I really can't understand why people pay around 100k for something so ugly. Maybe just to show off that you can have one. But really looks stupid.
But they made a mistake by announcing the design long before they were able to produce it. By the time they had built it, the hype cycle was over, and the design was already old news.
It was also supposed to be bulletproof (presumably looking like a tank), but in reality, it turned out to be a brittle underbody with glued-on panels that were peeling off.
At the $35K starting price that Elon hyped, it could have been excused as a utilitarian design. But Tesla instead released a beta-quality product at a luxury price.
The revolutionary new cheap Tesla batteries that were supposed to make that price point possible turned out to be as real as all the other stuff Elon promised.
That completely novel design would have been neat to see, and perhaps worth the required aesthetic. But that was not to be.
They dropped the origami single steel panel, then they abandoned the whole idea of an exoskeleton design and opted not for a body on frame like all good pickup trucks, but a unibody that puts them in the Ford Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz category, light duty, but at 4 times the price with a pretty awful aesthetic, and from a company whose owner has become a pariah among decent people.
That's the "cherry on top" of this dung-heap.
I predict that in 50 years, the cyber trucks in mint condition will be worth a decent amount of money. It is the first of its kind(electric SUV).
It’s still a crappy car.
The DeLorean was not a particularly good car, but it featured prominently in a movie series that remains a cultural touchstone.
The AMC Gremlin was just endearingly ugly. Today, it has a bit of a cult following, but that has not made it a particularly valuable car.
Nobody would know anything about the Delorean if it weren't for its starring role in one of the most famous movie franchises ever.
Instead, they failed at the exoskeleton design. They failed at the origami several large folded panels structure. And they kept the ugly design that those novel approaches to car building led to, but slapped it on a barely-a-truck unibody that can't compete with any other real trucks in its price range, in any dimension, and then rushed it out with serious quality issues.
A $100K unibody truck with silly aesthetics that don't actually separate it at any fundamental level from actually useful trucks, well, that just doesn't work at any scale that could make Tesla whole on the investment, much less provide them some edge in the market.
So, it's a novelty for people who enjoy getting flipped off a lot. I especially love pulling in front of them on I280 and slowing to a crawl while flipping the bird out my sunroof--and it brings extra joy when those "alpha males" have their families along.
But stainless steel is much milder than normal steel, so you need to use thicker panels. But thicker panels are more difficult to stamp. So why not then double down on thickness, and make the panels structural? It makes them impossible to stamp, so double down on the "flat" design.
Well, it didn't work out as intended. The whole flat panel look ended up being a total gimmick.
Did you actually drove one or seen reviews?
My impression from reviews was screaming "WANT". This is one of the most advanced car, not just truck on the market. There's literally nothing like it out there.
Reality: fewer than 100k actually sold. The truck was everything anyone with half a brain thought it would be.
Showing off has been a well understood reason for buying luxury cars from the very beginning of automobiles (when they were all luxury).
The CT just happens to be on the extremely ugly (or unconventional looking) end of the spectrum.
It's an Edsel.
How many of you all have ever seen or even heard of Edsel? That's CyberTruck in half a century. It's not going to be remembered by most, much less collected. Those who do remember it will scoff like we do Edsels and would have done for that coked out* car maker, John DeLorean's monstrosity, had it not got a starring role in one of the greatest movies of all time and the franchise that followed.
* To be fair, we were nearly all coked out in 1975 :D
Who buys a car for its "novel structural design"?
Most buy a car for some combination of transportation/utility, comfort/performance, and social signaling, in varying proportions depending on their needs/circumstances, desires, and personality.
The CT's appeal seems to lean heavily on the last 2 of those characteristics, since as you point out, a common pickup truck would be more functional and far cheaper.
But $100k for a car like that is a complete insult to good taste. It'd be like selling a luxury 1.5m container home. The low price tag is the entire point of the jank aesthetic. You're supposed to be communicating that you reject the idea of "keeping up with the Joneses" and wear the aesthetic imperfections of the lower economic class as a badge of honor.
Of course, as with every cultural movement of any nuance, real world Dr. Eggman completely missed the point here and shat all over everything with his tone-deaf Rich Frat Boy With Asperger's schtick.
I bought a Toyota Sequoia around the time they first started rolling out, but seriously considered the Cybertruck but it didn’t seem like it’d be able to haul a travel trailer as well as we’d have liked.