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Comment by silverwasthere | Hacker News Reader

I like the theory that musk is trying to win over the truck buyer segment's hearts and minds via twitter anti woke signals before releasing it to ensure there is an accepting market.

If you look at a map of the best selling vehicle by state and overlay who they voted for in the last few elections it's pretty clear who he needs to cozy up to and win over. I'm not thrilled about it, and it solidifies my choice not to buy a tesla, but it makes business sense to my uneducated eye.

Personally I like my nissan leaf and would like a nice simple plug in hybrid truck, not an electric brodozer.

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That’s a pretty dumb theory. The cyber truck depends on a gigapress that just finally made it to the US to their plant in the last couple of months.

Second, it already had massive preorder demand from before the Twitter drama. There was no need to ensure demand.

Finally, the market for the cyber truck is going to be all of the people who were conscious about fuel efficiency and wanted a truck before but downgraded to a car/crossover. The cyber truck will not make a dent in any rural truck sales where towing and hauling is common.

As a counter anecdote, me and a few friends who preordered cybertrucks don’t care about fuel efficiency. We just love the bizarre looks and extreme performance/range. Personally I also bought into the hype around its toughness because I need to haul kids around in an area that is infamous for suicidal deer.

I’m even fairly ambivalent to the fact that it has a truck bed. Maybe I’ll carry lumber once a year. I’d rather have a 3rd row of seats.

Point one and two are good, I wasnt aware they had as many preorders almost as the last 3 years combined of f-150 sales, but sooner or later they are going to need to sell to people that don't actually care what kind of powerplant is under the hood to grow their market share and overtake ford nationally.

A Cybertruck pre-order costs $100, and it’s refundable. I’m not sure what the actual demand for those things will be when people have to put real money down.

This theory seems a lot more convoluted than "it's hard to scale production of a new vehicle and they haven't figured it out yet."

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