this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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This should surprise no one. The reception was poor, delivery was poor. It’s a niche market item in an existing niche market. On top of that, the de facto spokesperson of Tesla isn’t well liked by a lot of potential buyers.
"niche market," is a way of saying they made a bad product few want.
pickup trucks are hardly a niche product especially in the us
I don't think I'd call that thing a pickup. I'm not gonna run to the farm and pick up a 1000lb bale of hay in that thing. A Baja looks like it has more bed space.
A bad pickup truck is still just a pickup truck.
Yep, what else could you call it? It's not a hatchback, a sedan, a convertible, a sports car, etc.
Swasticar
Incel Camino
An enormous mistake?
It's an Ute (as the Australians et al. call it), like the old El Camino etc.
Real pickups have body-on-frame construction with cabs and beds bolted onto the chassis separately, so that the bed can be removed and replaced with a specialized/custom one if necessary.
Calling it a ute implies some degree of utility.
Hatchbacks can fold down the rear seats to extend the cargo area. The Cybertruck fails even at that.
Trash.
Most pickup truck owners don't do that either.
Maybe in the US they don’t…
And more ground clearance
It makes more sense if you start from the other side - EVs are a niche market, and an electric truck is a small subset of that.
The Cybertruck sold 38,965 units last year, vs 33,510 for the Ford F150 Lightning.
One of the things I love about my Lightning is that it doesn’t look like a fucking cybertruck
Other truck makers tend to let their vehicles fully render.
I will hand it to Tesla, iterating on the Cybertruck design must have been really fast.
The Lightning really is a nice looking truck.
The trapezoid Minecraft ~~Cybertruck~~ Deplorian— not so much…
I'll be borrowing that one.
See also:
I'm not a Ford guy, but they do look pretty good.
They shipped 39k cybertrucks for backlogged preorders that were based on a completely different description of what the truck would be.
Well yeah, but to be fair, they were lying.
Which is mind boggling, as the Lightning seems like a good, attractive vehicle, while the cybertruck seems like a pile of shit
And the cybertruck is hardly a pickup truck. What were you saying?
To be fair, it's valid to cater to niche markets.
However, that wasn't what Tesla was aiming to do.
cybertruck is barely even a truck at all. its a truck shaped car for rich assholes to look rugged.
Try and fail to look rugged. They just end up looking like the douche nozzles they are.
They're a comedy show on wheels. They always lighten my mood when I see them. I'm a little smug too, knowing if I had that much money to blow, it wouldn't be on one of those.
Which is a very niche market. I'm not part of that market.
Tanks camouflaged as pickup trucks are.
Just wait till DOGE start requiring it for all government vehicles
"What?! You all wanted electric mail trucks, so here they are!"
(Sadly / Probably)
oh shit...
"Isn't well liked" is quite the understatement. "Despised" is more like it. I actually like the way the cybertruck looks, I think the technology is interesting, and if I really wanted to, I could probably afford one.
I wouldn't drive one if it was given to me for free. I'd rather take a taxi every day than drive a public display of support for the treasonous fascist manchild that owns the company.
Tesla's second biggest problem is their shit standards and quality control. Their first biggest problem is their shit corporate leadership.
I swear that every time I saw one, the people around would point and laugh. 100k+ to drive a car that is always broken and mocked by everyone is quite expensive.
I mean off the bat that's one of the worse combinations of people/product I've ever seen. I mean off the bat electric car's target market is people that want to think they are doing something better for the environment.
So... then the guy making them goes loudly in the "fuck the environment" group.
To top it off though, Cybertruck itself always confuses me. I don't know who the target audience is. The original tesla's I could look at and think, that's a cool car, if they ever came down in price I'd be interested.
Cybertruck you look at and think... What a car would look like if you scaled up games from the 32/64 bit console era and made them HD without increasing the polygon count.
My problem with Tesla is that so many things seem half-unthinking, half-finished or half-assed:
Unthinking: I know! I'll put a ledge in from of the headlights, so snow can pile up while I'm driving!
Unfinished: all the seam mismatches and eternally unfinished-but-really-close! full self-driving (it ain't gonna happen).
Half-assed: that recall they had to do because sometimes the latch doesn't catch properly and the hood flies open when you're driving and blocks your view. Tesla's solution isn't to fix or replace the hood latch so this doesn't happen; they push a software up that monitors the hood latch and pops up a warning, telling you to pull over and check the hood latch. Because apparently fixing the issue that their poor design (see #1) and bad implementation (see #2) doesn't warrant an actual fix, they're just going to fob the risk , the cost and the work off to the customer.
I like the theory that Tesla had a long term roadmap before Elon scooped it up, and that he wasn't able to do too much to disrupt that in the early years because he was focused on LARPing as Tony Stark on the Internet, and the team that developed around him to insulate the company from him were reasonably good at their jobs. But even the best can only hold back so few bad ideas while keeping up the illusion, and the result has been gradually diminishing amount of ass.
Until that roadmap ran out, and/or Elon stopped being distracted, resulting in them designing and building the Elon.
The target audience is monied tech bro millenials who really wanted a warthog out of Halo.
The problem is that the overlap between tech bros and nazi lovers is definitely not 100%, probably not even 10%.
We're not all buying EVs for the environment. I bought an EV because I think the car is cool and it's really enjoyable to drive. It's nice that the "gas" is also significantly cheaper, but that wasn't high on my list of reasons to get the thing, either.
The EV owners I've talked to didn't buy them for the environment, either, but I haven't talked to any Leaf owners or anything. Maybe they're more environmentally conscious. It being better for the environment long term is definitely nice, and I hope progress continues on batteries made with less toxic components.
Thankfully, I did not buy a Tesla and they were never on my list of options because of Elon. So he definitely alienated a customer due to him being an awful human being. I also won't use any of their charging stations, since I don't want them to profit off of me.
Plus the initial sales were to people who had already committed to preorders at a lower price for a truck that was hyped up to be far better than the end result.
Cybertrucks are basically No Man's Sky but without the possibility of being good in a half decade.
It is jaw dropping that only 40,000 of their one million+ reservations actually turned into sales. Thats 4% conversion!
Also, trucks are not a niche market. And there is pretty minimal overlap between the kind of douche who wants one of these and people who object to Musk’s behavior. It’s designed for his cult, especially.
Isn’t well liked…. Is a Nazi.
Let's not forget the quality. Also poor.