Tesla Cybertruck sales surge 61% in July, outsells direct rivals
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No, I can’t separate Tesla from its smug, cultish owners. If you buy a Tesla it has a negative social connotation, the same way BMW owners can’t complain when people make turn signal jokes about them.
But also, my feeling is it’s positioned poorly in the market.
The Hummer EV is a better more capable vehicle that “does it all” a lot better. It’s more luxurious and the build quality is better. It’s better in every spec.
The Rivian R1T beats it out in range and capability as well, and some of its trim levels are cheaper than Tesla.
The Ford F-150 Lightning is cheaper and has a ton of design elements that have been proven by people who do real work.
And next we’ll be seeing the Silverado EV and RAM EV.
The CyberTruck comes in one color, has stainless steel panels basically glued on top of the unibody, has a barebones interior lacking a number of luxuries, and the recalled hub caps aren’t even shipping to customers.
It’s also going to be impossible for Tesla to refresh without major tooling changes. It’ll be like the PT Cruiser or New Beetle where it is overdesigned and can’t be easily transitioned to a second generation.
It is about most pedestrian hostile design possible with those sharp corners. How it’s allowed on the roads boggles my mind.
Also it is owner hostile. What other vehicle can you not resell?
Finally, the body panels are all wavy when viewed at a shallow angle. Even the cheapest of cars do not suffer from this.
Rivian is expanding into Europe including its commercial van, which is a product that Tesla should have made given that EVs are perfectly suited to delivery vehicles.
Tesla should be coming out with a three row family vehicle similar to the EV9 or ID Buzz but they wasted resources on a niche $100k truck that will inevitably (in the long term) be snuffed out by Ford, GM, and RAM pushing the kind of volume that they do with trucks.
Its third row is too small. It’s a two row-size SUV where they stuffed in a tiny third row, it isn’t a serious alternative to a car like the Hyundai Palisade.
It seems to be their least popular model.
I drove a Model Y for >2 years, and it was great. The camp-mode alone brought so many opportunities to stay with friends and family more than I otherwise would have. Camping and sleeping in the car was the only time I had to wake up the dog in the morning. Usually she's up before me.
It used to be that Elon's public persona was a geek who wanted solar panels and EVs everywhere. When there were concerns about battery life, he upped the warranty. There were a few more very positive cases like that.
Then those things slowly feel apart.
Later it turns out we were fooled all along, and he's been a lifelong conservative, mistreated his kids and still does, and lately offered financial support to a wanna-be dictator. I can't even remember every horrible thing now.
Getting rid of the Model Y wasn't easy or cheap, but if I can't stand by my principles when it gets hard, what's the point of having principles?
I know some people who just can't afford to get rid of a car like this, but those who deliberately support a person like Musk are just hanging out in a Nazi bar at this point, and my grandparent literally did bad things to Nazis.
If you ever heard people ask "What did normal people do during the Nazi's rise to power?" -- we're all doing it now.
I’m glad the NHTSA is going to start actually testing car safety with pedestrian dummies. That’s a start.
Smaller vehicles would see the child and stop. The cyber truck would not.. (just because other trucks and suvs are big, doesn't make the cyber truck safer)
So you don't think there should be vehicles other than "smaller ones" on the road anymore, or just no cybertrucks?
Btw I disagree, generally in a higher up vehicle you actually have a better view down, and the cybertruck is not as a high up as a truck anyway.
But it's less about overall size and it's more about window size and the front of the car. (that's why you see buses and trucks with the flat fronts)
Also you have a human and a computer looking for objects vs just a human (and there are many humans who I don't trust on the road)
Whenever someone gets killed on the road in my country, it is always someone on a moped getting run over by some truck. And I don't mean a pickup I mean one of those heavy commercial trucks.
I would rather self-driving cars not exist though. Just for the simple reason that it gives the government or corporations a plausibly deniable way to assassinate anyone at the push of a button by hacking their car. And with AI is all sorts of adversarial stuff you can do with image recognition. idk I just dont trust computers in cars
Here is my scientific data:
> Whatever their nose shape, pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile, an IIHS study of nearly 18,000 pedestrian crashes found.
- IIHS [0]
> After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk.
- University of Hawai'i professor [1]
> [A study] found that between 2009 and 2016, pedestrian fatalities increased in nearly every circumstance examined. But among all types of vehicles, SUVs had the biggest spike in single-vehicle fatal pedestrian crashes, and crashes were increasingly likely to involve high-horsepower vehicles.
- NPR [2]
[0] - https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/UHEROwp2... [1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/14/611116451... [2] - https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...
I’m not a fan of the cyber truck, but the reviews I have seen show that vehicle is also loaded with these safety systems.
Paradoxically for a vehicle that's surely received oodles of aerodynamic attention, it at least doesn't seem like a design that might push a pedestrian to the side or lift them up onto a hood, but rather knock them forward (and then under the vehicle).
A Cybertruck crossed in front of me at a traffic light this weekend in my first Cybertruck encounter as a cyclist. I was surprised by my lizard-brain's involuntary concern as the hood's corner passed by.
Edit to add: it seems like a wide vehicle, too, which adds to the effect.
Do you think vehicle safety regulations give pedestrian safety an appropriate amount of consideration, in light of the poor forward visibility of many vehicles that are currently for sale?
Seems to me that if the bulk of the injuries encountered during a vehicle accident occur to passengers by an order of magnitude greater than pedestrians, it would make sense that design elements that protect passengers even at the expense of pedestrian safety would be a positive overall safety impact.
Tesla is selling a very expensive conversation piece out of a sci-fi movie. There's nothing else really like it.
It's got a lot of properties of a "truck", yet it is difficult to imagine utilizing it, especially given the price, in many of the environments for which trucks were originally designed.
That's very surprising. Almost more so than the headline.
GM did it in the early 2000's. It's not generally worth the trade-offs in a pickup truck (cost, durability, maintenance, weight capacity, wheel-well size, etc.).
Haven't seen many in Texas other than liberal areas.
That said, they're actually really nice, will be getting one after another gen or two.
But I don't view it as a truck, more of a modern bullet-proof[1] el camino, still keeping an ICE truck for work/play.
I actually really want one and could afford it, but the combination of abundant apparent QC issues and reports of poor/slow customer service kill the idea for me.
Once they’re out there for another couple of years and there are published statistics - and I’m able to get my hands on some used ones to see how they’ve held up - I’ll reevaluate. Until then, I’ll stick with my 25-year-old Jeep.
I’m saying that it looks like they have sales growth when what is really happening is that they’ve been so constrained on production that they’re only now increasing sales to fulfill back orders.
The problem will arise when the back orders are filled and this too-unique looking truck with only one paint color is everywhere. The novelty wears off and now you’ve got a vehicle similar to the PT Cruiser or VW New Beetle where its unique appearance has worn out its welcome in the market. Five years from now Tesla has no path forward on refreshing the truck. Every single passenger car on the market has a 5 year styling refresh cycle.
Of course car platforms don’t change especially fast. They’re complicated to design and build.
But yes, all car companies tend to have some kind of refreshed exterior styling within a platform generation, and they also update interior amenities, sometimes major and minor ways (new infotainment systems of course are common). Yes, they have customers they love to sell to repeatedly every 3-5 years and it is wasteful. Lessing is the most profitable form of automobile sale.
Just compare the 2025 Kia Carnival to the 2020 model, as an example. Basically the same car but new electronics inside and new exterior styling to match Kia’s latest brand language.
Tesla themselves refreshed the Model 3 just recently after about 5 years of high volume sales.
What I’m saying here is that the Cybertruck will have major difficulty doing a mid-cycle refresh like that. Where do you even start from a styling perspective? Do you just keep it the same forever? What happens when the novelty wears off?
The stainless steel panels are also a huge problem since they can’t be pressed in a mold like normal automotive steel, they have to be bent. You say engineers hold stainless steel with in a special place in their heart, but with that in mind you’ll have to explain why more vehicles don’t use stainless steel if it’s such a great material to build cars with.
The issue with SS is that it required new-to-the-world sized equipment and presses that traditional auto didn’t want to experiment with.
Well, we already know why: difficult machining, can't be made into complex molded shapes, can't be painted, can't be color matched, sucks up fingerprints like no tomorrow, difficult for body shops/repairs, reduced pedestrian safety...
And what are the benefits? What does the customer get out of it?
I don't know any group of automotive engineers who would choose Stainless Steel given an "unlimited budget/creativity" type of project. You don't see it in million dollar exotic cars or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that Elon Musk is stuck in the 1980s and wanted his own DeLorean truck.