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Comment by dmarcos | Hacker News Reader

FWIW it looks there’s now a demand surge with the introduction of the new cheap cybertruck variant. delivery dates pushed out to the fall of 2026.

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That was an artificial boost created by setting a time-limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the price, then they put it back up. [1]

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in...

EDIT: grammar

What's an artificial boost? Sounds like you're describing a sale.

Sales are artificial boosts yes. The difference is in the connotation. A sale is given for something that people generally would buy anyway, but now more people will. An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy.

Or in other words, sales raise $high_number to $higher_number while artificial boosts raise $essentially_zero to $acceptable_number.

Your claim is that people that bought the cybertruck at a lower price don’t actually want it?

I believe the claim is that the demand side did not change, the supply side did, as in sales != demand.

Just quoting the above

“An artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy”

So people spent 60k on a cybertruck that they didn’t want? Is that the claim?

the claim is that it moved sales forward in time, but it'll have a corresponding dip in sales later, whereas a good sales campaign increases total volume (virtually no dip, brings in new customers, etc)

> artificial boost is given to stuff nobody wants, but at a lower price can be convinced to buy.

People do want it, clearly, but it's too expensive for them.

Sales don't make people want things they otherwise don't.

> Sales don't make people want things they otherwise don't.

That is exactly what sales do. most sales are made sellings things to people they don’t want, until sales does what sales does

So people spent 60k on a cybertruck they don’t want? Do you believe that?

look around your house and see how much shit you got that you really want(ed). great salesman (and elon is the best in the history of the civilization) will sell you shit you never thought you wanted :)

The motivation to buy something is always because you want it. That a product doesn’t meet your needs or expectations later is a different story. What’s your evidence to claim that people spending 60k in a cybertruck don’t want it? What’s your evidence to make a similar claim or the opposite for any other purchase? Without evidence it feels you are making baseless claims about peoples motivations.

> The motivation to buy something is always because you want it

salesman make you want stuff you didn’t know you want it but now you do. entire world economy is built on this

Is it still your claim that people spending 60k on Cybertruck don’t want it? How do you know? Given the lack evidence feels like motivated thinking. You don’t like Elon and can’t accept that tons of people actually like him and his products.

literally almost everything I have bought on sale is something I wasn't looking to buy at that moment in time.

How many of those things cost more than 10,000 dollars?

I think you might be slightly misinformed on how many 10,000+ dollar purchases the average person makes in their lifetime to make sweeping statements of that nature. Advertizing sales on medical procedures or daycare could have the opposite effect I would imagine

[X] doubt

Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.

A push on delivery dates is as likely to mean production issues as it is an influx of interest.

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