Tesla Cybertruck may have a rust problem | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Cybertruck may have a rust problem

carsdirect.com

63 pointsthunderbong69 comments

You have to admire the marketing when they can convince their fans that not clear coating a vehicle is a feature not a bug.

It wouldn’t even look different or cost all that much. The only downside is you would be able to leave it parked outside.

What will Tesla think of next?

> You have to admire the marketing when they can convince their fans that not clear coating a vehicle is a feature not a bug.

It's not rust, it's an attractive patina!

You're washing it wrong

Huh, interesting.

It would be hilarious* if these cars really had a serious rust problem, and all the hipsters with their 60-100k cars will explain how rust is completely normal on a 3 years old car. Or that it is "cosmetic tarnishing".

* hilarious in the abstract, if it happened to you and you take a financial hit, I'm sorry

As one reddit comment mentioned, if people start wrapping this car, but the "wrapping" company is not doing a perfect job, moisture and dirt under the wrap can wreck the car without owners noticing it for a long time.

However, I'm not sure if the issue is really widespread, I'd imagine we had more photos if it were. I guess we will see.

I haven't decided if I'm going to wrap my Cybertruck, lean into the Mad Max rust aesthetic, or lovingly wipe it clean every week like my neighbor and his pristine Shelby. Most likely, option 3 until I get bored, followed by option 2 until the wife gets embarrassed, then option 1.

Ah yes, I'm well aware of the financial hit. I'm buying a new car after all!

> Or that it is "cosmetic tarnishing".

I'll give it a pass if it turns out it was made with weathering steel. :p

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathering_steel

That would be an incredible mess. If it's not pre-weathered, weathering steel leaves rust stains everywhere during the weathering process. You would have thousands of people suing Tesla for the damage to their driveways and garages.

I don't think it's weathering steel :-)

> cosmetic tarnishing

We call that patina.

Post-apocalyptic nano-hydro-scarring

it's 80s retrofuturism, 1880s

> if it happened to you and you take a financial hit, I'm sorry

I'm not. The people who bought the Cybertruck either knew or should have known that there'd be issue like this given the well documented Tesla QA issues and the fact that this is a completely new product so they're the beta testers.

You don't know what a hipster is.

You can also passivate, powdercoat, etc. Not that you should need to do this after dropping that kinda cash on a car (refuse to call it a truck :P)

It really is a terrible truck.

And on that subject I was thinking on pickup truck beds today. None of them are really very good. A good bed would be made out of solid steel and be full of tie down points. That is, the way work trucks are made. As is stands they are made of car body steel and have almost no tie down points, and never one where you need it.

As a postscript I have been watching the edison motors channel(they are developing an electric semi truck). and my first thought was "there is no way these guys are going to be able to make it in the industry, They make way too much sense" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an6e2Lh9u58

> A good bed would be made out of solid steel and be full of tie down points. That is, the way work trucks are made.

There's a lot of different truck beds with different styles and materials for different purposes. Sheet metal truck beds are the most popular work truck bed by volume, but there are very serious industrial users that choose aluminum.

e.g. https://cmtruckbeds.com/truck-beds/

Disagree on the 'made of solid steel', my father is a woodworker/painter/decorator, aluminum is enough, he doesn't move gravel or stone.

Fully gree with full of tie down points. Even in car trunks, you need more tie down points. Let me insure my stuff won't fly if I take a sharp turn, please!

> tie down points

I've always thought the same thing. Maybe none of the CEOs ever take home groceries in their car. Or haul a motorcycle, bicycle or plates of food over to a potluck.

Why don't trucks and cars have modular storage? multi-use storage?

Why do we have to quickly drive home from the grocery store to put stuff in the fridge or freezer? We should have a cooler in the back of the vehicle for groceries so it doesn't become a race, and groceries don't have to be the last stop.

and milk jugs, eggs, bread. Car manufacturers provide enough storage so that all of them end up thrown about the trunk on the drive home. Why not reconfigurable storage that holds them in place?

They're too busy figuring out how to add some subscription entertainment system. Or optimize away physical controls into the touchscreen.

Actually, why can't we have some sort of storage that lifts your groceries out of the car and wheels them into your kitchen?

The answer to all of your questions is that trucks are marketed largely to people who don't need trucks and will only subject them to light use.

If the truck bed were solid steel it would cost more and wouldn't sell that much better.

If there were more tie downs it wouldn't look as sleek and fewer people would buy it. Those are the people who don't use tie downs (or the bed, really) anyway.

That high-end entertainment system is what sells trucks to that kind of customer.

Serious question: won't any "real" pickup truck user put a plastic truck bed liner in the truck bed anyway?

I mean if you're hauling heavy stuff around it's going to quickly beat a bare metal or painted metal surface to crap anyway right?

    I've always thought the same thing. Maybe none of the 
    CEOs ever take home groceries in their car. Or haul a 
    motorcycle, bicycle or plates of food over to a potluck.

From the outside, seems like two huge factors.

One it's because there's so much time crunch pressure on vehicle development. It costs megabucks and they can't just extend the development cycle on a new vehicle for months to allow for "dogfooding" (which may involve hauling literal dog food from the grocery store)

Two it's because feedback cycles on vehicles are long enough to be effectively useless. For example, everybody hates the removal of physical controls from car interiors, but it doesn't hurt new car sales (because it's not obvious how crappy the controls are until you've spent some real time in the vehicle) so manufacturers don't really have an effective feedback loop guiding their decisions. So cars often have just the dumbest possible usability failures.

some car companies have been in business for > 100 years!

Posts on the source (forum) linked in the article suggest this is dust from railway tracks that lands on the cars and rusts.

It needs to be carefully removed, but is common on new cars transported by rail.

This “rust” is cosmetic tarnishing, not structural corrosion. Over time I imagine it will develop into a beautiful patina. Every CyberTruck will look unique.

If you really want to keep it looking shiny and pristine, you can always get a clear protective wrap.

Or they could've clear-coated it from the start, because the vehicle wasn't advertised as "will develop a patina" it was advertised as "stainless steel that's why we're not painting it".

That's right kids, It's A Feature, Not A Bug!

( and if it goes wrong it's your fault for not fixing it yourself )

Baloney.

Try it.

I have!

Interestingly though it's called Polony here, or the original Mortadella in the Italian suburbs.

> Over time I imagine it will develop into a beautiful patina. Every CyberTruck will look unique.

This is sarcasm, right?

I think it's only partly sarcasm.

Everyone knows anything made of copper won't stay reddish if left outside for any length of time. It's just expected it will develop a green patina.

Maybe that's the sort of expectation these Tesla truck owners need to embrace - and the sooner the better. Every metal left outside will slowly oxidize.

Stainless steel doesn't oxidise like copper, though. If looked after reasonably carefully, it will probably stay looking nice pretty much indefinitely. Look at Deloreans, for example - some of them are still looking great after all these years.

Deloreans didn't rust though, they were made of an alloy specifically chosen for that. The Cybertruck seems to rust, it's not going to be beautiful, if it was on purpose it'd have been advertised.

Stop drinking the kool-aid.

Just embrace the fact you were sold a lemon and think of how great of a yard ornament it will make! Great line of thinking, very cool

the Cybertrucks near Starbase are gonna look wild after a year or so of the sea-salt air eating away at them

Is that even a thing available?

Yes, but it costs something like $5,000, and you have to think of it in time.

It's the thing they use to completely cover a car in a Red Bull advert or similar.

More common is covering buses and trains. For trains in some countries probably the majority of vehicles are wrapped: https://www.aurabrands.com/what-we-do/on-track/rail-livery-b...

If you see a really expensive vehicle (rare sports cars, etc) I think it's the norm.

Big financial hit if you screw up the paint job on a Ferrari or something like that. Either you're going to pay through the nose for paint repairs or you're going to take a huge hit on the resale value of your $250K vehicle.

So a $5000 (or whatever they cost) clear wrap quickly becomes the smart financial choice on your investment.

lol what. Without a clear coat or some protective coating, all metal will corrode over time and 100x faster near the ocean. Even marine-grade 316 stainless steel. Steel patina is basically just corrosion.

Not that it is the case here (it almost certainly isn't), but not all corrosion is 'bad'. Some steels are designed to form a protective layer of corrosion and then stop corroding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathering_steel

If Tesla really wanted to stick to the cyberpunk theme, they should have chosen COR-TEN :)

Marine stainless generally doesn't corrode if it remains dry. Otherwise boats would be near impossible.

I live a mile from the Pacific Ocean and have a bunch of 10+ year old 316 around the outside. It’s starting to rust.

Ah, yes, they're just driving/washing it wrong

This has been the way I've seen it. It's a true testament to the ruggedness and off-road dedication.

In industry we don't use bare uncoated stainless steel in marine environments at elevated operating temperatures due to chloride stress corrosion cracking risk. I do wonder what metallurgists think of this bare 301 stainless steel from a CSCC point of view.

What on earth is this article

> If things like rain, car washes, bugs, and pine tar need to be cleaned off immediately and regularly, road salt, rocks, and debris from off-roading will surely wreak havoc on the truck’s body.

Clean off car washes?

Has no one driven Cybertruck in salt or off-road yet?

> stainless steel body doesn’t have a clear coat, so there’s nothing to protect the body from dents, dings, scratches,

Clear coat protects from dents and dings?

How is this article written worse than a bot.

I don’t understand why people want their truck to look pristine.

Mine is all of seven years old, and is more dents and scratches than it is intact bodywork - because it’s a truck, and it gets used for truck stuff.

If you don’t use it for truck stuff, and want a shiny object, for god’s sake, don’t buy a truck.

I think there is a very good chance that exactly zero Cybertrucks are used as actual work trucks.

The majority of trucks sold are status symbols. I’ve never seen a muddy Raptor.

I'm not exactly defending it but a lot of people buy trucks because they occasionally "legitimately" need one.

I remember my parents used to buy station wagons. 51 weeks out of the year, we did not need a station wagon. But one week out of the year... we did need it, for family vacations.

Car rust is a little bit more than a cosmetic issue. Eventually it destroys things.

Initially I expected it was about software running on the cybertruck, was disappointed, and amused.

Disrupting the "cars that can stay outside" industry from the ground up.

Meta:

What is it with Tesla that each little thing is being blown epically out of proportion by news outlets, press, TV, etc.?

I mean, i get it - bad news are good news, bring clicks etc.

But with Tesla?

- Cybertruck? Rust, tyre problems - "recalls" which are OTA software updates - waste disposal in CA - ...

Elon is of course no saint, a controversial figure - in fact, i think he's pretty much a clown and at this point in time, he's doing Tesla a disservice by still being "in charge".

But that's not the point with the recent (?) reporting, i feel this seems to be bigger and across much of the media i observe - as if every troll factory in the world has a contract to bash on Tesla...

Recently, it's gotten so bad, i had to use RSS-Bridge with the filter plugin to filter each headline that contains "Tesla" - right now only sparing HN from this treatment - not sure if i'm keeping that up for much longer :(

Seems obvious to me. Tesla has an absurd valuation. Their CEO is the richest person alive (or was at one point) and has a cult-like status amongst many online fans. This person has historically used his loudspeaker to lie, pump, dump, you name it. Finally, Tesla as a company is premised on subverting an existing industry with very established players - it’s entertaining news when that doesn’t go according to plan.

Probably similar reasons why the press jumped all over every Apple mistake when Jobs was around.

All this, but there is also some negative PR getting funded, presumably by the incumbent car manufacturers threatened by Tesla.

Remember that NYT article came out in 2018 that painted such a terrible picture of Elon (1)? A year later it showed up on my Facebook feed as a paid advertisement. Who pays to promote a year-old news article?

I wonder if they actually want Tesla to succeed (or at least partially). Because if its true that an auto manufacturer can achieve those valuations, then they can too.

One of the richest men in the world has a billion dollar short position on Tesla.

A lot of people stand to lose a tremendous amount of money if the stock price doesn’t come way down

Finally, concrete evidence that the rewrite it in Rust fad has gone way too far!

It’s about time we put object oriented oxidation to rest.

Seems like if they went with a different language, the truck would Go better.

Should have gone for good old Steel Bank CL

Tesla ought to have C'en this at the start

Whoa! Steel Bank CL actually is named after the metal (slightly indirectly - it's a reference to the fact that Carnegie Mellon University was founded partly on steel money).

Steel and finance:

Carnegie -> Steel

Mellon -> Bank

I just want a truck that can deliver cargo and packages in crates.

Why capital 'R' in rust here? I thought somehow they were using Rust in their software, and ran into some problems with it.

Exactly right. And Tesla engineers known as May and Havé are believed to be responsible for the bugs.

It's almost as if there's a pattern to which letters in the headline are capitalized...

Title case can be confusing sometimes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case

As seen in one of the answers on "What is the worst gotcha in C# or .NET?" at https://stackoverflow.com/a/2542285 (among many other interesting answers over 3 pages)

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