I wonder how much the demand for this vehicle has changed since it was first announced.
I was definitely on the bandwagon from this thing from the first time I saw it. Four years of Elon's dumb antics and I now absolutely will not spend a dime at any company he's associated with.
> I traded a Toyota full size pickup truck in for my first Tesla, a Model S, because Tesla needed to move units to survive. I'm looking forward to closing the loop, trading that Model S (with almost 110k miles on it after driving cross country in six years) in for my Cybertruck. It's ugly, I love it, I don't care what it costs.
I don't need a fancy EV. I want an EV I can beat the shit out of (steel body, no paint issues to contend with), tow with, and has native access to the Supercharger network (I live out of a duffel bag with a starlink dish and am constantly mobile across the continental US). I also don't want to support legacy auto, who had to be dragged to the EV transition by Tesla. Mission accomplished. That is worthy of my dollars. How others spend theirs is up to them.
> as someone deeply concerned about climate change
> I have one, but am looking for a second
I think you are only superficially concerned about climate change if you are planning to buy not one, but two, fully steel enclosed monster trucks weighing 6.500 pounds each.
I‘ve had a fully electric Ioniq for almost 4 years, the most efficient car at the time. I‘d rather people buy a used compact, efficient diesel than bring such a monster into circulation. The waste of materials and power (40kWh/100km at 120km/h reportedly) is ridiculous.
This is my thinking as well. we are currently patting people on the back for helping with climate change when they buy a new 5000 pound electrical vehicle.
Tesla's ability to spin up utility scale battery manufacturing is what is contributing towards the phaseout of fossil electrical generation. That capability is built off the back of its vertical integration and vehicle manufacturing leading to cell production learning rate. It is incredibly simple for someone to assume that giving up cars solves the problem. 90M light vehicles are sold globally annually. How many have been given up? Without scaling up EVs and battery storage, there is no success by pleading everyone take the bus. Some people might forgo a vehicle, and those are small wins, but you aren't going to move the needle on ~16M/units a year in vehicle sales in the US and the global sales I previously mentioned. If people choose to buy cars, sell them EVs.
TLDR Pats on the back aren't going to drive down petroleum consumption in any material fashion.
It is of course incredibly simple, but it is even more simple to claim that buying "Teslas" helps to fight climate change.
That solution simply doesn't scale and is a convenient "feel good" excuse for Tesla to sell more cars and individual that can splurge in a 5000 pounds vehicle full of toxic particles requiring a ton of grey energy to produce.
Is it marginally better than buying an ICE car? Maybe (Some studies show that keeping your old car a couple more years is actually more efficient).
But the real solution is to start reducing the size of those vehicles to something like a one-person car, not buying a "lifestyle truck"
Edit: I have no issue with people buying what they want. I have an issue with people splurging on superfluous items and ALSO claiming they help fighting climate change.
The problem is Tesla are not really good at battery tech. Their 4680 batteries are not competitive, many of their cars just come with blade batteries from BYD nowadays.
I continue to be puzzled by people's strong opinions on Elon. He's says dumb things on social media but there seem to be unusually strong sacred contagion effects from that.
Buying petrol from Shell or cereal from Nestle? No problem. Buying a Model 3 from Tesla? No way!
Honestly, I'd be surprised if there weren't a ton of people with the same views on immigration or trans issues or covid or whatever, each associated with a company you buy from every year.
Though personally, I always thought Cybertruck looked pretty naff.
If you went out on the street and asked random people to name CEOs of nestle or shell I'd guess you'd have a super majority who don't know.
There's a reason most CEOs stay quiet, when you become the face of a company your actions reflect on the companies you represent, and when you spend billions of dollars to make sure that your antics are broadcast as far and wide as possible it's not surprising that your antics affect your companies.
There's a reason most spokespeople for companies have to sign some level of acceptable public behavior contract.
It's Elon Musk that's lucky to have humanity, not the other way around, given that his primary skillset is in deftly taking credit for the achievements of others.
The separation of art and artist is a complex thing that differs from person to person. I think one universal aspect is that one's willingness to divest from art (or product, in this case) is relative to the ratio of disgust felt for the artist to desire for the product. Elon has reached a point of cultural over-saturation while Tesla's products move in the wrong direction on the ladder of cultural cache, the result of their (Tesla vehicles') own foibles and the industry as a whole just becoming more competitive. While plenty of people won't buy his cars, I'm sure they will or would still use a Tesla Supercharger if they could, because the value there is simply too compelling and the relationship is brief but powerful.
Elon in particular has become a liability thanks to his deliberate efforts to be the face and voice of Tesla. For me and clearly others, it's no longer possible to think of Tesla independently of him. His products need to be that must better to work against it and they're just not making the cut.
Other products -- Shell, Nestle -- are reevaluated for disgust-vs-need each time. Most of us have tiny, brief interactions with these companies. There's no meaningful relationship, so I'd have to be extremely furious with a brand to avoid their product. Right now I'll get gas from Shell but not Lukoil, for instance.
Buying petrol doesn’t apply if someone is already looking for an electric vehicle. There’s plenty of cereal brands to choose from. Same as electric vehicles/trucks. Everyone has opinions to what they choose to spend money on…and people generally do that when given more than one choice.
Elon isn't morally worse than my grandparents. It's currently much easier to rally people around things they hate than things they like or support. It seems like that was always true to a certain extent, but social media in particular has dialed it up to 11. Most of my coworkers and family define themselves by what they hate rather than what they like. I put a lot of effort into not going in that direction.
> Did your grandparents buy a company and fire two-thirds of the empoyees
Of the things he's done that's actually one of the least questionable.
Twitter was going to have to fire those people soon any way due to not making enough money to keep paying them and they've gone on to do better things any way.
He's indicated he thinks that Twitter's liberal censorship was an existential threat to man. I think boosting his own messaging has to have been one of the motivations (though maybe not the most pressing one).
ah yes the "you live in society yet you criticize it" logic, you think i have a choice in the fact that we live in a fossil fuel car dependant society?
what a shallow unnuanced "critique", on brand for this website
It’s hard to divorce the man from his companies. Recent revelations about labor abuse/accidents at his factories. Forcing his companies to respond to media queries with poop emojis. The shitshow that is self-driving (and the marketing thereof). The scammy auto insurance offered by Tesla. The list goes on.
There are definitely times I’ll take on a personal cost because of my principles. But he’s pretty far removed from your actual life and there are other factors. There are good people in the company and it’s the best current shot at competing with eg China. Fair chance almost all electric cars are made by China in 20 years. I’d rather deal with a flaky CEO who also happens to generate massive economic benefits for my country. (But that’s me, obviously everyone has that choice to make. And if Tesla was Russian I’d be right there with you so maybe I’m full of it :)
There's an argument for the CEO's ethics and values to strongly guide the company.
If engineers sharing your views and concerns don't want to work there, how are you expecting those cars to fulfill your expectations and perform on the points you value ?
If this were something like bread or water, then yes. But it's not. A Tesla is a luxury purchase, not an essential purchase. Nobody who chooses not to buy one because of Elon's stupid antics is going to suffer in absolutely any sense.
Sure but there's still plenty of time to see if those histories will be the fawning sycophancy required by the totalitarian regimes he openly advocates for, the story of a brilliant businessman who was batshit insane (a la Ford) or the humorous tale of a fool who lucked into a few $billion and then squandered it all on an empire of trash.
Musk may be an asshole boss and he may post cringy right wing opinions on X, but trying to boycott his businesses based on those actions is quite disproportionate compared to the behaviors whole industries are engaging in regularly. Elon and his companies are in no way worse for the world than the average car manufacturer or businessman.
People factor a lot of things into major purchase decisions, and it's really not a big deal to refuse to purchase a vehicle from one or more car companies. Some people will only buy a Honda, for example.
Personally, I don't want to fund Elon Musk's culture war bullshit. I don't like being lied to (FSD, and vehicle reported range). And I don't like their doing away with all of the instruments in favor of voice control and a single display.
how common do you think this perspective is? outside of places like this one, of course. as far as I can tell, the average person's perspective of the guy likely hasn't changed much in the past few years at all.
At least where I live, a lot of people I know are turned off by him. Including expressing opinions like the OP where they intended on buying a Tesla but now are looking elsewhere. Granted I live in a bubble, and one's friends & acquaintances are another sort of bubble. But it's different than HN.
I'd expect somewhere in between the strong negativity on the Internet and total obliviousness.
Average person probably doesn't consciously register all that is happening and can't tell you about the past weeks' drama, but I think there's a certain point where too much negativity attached to a brand starts to drag it down, and Tesla might have reached that point.
I'm not saying it certainly has, but a few years back the outlook on Tesla was so overwhelmingly positive, you'd have to actively seek out criticism on your own. At least nowadays sentiment on them seem to have returned back to Earth.
I think you're underestimating how much people love drama. Average people don't give a shit about what CEOs do, except when they fire half of a very public company and there's stupid stories to be shared for weeks and weeks.
Same way people still remember Carlos Gohn, when they probably couldn't name WV's CEO.
A decade ago most people I knew thought of Elon neutral or even positively, he was just a figure that was doing good stuff with cars for the environment. At this point everyone I know thinks he's pathetic and a disgusting person.
I don't know when the Cybertruck was announced initially, I believe Elon had already started to enter the public eye a bit more aggressively... but sentiment has definitely changed over the last ~8-9 years.
The risk is that he will go much farther than he already has. If he comes out as a full-fledged neo-Nazi, which I wouldn't bet against given how erratically he has behaved lately, the value of Teslas on the used market will plummet.
If you think Elon is a neo-Nazi, where are you getting your news from? Obviously, not from a primary source or you’d realize what you are saying is ridiculous.
There was no reason to think he would bid $54.20/share for Twitter, either.
There was no reason to think he would call a guy a pedophile for criticizing his submarine idea.
There was no reason to think he would name his kid with nonstandard characters.
There was no reason to think he would offer to trade horses for blowjobs.
There was no reason to think he would _______. I'm not saying he's a Nazi, or that he is especially likely to call himself one. It's impossible to say whether he is more likely to wake up one morning identifying as a Zen Buddhist, or a Laveyan Satanist, or a Nazi, or a Methodist.
You don't know what he'll say or do to hose the value of your car, and neither do I, and neither does he.
have you ever noticed how odd it is that the anti-Musk rhetoric is functionally identical to the anti-Trump rhetoric of 2016–2020, and also how no new Reichs were started 2016–2020, such that one can conclude that perhaps takes like this are possibly a hair hyperbolic in nature, and should maybe be reevaluted a bit before terms such as "neo-Nazi" completely lose any remaining weight they might have?
I don't think anybody missed it, but many people experienced far worse in their own cities during the "Summer of Love" in 2020. Nobody I know cares about J6 except as a political football.
Man, you guys would be so screwed if you didn't have the "Summer of Love" to fall back on when someone criticizes your personality cult.
You should contemplate that sometime, just as an exercise. What would it be like to live in a world where whataboutism doesn't amount to a cheat code to summon the easily-led? One where your beliefs, opinions, arguments, and actions actually have to stand on their own, without reference to unrelated crimes committed by other people in a different time and place.
this has nothing to do with it though. it's not that most normal people like him—it's just, most normal people don't spend any portion of their daily lives ruminating on how much they hate someone they've never met, who is much wealthier and more successful than themselves, to the point of repeatedly expressing said hate on the Internet... well, at least, since about 2020 or so.
Almost everyone I encounter dislikes Elon Musk. I'm not even talking about tech people, although I do live in Silicon Valley and that might bias things. My hair dresser, my wife's make-up artist friend and stay-at-home moms. My kids' teachers.
For better or worse, even random Joe Q. Public knows who the richest man in the world is, and has some opinion on him. Everything he does is scrutinized by the media and put into some political or moral framework. Just like Bill Gates in the '90's, he's inescapable.
But unlike Bill Gates and other prior holders of the richest-man title, Musk eschews any personal PR department and instead broadcasts to the world unfiltered takes. And by and large, people don't like what they see.
I don’t care about Elon one way or the other. But the fact that he’s skewing more right wing in the last couple of years probably makes the truck more acceptable to drive in rural areas. It’s still gonna look weird, but I suspect people will not throw rocks at it the way they might have previously.
I really don’t know how useful a comment structured like this is. Were you trying to be helpful or hurtful? I think it’s better for you rather to +1 GP’s comment by adding your observations instead of only measuring their values against yours. Do better please.
How much to purchase the reservation from you? Early model numbers will go for a premium and I'm going to flip as many as I can. I guarantee no additional money will go to Elon Musk. I'll keep it myself.
Can you name the specifics of Elon's dumb antics? I can think of a couple of dumb Tweets, but on the whole, I think he is more right than wrong on his takes, he just has less of a filter than most people.
Turning his sexual harassment allegations into a cultural red vs blue issue by front-running a story about said sexual harassment allegations
Totally unnecessarily inhumane behavior toward employees during the Twitter acquisition
He just seems increasingly like a truly awful person by almost any definition of “awful person” except the one “has a lot of money.” Character really, really matters, and culturally important people exhibiting horrible character should be aggressively laughed at and disparaged. A less public, equally atrocious, equally wealthy person actually does have less of a negative impact on the rest of us by mere virtue of being less public. Elon could’ve been awful in private and frankly I wouldn’t have cared all that much. But as it is now, generations of people — young leaders — are learning that you can be as awful as you want so long as you’re powerful. What does that foreshadow for our culture, if unchecked?
There's not enough characters in a single HackerNews comment to truly show every fucking insane thing he's done over the last X (ha-ha!) number of years
You seem to be getting downvoted, but I agree with you to a large extent. He does say a ton of stuff I disagree with, sometimes strongly, but I also know if most other CEOs were as public and unfiltered they'd probably fair even worse in aligning with my positions on many issues.
When I'm thinking where to spend my money, I do appreciate that Tesla (and SpaceX) push the boundaries in high-tech industries, and that much of the R&D and manufacturing spend goes to employees in my home country.
He used to be politically neutral but seems to have adopted a right-wing viewpoint that is getting increasingly right-wing over time. Not an extremist by any means but a definite shift. It started around the time he got into a scuffle with the Democratic administration over union issues so maybe it isn't a real shift just being opportunistic. Maybe it is just perception and I'm off-base.
As an investor in Tesla's IPO I find some of his behavior erratic and worrying. I certainly can't diagnose anyone and don't know the man personally. But sometimes he gives the impression he's abusing stimulants to stay awake for 72 hour stints. I worry about his health. I worry about how some of his decisions might negatively affect Tesla or SpaceX.
In the past he was known for appreciating contrary views and opposed yes-men but it seems like he is surrounded more and more by such people who say what he wants to hear in an attempt to leech off him. Again I don't have any personal knowledge but it is another worry that any rich person has to face. I hope I'm wrong about this.
The thing I'm most disappointed about is his moving from CA to TX to avoid income taxes.
The startup ecosystem, local infrastructure, education system, and many other factors that make California the global center of startups and innovation are paid for by those taxes. Or at least the region needs to pay for infrastructure, housing, etc to make it possible for such a system to function. Elon effectively declared "screw you future generations, I got mine".
Did moving to avoid income tax make him immoral? No. Was it illegal? No. But I hate that kind of thinking. You made your bones here in CA, now that you have more money than you can ever spend in a lifetime you want to bail to avoid paying into the system that made it all possible?
I want to be clear here: Elon is within his rights to do that. I'm not calling him a sinner. I just personally find it incredibly disappointing and demonstrative of a lack of appreciation for the factors that made him successful.
edit: I still own a Tesla vehicle. I still own shares. I still support SpaceX's mission. I don't fault anyone for being a fan of his, I'm just not as much anymore and I find that regrettable because he used to be focused on such grand and important things.
edit2: Twitter is also such a massive and pointless distraction born out of being personally offended that they were fact-checking and moderating some of his tweets. The world would be better off if he were focused on Tesla and SpaceX. Instead he's out there swearing at advertisers and doing petty things like removing verified checkmarks or banning prominent people who say bad things about him on Twitter - despite his purported support of "Free Speech". All of this is demonstration of extremely thin skin and lack of perspective.
He recently posted, then deleted a tweet about "Pizzagate." Previously, this hyper-political conspiracy theory got a random pizza place assaulted by a man with a long gun looking for children in their non-existent basement.
He posted another insane conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. [0]
He keeps promoting the concept of "civil war" in the EU, due to immigration. I am in the EU, and this sounds absolutely bonkers to me. Maybe different parties being elected at best/worst, but civil war? That's not a rational take, and seemingly just projection.
> Musk, who has never reserved his social media posts for business matters alone, drew attention to a tweet that said Jewish people “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
> Musk replied to that tweet in emphatic agreement, “You have said the actual truth.” [1]
I greatly respect SpaceX which he actually founded, what he has done with funding and running Tesla, but it appears to me that he has now truly lost his mind. Today he behaves like a politically deluded troll. This saddens me deeply. At one point, he seemed like the best of us, above any of that dangerous silliness.
These guys care about superficial things when likely the current car they brought has a similar “bad guy” that had a hand in making his vehicle. Ignorance at its best
I don't think I disagree with you in principle, but it's interesting to note that Henry Ford published a four volume book "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem". And Volkswagen was founded by the Nazis.
And what does that have to do with the people buying those cars now? It would be one thing if people were buying those cars and that was still going on. That's why this is different.
I was definitely on the bandwagon from this thing from the first time I saw it. Four years of Elon's dumb antics and I now absolutely will not spend a dime at any company he's associated with.