1.2M Tesla Cybertruck Pre-Orders | Hacker News Reader

1.2M Tesla Cybertruck Pre-Orders

insideevs.com

for all the talk of musk being nothing more than a salesman, con artist and charlatan... i desperately want a truck that is all stainless steel. the salt is brutal where i live. and almost everyone i know wants a truck that wont be hobbled by complicated emissions equipment. try driving across Nebraska in a snow storm when the engine shuts itself down because a diesel emissions sensor, totally unnecessary for the actual operation of the truck, stops working correctly. for all the mud people sling, hes offering something that a lot of people desperately want and that the established players refuse to deliver.

Let's just hope the truck is better about the cold than the 3 is. I am quite tired of the snowflake icon and the helpful battery gage telling me how much power I can't use because it's too cold out.

How does it to in extreme heat?

yes, one of the weakest points of EVs in general. the new developments in thermals, namely the unification of the thermals and bridging of all thermal systems, stands to take a pretty big bite out of that. not to mention the heat pump. vacuum panels integrated into the pack could make it a non-issue, although i havent seen any talk of tesla doing that. for me, i would really like to be able to have a generator on board not only to extend range but also provide peace of mind for blizzards. the nice thing about that setup is that when the complicated machinery in the gas engine stops working, i can just take it off and put a new one on. or use it to power a jobsite. if the cybertruck would allow you to charge while moving, im not sure i could justify buying anything else for my personal situation.

Just curious, but what percentage (roughly) does your Tesla battery degrade with cold temps?

I tracked energy consumption (Wh/km) averaged over the time I had winter tires installed on my M3 (when temps hit 7 C or lower) and consumption was up by 20-25%.

I would have thought that, once you started moving, the battery would warm itself up and the full power would be available. Is that not the case?

I suppose that might not help if one's main use case is a lot of short, interspersed trips on very cold days. How long does it take for the battery to warm itself up?

While F150 lighting isn't stainless steel, they are made from aluminum alloy, pretty good against rust.

the chassis is aluminum? im pretty sure its steel

edit: https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2021...

steel frame.

If you live in an area with harsh winters, your battery will degrade faster than usual. Do you want to a frame which is going to outlast an obsolete vehicle?

cold weather causes the battery to self-discharge at a higher than normal rate, not degrade or become damaged. but i would be happy to upgrade my pack, all of which are designed to be swapped out easily and even quickly enough for re-charge by swap in some models, when the next quantum leap in electrolyte chemistry comes along.

Opposite is true for leaf sans cooling in hot climates…

Fair enough. They are two different construction. That being said, F150L has V2V/V2H charging, so that might be useful for a lot of folks who live in areas where infrastructure isn't amazing.

Where did you see V2V mentioned? Or are you assuming it's possible due to the normal plugs? The V2H charging is an extra $7500 (included in the platinum model) for the interconnect to your house.

Plastic is the best against rust.

And worst against sun

So a $120M (1.2M * $100) zero interest line of credit just from spending a few million dollars on creating a prototype and putting on an event. And a billion in PR value.

Musk is pretty good at raising money.

I can assure you Tesla doesn't need this kind of a credit to raise money, they could probably get a sweet $50B via a simple ATM equity offering. And incidentally it would be a similar set of people that would lay down the money.

This is true, but also it is true that financing via customer deposits is vastly cheaper than selling equity.

Financing the first ever production models costing $50K each with $100? Just the fixed costs of design and building the factories must cost billions.

They are also allowed to sell equity if they discover the need to do so. But preorders allow them to a) offer somewhat less equity and b) do so at a higher price due to the PR value of >1mm preorders. The pre-orders appear to have significantly reduced the cost of capital for the Cybertruck.

> simple ATM equity offering

There's no equity being offered here, there's no upside on offer at all beyond getting a truck.

This money isn't revenue, it is merely a pre-payment towards an NRE for building a car.

The best take is that it looks a lot like a Kickstarter style "proof of a market" without actually selling anything but the promise to build the thing everyone's interested in.

Something tells me Elon does not want Tesla to issue more shares.

They issued shares twice in the past year. They issue shares (or in the past also debt) approximately every year.

The Roadster preorders are probably even better in this regard. 500 Founders Roadsters needed to hit $120m and I'm pretty sure the actual number is easily 4-5 times that (I ordered one too).

I dont know, they ran an affiliate program awarding Roadsters. This alone materialized a huge liability in their books. Electrek scored two of those, no wonder they are super pro tesla :) https://electrek.co/2019/01/17/tesla-roadster-free-killed-re...

I vaguely recall that Teslabjoern said in one of his recent videos that it's just a 10% discount he is getting and he is not sure whether he'll actually order one.

2% discount, stacking

>Some even accumulated enough referrals for two free Founder Series Roadsters and Tesla confirmed that it would be giving two Roadsters away to those who get the 105 referrals needed.

>over 60 people are qualified for a Roadster and over 20 of those should get a second one too

i read the article, but consider it speculation at this point (that it goes to 100%). I haven't seen a clear offering by Tesla in writing about it yet, nor have I seen any of the e-mails Tesla sends to winners about the discounts they achieved.

It would be interesting to compare demographics of people pre-ordering Cybertruck vs electric F150. I was always assuming the hard core truck guys would rather go for F150 while there will be many first-time truck owners ordering Cybertruck.

> demographics of people pre-ordering Cybertruck vs electric F150

The location of the people would be a bigger signal than the demographic (on income or age).

An F150 would be bought by someone who does not care about a supercharger network & probably does not live near one (& also wants to run their house off it when the power does blink off for a couple of days).

I'd bet someone who buys an F150 would also be in the market for Starlink more than a cybertruck buyer.

On the Supercharger note, I'm starting to look at Tesla as sort of competition for Shell/Exxon rather than directly to GM or Ford.

For the 21st century, everything old is new again. SpaceX may become the Dutch East India Company, and Tesla may be Standard Oil.

Yup. I think part of the brilliance of the Model 3 was convincing people who would never have considered buying a luxury car, to buy a luxury car. Like well-off professionals who would have normally just bought a Honda or Toyota.

(And despite what many might say, $37k+ is definitely luxury sedan pricing. That is well optioned BMW 3 series and Mercedes C class pricing.)

3 series starts at 41k...

1) My Model 3 numbers were out of date too. Model 3 SR+ is now $41,190 before incentives.

2) Actual typical sale price of the BMW 3 series is $36.6k-$40k (in my region, numbers will vary depending on region). https://www.kbb.com/bmw/3-series/2021/330i/?category=sedan&i...

If they are actually hard core truck guys(as in, people that actually use their truck for its truckiness), they will probably be turned off by the 65" bed length.

Does anyone have an estimate for how many of these will actually convert to sales?

Ford I believe released numbers for one of their vehicles, something like 65%.

Bronco Sport. Don’t know if deposit amount might have varied by dealer, but a quick Google says $100 refundable deposit (same as Tesla) was typical.

https://www.motor1.com/news/496806/ford-bronco-pre-order-sal...

EDIT to add - Bronco Sport orders opened last July with the car going into production last October, so placing a reservation probably indicated some real level of interest in buying a car within a few months.

For the Tesla, you have to figure a lot of people put $100 in (knowing it's refundable) to hold a place in line for god knows how long until the Cybertruck actually comes out, just in case they want one. They started taking reservations for these in 2019. It's been a while.

10%.

This seems like a lot. Ford only sells about 800000 pick ups a year and that's pretty popular with a reputation. Who are are all these buyers?

A pre-order only requires putting down $100.00. These are not sales.

Sure but when was the last time you pre-ordered something you never had intention of buying?

I pre-ordered the 3 but cancelled it three years later when it was finally purchasable (Australia) as my situation changed massively. Went from zero children to two - already bought a new car to fit child seats.

It does not seem like a lot to me. You're just looking at one year.

The US has an amazing number of trucks. Like on the order of one for every two citizens.

So 1.2M expressing an interest is on the order of, probably less than, one percent of existing vehicles.

Why aren't those pick up owners buying new trucks now? I guess I'm skeptical that the owner of a 15year old tacoma is putting a down payment on a pick up that's almost twice as expensive as as a tacoma or 10k more then an f150. These trucks get bought because you can fix them and keep them running. So I'm wondering who these people are.

I picked yearly sales to look at because if this comes out those people would impact that years sales. At least that's what my intuition says. Are people really over the f150 and ready to have a new most popular truck in America?

Who knows. But it seems logical to me that people are incrementally more likely to buy a new truck "early" in their personal cycle when something truly new and different comes along.

And as lots of people have said, this isn't especially firm interest being expressed.

Dunno but Tesla delivers about 800k vehicles per year which is about to bring them to top10 or so.

Where do you get this from? Nothing on google says that

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2021-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...

The electric F150 has already reached 120K preorders, and it was announced only in May. The number of Tesla preorders they can accumulate is a function of how long it is delayed. Which, at the rate Tesla’s battery tech. isn’t progressing, will be a couple more years yet.

Cybertruck had 146,000 orders within 48 hours, so the initial surge in orders is normal. - [0]

More impressively, it has racked up 250,000 orders since May, almost two years after announced.

[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/24/20980141/tesla-cybertruc...

If nothing else, it's a great way to pump the stock and forecasts.

I think Ford and VW are going to be a great adversary to Tesla long term - Tesla went all-in on minimalism and doing everything through touchscreen. Meanwhile, Ford and VW are specifically designing and marketing their EVs as "normal vehicles" that happen to have an electric motor.

I wonder how the ownership model is for non-Tesla EVs. TSLA has a reputation for making one feel like you're licensing a car, rather than owning it.

I'm actually interested in looking at the reliability of teslas in the long term. Reports have been showing many different opinion without enough data I guess?

Some said that it is easy to maintain because there are less parts moving, some said that they are very unreliable.

I have been holding myself to pull the trigger to buy a tesla because of those. I don't have the leverage to buy many cars financially, so might as well choose the reliable one for a long term

Something that I have not heard talked about much is that this deposit mentally buys the truck so another car/truck purchase is put on hold while the wait happens. Also the early versions (first 50k) is going to be strong demand on the secondary market. My guess is that the premium over sticker in the aftermarket is going to be huge

Why a premium for the early versions?

Just because someone will want to have it NOW

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