thing will never catch on here in Europe and I'll continue being safe while crossing the street.

Speed is what kills, not a slightly harder body.

Even the lightest car has enough mass that it's going to really hurt pedestrians if it hits one at speed.

And if any car - even this one - hits someone at 5 mph, it's not going to do that much damage.

> And if any car - even this one - hits someone at 5 mph, it's not going to do that much damage.

About 2% of auto or light truck vs. pedestrian collisions under 10mph produce severe injuries, and at all speeds light trucks are more dangerous than autos, so I think you are overgeneralizing here.

5mph != <10mph

> and at all speeds light trucks are more dangerous than autos,

Citation needed.

There's a huge difference between hitting a pedestrian with a small hatchback at city speeds (which, in my congested city, means between 15 and 25 kph) and hitting it with a vehicle like this.

why? the difference in mass between a small hatchback and a human is still an order of magnitude larger than the difference between the same car and a cybertruck. they are both so much heavier than the pedestrian that they should transfer about the same energy into the poor fellow.

Because when a hatchback hits you chances are that you’d get thrown on its hood or windscreen, while when a truck hits you chances are you’d be thrown behind its weels. The first scenario gives you bigger chances of survival as a pedestrian. It’s not a question about mass, it’s about the shape of the car. Of course, this whole scenario applies to speeds generally met in cities/towns (maximum 30-40 kph).

There is a big difference between someone rolling over the hood of your sedan and hitting them with a huge "wall" of a pickup truck.

Tesla has always had somethings for those who do not care about environmental issues: looks (Tesla cars don't look like vacuum cleaners of the past), performance (fastest 0-100 of any sedan), technology (remote control, some self driving, OTA updates). In fact, the only way to appeal to general public is through these things. Environmental issues are just too hard to grasp in every day life, especially since their supposed effect are long into the future.

> since their supposed effect are long into the future.

And in the near future. And in the present. and in the recent past.

> It is a design you can't ignore, it looks metal af and no matter what your pickup currently looks like, it will appear wimpy next to it.

With my brother we also speculate that this is the PERFECT car to personalize: Must be a blast to custom paint it.

Also:

If you have one, you will be (probably) the ONLY with it in the block. This alone will be a factor for some..

> If you have one, you will be (probably) the ONLY with it in the block.

Humvee market

True, the nice flat surfaces will be great for graffiti. Don't park it outside.

I think this vehicle is for the police eventually. This market is just the transition point.

Search for 'dubai cybertruck' and you'll already find reports of police forces ordering them. A long range, high-acceleration + high-speed utility vehicle that's marketed as very robust/bulletproof? Definitely.

I suspect that it should be cheaper to make as well... very few curves make for easy to make panels. Not a lot of investment needed to manufacture these things.

When curves are made on a computer, and CNC cut into a steel press that can make a door in 8 seconds, they turn out very cheap. In fact, curves are much stronger than flat panels for the same weight/cost, which is a big reason for exterior curves in some cars which are also structural.

From that perspective, I think the flat angular design used is for style only, and has no engineering basis.

I don't understand why people keep speculating about this when it's already been covered by the press and Elon himself:

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pi...

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1198700591465156608

The design of the body panels still requires a hydraulic press to form the parts. The only money that can be saved is with cheaper dies but that only matters for low production volumes. Breaking a stamping press sounds like incompetence to me. They have near infinite scalability. Just build a bigger one.

Yep. The lack of curves will also make it near impossible to blend any dent/paint repair that it might need down the road.

I think they are targeting people who do not care for environmental issues and who still think that electric vehicles are something for beaus and weaklings

How is that different from people who want to loudly signal their environmental virtue while ignoring externalities such as the electric power probably coming from coal, the extraction and manufacturing processes for batteries, etc? This is a competitor to an electric humvee - an unnecessarily large vehicle is wasted energy no matter where that energy originated

Maybe it's overanalyzed? The design is unusual but does look like a low poly lamborghini, so it has some appeal as sports item. But is the design even legal? Is it legal in every country to not have side mirrors? That front LED light is also blinding. And is it OK for a car to have so dangerously stiff side doors?

I don't know if it says much about the future of cars, it's a more of a lifestyle item and it remains to be seen how many of the preorders are being serious.

The linked article is more revealing:

https://jalopnik.com/a-deep-look-at-the-design-of-tesla-s-cy...

This one is much better: https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pi...

That's just bumper-to-bumper hype.

Worth noting that Jalopnik is famous for this sort of controversial take on things to encourage discussion. I love the site but, apart from its excellent investigative journalism regarding Goodyear tires and the criminal coverup[1], its content has never really been about insightful analysis that would warrant being referenced here.

1: https://jalopnik.com/goodyear-knew-of-dangerous-rv-tire-fail...

It's telling that their opinion fully contradicts what the truck's design team said about their thought process (cf https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pi...) and that they don't even care to consider it.

I've had a vehicle to get me from A to B for most of the last 25 years, but this is the first one I've actually wanted.

For context, my first question was: "how much firewood will it carry"?

Up to 100 cubic feet with the cover closed, up to 3500 pounds if you add some redneck plywood panels to stack it higher :D

I was thinking about shuttling mountain bikes up to the top of the hill myself. I could easily get 6 bikes and 6 people. If they could get summon to work on forest roads this would be the perfect shuttle truck.

Same here, I do not have much savings, new to US, but kind of almost ready to pay $100 to book it & hope in 2021 I will afford it.

What's the answer? It doesn't look like it has a pick up bed.

People that use trucks for actual truck things won't buy this. The design of the bed is a design flaw. Imagine you work construction and you have tools in the back of the bed. You will have to climb inside the bed of the truck everytime to load and unload the tools. You cannot access the bed from the side because of the stupid design.

There is no way this will compete with the EV F150 that will come out near the same time frame as this.

Tesla doesn't even have a method to produce the body of these trucks at the scale needed for production.

Most of the people that pre-order these trucks won't see them until at least 2025, if not later. You think people are going to wait for these over buying an EV F150 that Ford can produce at scale of the normal F150. Maybe some will because of the brand, but most will go for the F150.

Can you do that in any modern half ton? They're so much taller than they used to be; you have to be at six feet tall to reach the bed from the side.

> People that use trucks for actual truck things won't buy this. The design of the bed is a design flaw. Imagine you work construction and you have tools in the back of the bed. You will have to climb inside the bed of the truck everytime to load and unload the tools. You cannot access the bed from the side because of the stupid design.

That's what the frunk, the trunk in the bottom of the bed, and the storage in the two triangle rear panels are for

First of all, this is typical Gawker-site blog spam. It has zero insight.

Second of all, while I’m sure you can find some tesla fans who will go for it, especially with a $100 refundable deposit, I think they just made a bad call. How they go from Model X/3/S to this, escapes me. I love flat car panels, but I don’t think anyone who isn’t already a tesla fan will go for it. It’s viscerally ugly. They got many fundamentals right. The problem is the look. Trucks are not utilitarian. They are SUVs with the roof removed to make it less useful so that men will be comfortable buying it. Utilitarianism is not a legitimate excuse for this design.

It looks like a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds designed a truck they’d want to drive. It definitely has that niche appeal, but certainly no mass-market appeal. Is Tesla’s long term strategy to stay in the high end? I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re doing this kind of niche appeal because the price of batteries has not come down far enough to make a cheap decent electric car yet.

Trucks pre-date the SUV and while there is certainly a market segment of people who buy a truck and don’t have need of a truck the idea an SUV is a more utilitarian vehicle in the literal sense of the word is beyond the pale.

Agree the Tesla cybertruck is hideous and unlikely to appeal to a mass market for consumers or commercial operators.

This is so not accurate. There is a reason trades people drive trucks and it's not because they look manlier than SUVs. In fact the problem with the Tesla truck is that it looks like it was designed by someone who thinks people buy trucks because of macho aesthetics.

I've only now taken a look at the truck from all sides, and it does many things that I've thought of from the standpoint of new design movements being reactions to previous design movements.

IMO we're currently sorta ripe for cohesive neo-neo-modernism in consumer tech, after the plenty of show-offery and getting designs ever more ‘friendly’. We've seen that shift in e.g. aluminum Macbooks after earlier iMacs, but cars seem to trail behind since there's apparently no design nerd like Jobs there. Cars are all bulbous and curvy now. The closest to a modernist car that's not looking outright DIY, is the first-generation Audi TT: just a rounded box on another rounded box.

So what would a modernist car feature nowadays? Let's look at the Cybertruck:

- Resurrects the wedge shape and makes the panels even flatter than they were in the 80s, instead of the ubiquitous ‘curve on curve’ of today after we learned to shape panels whatever which way. Lots of cars from the hatchback wave of the past decade, like Opel Astra J, looked simultaneously family- and rally-oriented with no discernible design statement: that feels like baroque indulgence, it's got to stop.

- A flat, straight LED line of light instead of barely-comprehensible current headlights. (Just two giant flat rectangular panels would also do pretty good, but would resemble SUVs from the 90s.)

- No decoration of any kind on the front. This one is important, and Tesla did well here. It's pretty much the last bastion of brand-specific decoration when cars all look the same shape—but (afaik) even the radiator grille on ICE cars is only for appearance now, and Tesla has already shown that it's ready to dispose of that. With the truck, the deed is done.

Funny enough, even recently most attempts at artistic depictions of ‘future cars’ imagined them more complex, not less. It will be curious to see how designs turn around now.

> It will be curious to see how designs turn around now.

This is exactly what I've been wondering. Can't wait to see how the rest of the market reacts to this new direction.

Are all cars going to shift this way? That would look cra-zy on a highway!!

Eh, the collective market is probably incapable of reaction that's not measured in at least a decade, even though someone really should tame those shapeless blobs with headlights spilling all over the hood and sides. I'm placing my hopes in artists first of all, then maybe we'll get some spartan looks and reincarnations of the Stratos Zero/Countach wedge in consumer sport cars, and then hopefully some of that seeps into the mass market.

Won't be surprised if Japan barges in, if this becomes a trend at all―it seems their cars looked cleaner until just recently. Though this might also mean that they're gonna carry that complexity momentum now that they sorta gained it.

What the author is missing, perhaps, is that Elon thinks he will need trucks on Mars, and won't be able to take enough with him. But if the heavy parts can be stamped out by a machine he can take, then he can have trucks there made, largely, from steel plate refined from Mars dust, and glass refined from Mars dust.

It won't matter so much if they're too heavy, because gravity is less. It will need two or three layers of glass, with a vacuum gap between, for warmth, and to maintain shirtsleeve air pressure. It won't matter how they look, because nobody will ever go outside except for work, and try to send out robots even then.

He needs steel refining and rolling to make rocket body/tanks. I wonder how the thickness of the body panels compares with those of his new rocket thing...

One thing the author got dead right: these things will look very dated very, very quickly.

Oh lol. No wonder Tesla can't turn a consostent profit if this is the sort of thing they're optimizing for.

Yeah I think he was only half joking when he tweeted:

“Tesla Cybertruck (pressurized edition) will be official truck of Mars.”

Wow, when did that come out?

Called it.

Just add some attitude adjustment in the software so they cant drive right up peoples arse on the freeway and problem solved, instantly better than all other trucks!

I think the first commenter on that article said it best:

"The Cybertruck is designed with the sole purpose of brutally driving down the cost of production. PERIOD.

...

They aren’t building dystopia. That’s your neo-cortex story telling. They are driving down costs to get the price of what would be a $65,000 truck to a $45,000 truck so they can remove excuses of why people shouldn’t buy one."

When I look at what happens to areas that have a Walmart move in, when I look at all the trouble Amazon is having with counterfeits, I begin to feel that “brutally driving down the cost of production” is a pretty good way to build a dystopia.

And bulletproof material is designed to reduce cost how?

Cost of ownership is almost inversely proportional to durability. This car priced at 40k a will last me 20 years? This is 2k per year for this car.

If they are offering leases, they can offer them for less if they can sell it at a high price when they get it back.

By introducing an artifact that appeals to the visceral need for a “&$#@ yeah!” element common to the truck-owning or potentially truck-owning demographic at a low cost relative to alternative elements that evoke a similar emotion — and hopefully precipitate a purchase for a better orders * price - costs = revenue overall than not including bulletproof windows.

>The plusses for a folded stainless steel, origami truck are compelling: no paint shop and no expensive tooling. No Godzilla-scale stamping machines stomping it with multiple strikes. Without all that, the capital and environmental costs of using stainless steel body panels are small. And big attractions for a company that's sensitive to both types of green—cash and environmentalism. Just groove the steel where it's supposed to fold (avoiding cracks) and bend it on simple, cheap machines (like I was actually doing last week with my garage vise!)

Source: https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-electric-pi...

This article has all the details on the design of the truck. It was written before its reveal by journalists who saw the truck and met the team while it was still being designed.

That comment makes the claim that a stronger skin can take up some of the load bearing that you would otherwise have to make larger number of internal components to handle and then weld them to the frame. I have no idea how plausible this claim is.

To assuage concerns about the complications of a unibody from r regular fender bender body work?

Well let's think through a conventional truck frame. It's maybe 800-1200 lbs, uses 3-8 different materials, and has 100-200 fastening points and all those materials probably cost nearly as much as stainless steel.

And remember, the cost of an automobile isn't just the material cost, you have to amortize the manufacturing plant and the paint shop. By stressing the stainless steel skin (like an aircraft), Tesla doesn't really need to buy additional material, but they simplify the manufacturing dramatically because they don't need a paint shop and they don't need to assemble a frame.

To make sure that if the truck is ever in an accident that it kills everyone on both sides of the equation.

Cars crumple for a reason and Tesla's new truck seems like an absolute safety disaster even if people feel marginally safer because of it being supposedly bulletproof.

This is the first article to acknowledge something I noticed about the Cybertruck: that it seems to be drawing from a dystopian and cyberpunk aesthetic. I don't know if that means Elon is portending the end of western civilization, but it's a very interesting choice and I don't think the article writer is wrong to unpack what the design connotes.

Personally I love the design.

First thing I thought of is that it looks a lot like a stealth fighter - interestingly, does that mean it can avoid radar speed detectors too?

I'm definitely not an expert, but from what I've read, there's a lot of irony in the angular look of the F-117a becoming the icon of "futuristic". That plane, first of all was designed in the mid to late 1970s. Second, notice that newer [stealthy] planes don't look the same? What people say is that the facets were purely a necessity to simplify the calculations needed to make it stealthy. People did incredible things when computing power was expensive to solve problems analytically, which became obsolete once you could just apply brute force.

Also, I don't know about the business of making movie props, but it seems plausible to me that when making cars for SF movies, decades ago when budgets were lower, probably involved large sheets of plywood, cardboard, foamcore or whatever, hence big facets would be the most expedient design.

It's weird how arbitrary so many signaling mechanisms are.

Unlikely. The F-117 looks like a "low polygon" airplane because it literally is a "low polygon" airplane. The 3d electromagnetic field solvers running on the fastest computers available at the time of the development of the F-117 were only capable of simulating an object with a small number of facets so engineers designed an airplane that could fly with a minimum number of polygon facets.

It is probably invisible to Tesla Autopilot.

I do too. I think the design is beautiful and unique. I also like that the doors are hard to dent and that I can get from 0 to 60 in less than 3 seconds. All great qualities, as far as I'm concerned.

I've already ordered one and look forward to driving it around in two or three years.

That would be fascinating if it could. IIRC there is an urban legend that the stainless steel St. Louis Gateway Arch is almost invisible to radar. That being said DeLorean DMC-12s are not invisible to radar speed detectors so I would doubt the Cybertruck is.

Possibly more/less visible. Speed radars reflect off surfaces facing it. In practice that means the front, the reg plate, sometimes the side mirror for most cars. For the cyber truck it's going to be extremes depending on the radar location - completely front facing one may be hard to bounce, but the ones over the street may hit the flat front perfectly.

It still won't work around speed cameras like the ones in UK (it's both a radar and photo camera) or variable speed cameras which use reg recognition.

I'm pretty sure LIDAR speed detectors are a lot more common than radar these days.

> because we are running out of oil, the precious and finite resource that is utterly destroying our planet.

Not really running out. The US is the largest oil producing nation in the world now, and our output is at the highest levels[1] in history. Oil is practically dirt cheap and I don't see it breaking out in price anytime soon.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

,,The stone age didn't end because the lack of stones''

Even if the general shape of the cybertruck follows from the materials and production process, the packaging and marketing is clearly playing off dystopian fantasies. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

Selling cars is as much about telling a story as it is about explaining how you will get someone from point A to point B. That's even true for "boring" family cars - the story they are telling is one of reliability.

Personally I think looking upon the stort elements is the tail wagging the dog. Theym story is the means for the emotional elements. Like many fugly SUVs made themselves inefficent roll over risks to try to sell illusions of security the styling is selling a power fantasy in addition. Not uncommon for truck marketing.

Not only collision protection which they pride themselves on but overkill "sledgehammer resistance" and projectile resistance to not worry about it. They even boasted solar roof options to give gradual recharge.

Sledgehammer resistance isn't useful in practice.

Getting T-boned is one of the worst types of collisions even though the B pillar usually doesn't get breached. All the energy of the collision is still being transferred into the occupants which often results in a coma with no visible injuries (other than getting your brain smashed). The purpose of crumple zones is to dissipate the energy of a collision and avoid these types of accidents.

They designed from first principles. That's it. What would a truck look like if you built in the utility that's desired with a pickup truck - Cybertruck is what you get. They kept it simple with the EV benefits and good design twist.

250k pre-orders at last tweet I saw from Musk - and the online video reviews are reasonable people saying they love it, pre-ordered and will buy it, even if they're still not 100% sold on its look.

How do you review a product you don’t have access to?

I had similar thoughts, but, um, skate where the puck is headed?

I think that’s the authors point. Not admonishing the design but that this is what our culture wants

This article just screams anti-EV. Jalopnik writers have a huge bias towards ICE.

> Cars are a reflection of ourselves, whether we choose to festoon them in explicit messages or not. They can show what we hope for, what we aspire to, not just how large or how modest our bank accounts are. They are how we present ourselves to our fellow human

Ya, not everyone believes that

Seriously, cars are not a fashion item and anyone who thinks otherwise is speaking from a position of privilege.

Sales numbers on hideous cars (eg. Pontiac Aztec) of the past say otherwise. There is absolutely some correlation between how fashionable a car is and how well it sells.

Yet the Prius sold by the droves despite its “obvious hideousness” declared by reviewers at the time of its release.

The hideousness of the Prius was on purpose: it was visibly signaling that the owner was someone motivated by environmental concerns.

This was a nice exercise in creative writing. The Model X and the truck are different vehicles for different use cases. One is a luxury vehicle and the other is a cheap as chips (almost) utilitarian vehicle that can take a beating. Neither is a metaphor for the future of mankind.

Or maybe they're just trying to target two different markets. Don't put all your eggs in one basket...

It's a truck you dork. You do work with it. It gets dented. Gravel comes up and chips your window.

I call that 'patina'. If anyone is upset their truck has a scratch they probably shouldn't own one.

I'm buying one and so is William Gibson. Cars never appealed to me until I saw the Cybertruck.

Aren't trucks supposed to be about "drive somewhere and do some stuff"?

I disagree with this article. Of course your messaging is going to be different when selling a pickup truck and a SUV. If anything I see commonalities between Model X and Cybertruck- both are unashamed with their design, even though it might be impractical to some, or ugly.

This reminds me of English class in high school where we were made to read into themes and "literary devices." A lot of times the themes were substantial, and the authors intended them to mean something and convey a message to the reader. But many times they didn't- we were tasked with finding a theme so we would look for anything that resembled narrative so we could finish our essay.

This guy is looking too hard.

I also thought it was telling he kept mentioning Tesla X, which is a product category exclusively for upper-middle class and is hardly Tesla's mainstream vision for cars, nor the most popular.

If anything they should be talking about Tesla's 3 if we're going to talk about what our car designs mean for our future vision for society (which of course will always have it's limits).

TLDR: author projects their anxiety and angst onto an electric truck.

This whole article and it’s sentiment is wrong. It’s a good example of a person who is not capable of thinking from first principles or who never watched the reveal. Which describes basically everyone’s reaction to the truck.

What is a truck? A utilitarian vehicle. Does aesthetics add utility to the vehicle? No. Does it cost lots of money to make the car look swoopy? Yes. Does it increase the utility to give the vehicle an exoskeleton rather than a traditional frame? Yes. Should we make the car swoopy instead of making it an exoskeleton? No.

Literally every logical angle points to doing what they did. They maximized utility and minimized cost. Is this a good formula for a regular car? No! Is this a good formula for a utility vehicle? Yes! Are there lots of idiots out there who like to daily drive “utility vehicles” for their commute? Yes!

Doug D reviews the car and said it costs too much. But he only ever compared the upfront cost of the trucks. You save money on fuel and maintenance with an ev, and his omission of that was glaring.

People saying strong glass is bad because first responders. If I want to have strong glass then that’s my right. And living in the sf Bay Area, I don’t just want strong glass I fucking need strong glass. Elon musk shared a video on twitter of the glass resisting a 1kg steel ball being thrown at it. When it broke on stage it was a fluke. And 9mm resistance would also be really nice. Apparently Doug D never visited Oakland.

> Does aesthetics add utility to the vehicle? No

If you don't think there wasn't a ton of thought put into the aesthetics of the cybertruck, you don't understand how cars are designed. It's not a design that emerges from pure functionalism at all. Pure functionalism is a bus or a train, a dump truck, or a goods delivery vehicle, like the kind that brings beer to a corner store. I say that as someone who would probably buy a cybertruck.

> Apparently Doug D never visited Oakland.

Leave Oakland out of it. You wouldn't believe it but children play on the streets here without wearing any body armor at all.

> You wouldn't believe it but children play on the streets here without wearing any body armor at all.

Doesn’t mean it’s smart. Oakland might be safe but children playing on the streets without body armor isn’t an argument because the same can be said for most war zones.

> Literally every logical angle points to doing what they did

How about drag coefficient?

> When it broke on stage it was a fluke.

It didn't break on stage in isolation. Two broke. Tesla armor glass was already claimed years ago to survive a nuclear blast (Tesla Semi reveal). It seems to be marketing.

It’s used for towing large and high drag trailers and off-roading. It was definitely a good call to prioritize other things. If you want to do a road trip then use a 3 or an s.

There are like five video clips online of the glass withstanding greater impacts. Tough glass is not science fiction. It is well within the capabilities of anybody to take some bullet proof glass or thick poly carb and stick it in the window. So saying that this glass is all marketing doesn’t make any sense. Literally anyone could do it. Many already do. It isn’t a new thing. People get tougher glass installed after market literally all the time.

Bullet proof glass would add thousands of pounds. This is the same gimmick glass from the Tesla Semi reveal, there the gimmick was that it was nuclear blast proof, which any glass is when far enough away from the blast.

The vehicle already weights 6k. And it wouldn’t add thousands. Polycarbonate would weigh a lot less. Bullet proof glass is designed for bullets and weighs a lot. Just replacing TV the glass with polycarbonate would make them virtually unbreakable and weigh a lot less.

Elon musk tweeted a joke that Tesla semi glass will withstand a nuclear blast or you get a full refund. It was a joke dude. You are really dumb.

What he actually claimed is that the glass won’t crack if a small rock hits it. The cost of the tougher glass is less than the average cost of downtime caused by cracked windshields. Truckers aren’t allowed to drive with cracks. So in reality there is some really straightforward logic behind the glass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com