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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I get to eat my hat somewhat. I hope it's tasty. Just a few days ago I made the comment that the Cybertruck's killer feature is it's $40K price tag, if and only if that price tag actually happens. I said that Ford could not make a decent EV F-150 at that price point unless they throw their dealerships under the bus. And here we are with a $40K EV F-150.

I'm glad I added the caveats though -- the $40K F150 is for commercial fleets, so will be missing crucial features for the passenger market and might bypass dealerships. Even so, $52K is still a competitive price for a SuperCrew with a few options.

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I expect that a real advantage to an EV F150 over any Tesla truck (or car) will be repair costs, most particularly collision repairs.

Of course, they'll always cost more than the estimates, plus you get to throw in sales tax and the annual registration tithe to the state.

I'm always surprised that people are willing to spend so much on new vehicles but I guess it keeps the money moving through the economy. The spice must flow.

Why do you think the F-150 Lightning will be cheaper to repair than the Cybertruck?

Cybertruck is unpainted (or varnished) stainless, isn't it?

Means that you can't fix small dents with filler, have to swap panels instead.

The cybertruck is unibody, there may not be a panel to swap. Body on frame is easier to fix major accidents as well. But getting a car that retains value andnis cheap to repair means after even major wrecks they won't total it and you get a car back that was bent back to mostly true.

Doesn't unpainted stainless mean you don't really need to fix small dents, no rust issues?

Steel bodywork on modern cars is typically galvanized very thoroughly and/or given other protective coatings prior to painting, so dents generally aren't at risk of rusting. That said, people tend to not like having even cosmetic damage to their cars. It's reasonably easy to hammer out, fill, prep, and paint dents in traditional bodywork, but bare metal doesn't really have that option (especially if, as Elon Musk claims, it's significantly work-hardened--I am somewhat skeptical about that, since it could significantly reduce crashworthiness without a ton of engineering).

Fair, but at the same time we're talking about work trucks a lot in this thread, and I don't think I've ever seen a real "work truck" that was totally unblemished. If it's unblemished you're not working it very hard, in my experience.

But you can hit the door with a sledge hammer and not have any minor dent to repair. (Just a window)

At what speed does a Toyota Corolla have to hit against your door for it to be the same force as a sledge hammer?

How fast is the sledge hammer moving?

Those same people sell their previous vehicle in decent shape for a lot less money, and you and I can then buy it.

That's generally my attitude too. Once someone complained that the car I wanted had low resale value. I reminded him that I was buying used so that wasn't a bad thing.

Ford also hasn't sold that many EVs (yet), so it's still eligible for the US $7500 federal tax rebate (unlike Tesla).

(BTW: It seems like such an arbitrary and ultimately bad decision to cap rebates by manufacturer. Rebate caps for expensive luxury cars? Sure. But penalize a manufacturer for making _too many_ of the thing you're incentivizing doesn't seem right).

You're not penalizing anybody, you're adding a temporary incentive to get the manufacturer up to speed. Once they're selling enough, they don't need to incentivize people to buy them.

Since the rebate is per manufacturer you are penalizing the first movers. Meaning, Tesla and GM's electric vehicles are $7500 costlier than Ford because they exhausted their rebates early on.

The cap should have been for the entire country so that companies like Ford can't sit back years before rolling out with an EV and gain a second movers advantage now that the tech is mature.

Ford has already sold over 100,000 EV's, and if they can't sell 100,000 Mach-E's in the next 12 months then they're doing something wrong. So by the time the F-150 becomes available their credit should be in the wind-down phase.

Another likely scenario is that Biden gets his infrastructure bill through and the credit becomes available to all US-manufactured EV's.

The Mach-E is a great vehicle. The only thing that may hold it back is high price tag, but tax credits will help.

The inflation that the infrastructure bill cause will make the credit pointless

As far as I know, Ford is capacity constrained to the point that they will only be able to ship ~50k Mach-E's this year.

Not only that, but the phaseout process for rebates is VERY slow. Its likely they will still have at least some rebates until some time in 2023, even without a change in the law.

> if they can't sell 100,000 Mach-E's in the next 12 months then they're doing something wrong.

Specifically, the thing they are doing wrong is not having enough capacity to make 100K Mach-Es this year. It's not that demand isn't there, but rather the supply can't meet demand. Same problem Tesla has, just in smaller numbers on the Ford side for the time being.

I think the $40k price tag is deceptive if you look a bit closer. The extended range 300 mile battery is only available on the Platinum edition which starts at $60k IIRC, otherwise you're stuck with 230 miles which IMO going to make the truck feel hamstringed.

The $50k Cybertruck gets you 300 miles.

Yeah, the $40K version of the F150 Lightning is the "commercial use" one, which will presumably be utilitarian. I think they plan to reveal more about the commercial version on Monday.

If the $40K commercial use version is the right truck for a given consumer, great. But most consumers will want to step up from that for a personal vehicle. I think for most people, we will find $53K is the real starting price.

It feels as if the $40K commercial-use version was added in order to capture some headlines that group "$40K" alongside features of the more expensive trims such as "4.4 second 0 to 60," and I believe they have been successful in that.

the $40k cybertruck gets you 250 miles.

(...in late 2022)

The Lightning isn't supposed to be going until 2022 either, and Ford is having supply chain issues with chips, which this truck probably needs more than any car they've ever made, so we'll see which ships first.

Yeah, and the Mach-E was delayed by several months as well. It wouldn't be shocking if this ends up being more like late 2022, at least for any significant volume.

Not that its an issue. People focus a little too much on initial ship date, IMO.

Why would it need more chips? It's not inherently different from existing trucks in that regard.

Battery management in a modern EV requires more compute than an ICE vehicle, for starters.

> The $50k Cybertruck gets you 300 miles.

The Cybertruck gets you nothing. It doesn't exist.

And neither does the F150 Lightning. What a dumb ass argument.

President Biden drove the F150 Lightning on TV. Has anyone (outside Tesla) driven the Cybertruck on TV yet?

That statement makes the argument even dumber.

How?

Seriously? The president drove it for a commercial and that is the prove to convinced you that it is real product? And Tesla didn't do a commercial with a president and therefore its a fake product?

They are both large car companies who have invested billions into the development and production of these products and they will both come out next year. Anything else is just nutjob conspiracy theory nonsense.

For example Jay Leno. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25ZuKkbHdqM

I like Ford and have driven mustangs for 30 years with a short gap where I had a truck.

Just a preface to say I’m not hating on Ford in particular here, but the msrp is bogus. I can nearly guarantee that the actual base on a vehicle you can actually by will be $10k higher once a dealer is involved.

Edit: side comment, wow 800 plus comments on an F150 hacker news submission. Did not see that coming ;)

At some point I will want to buy an electric truck. The biggest appeal with Tesla is that I don’t need to deal with dealership.

Lots of people buy 100k Ford pickups, 50k is no big deal to fords market

The $40k cybertruck pricetag is good.

It is setting customer expectations and it is competition.

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