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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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