I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.
That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
>I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics
That and also it's just a bad product.
>That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it.
A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
edit: agree there's a market for the raptor off-road tremor package thing, but it wasn't ford's first and they've been selling commerical trucks for 75 years. A true tesla f150 competitor would have sold like crazy, I think
> A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
The modern US pickup truck isn't built for utility. It's a $60,000 four-door lifted luxobarge with leather interior and a short bed. It signals (perceived) wealth while preserving working-class alignment. It can also be justified by way of having to pick up used furniture for TikTok refinish and flip projects or bimonthly runs to Home Depot to buy caulk and lightbulbs. Independent tradesman can write them off as work vehicles or, allegedly, use COVID-era PPP loans to buy them.
It's the suburban equivalent of a yuppie's Rolex Submariner. Investment bankers generally don't go scuba diving and if they did a dive computer would be vastly preferable.
I say all of that to say that making a pickup truck for that market segment isn't a bad idea from a numbers perspective. You just can't market it as a luxury vehicle because the whole point is that it is but it isn't.
A working truck should be max utility. Around the core market of "working trucks," there are various wannabe truck products that do not have to be max utility. For example, a Subaru Brat or a Hyundai Santa Fe. Niche products compared to an F-150, but they had/have their fans.
I personally can't stand the design, but the idea of an impractical "halo vehicle" that appeals to a niche audience but burnishes the brand as "forward-looking" is not a bad one. It's just the execution of this particular halo vehicle that I would have a problem with were I in the market for a lifestyle look-at-me vehicle.
The problem is as soon as you go EV, you use a lot of utility from the get go. With a truck specifically, because its a brick aerodynamically. There is no reason to buy a Cybertruck or Lightning when you can get a gas or hybrid F150 (or a Raptor) for a little bit more, and be able to sit at 80 mph on highways without worrying about range.
The biggest suprise about the lightning is that Ford didn't put in a gas engine in it as a range extender. They have 3 cylinder ecoboost engines that would have been perfect for that.
As the owner of a rusty 1985 pickup with manual windows and no radio, I can tell you there is great demand for utility pickup trucks that the manufacturers WILL NOT MAKE.
The first problem is CAFE rules. Congress legislated the light pickup truck out of existence. To get around CAFE rules, manufacturers increased the size of trucks and added a back row so they could be reclassified in a way that skirted CAFE rules.
However, there's a big demand for pickups, so people bought these because they needed trucks, and nothing else was available. Manufacturers took advantage of demand and started adding features normal pickup drivers didn't want or need, to access a high-market class of buyers. "Where else are you gonna go?"
$100k pickups, here we are.
Manufacturers are in no hurry to go back to the low-margin pickup days, even though that is what classic pickup buyers actually want.
> A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
> 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
>A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
How do you even define that? Give it a heavy duty bed and you're wasting weight that could be put toward hauling/towing capacities (and lord knows how people here would feel about ignoring those). A big engine for "reasonable driving" when fully loaded guzzles fuel.
I don't know much about car economics but I'd think Tesla probably should have built a truck to sell as a fleet vehicle first. There are very few car brands that aren't part of a larger entity doing b2b vehicle sales.
I remember the unveiling (loved the "bullet proof" glass demo). That was before I understood who Elon really was and I was pro Tesla. I never would have bought such an ugly vehicle, and I don't normally use looks to evaluate a potential ride.
> it's just a bad product.
So you've never driven one?
> A pickup truck should just be max utility
You don't know much about trucks? What does this even mean, max utility? Trucks are designed for different purposes. Should we eliminate all programming languages besides bash or python?
> especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
Seems like you don't know much about business either. Most new products should NOT try to do everything at once the first time.
BINGO: the folks buying these things are doing so to virtue signal their politics. If you need a truck for work or hunting, you're still buying a truck, not some Silicon Valley concept car like the Cybertruck.
That be easier to believe if there weren't so many Model 3 and Y vehicles that are clearly the new ones (changed headlights/taillights) all around. I'm sure Elon's "political" salutes gave their sales some headwinds, but I'm inclined to think it is more like 15% less sales (Q4 2024 vs Q4 2025). The CyberTruck factory is operating at <20% capacity.
The biggest problems are: it costs ~2x what Elon said it would, it has less than half the range he said it'd have, and it has had 10 recalls in its short life.
The recalls have been for things as basic as: light bar falling off, exterior trim falling off, bed trim falling off, the acceleration pedal falling off, inverter failures. It paints a picture of a low-quality product that has a very premium price.
How do so many people justify buying the new redesign? I mean it came out after the CEO went in front of the world and gave two nazi-like salutes, then did DOGE!
Do they buy his 'autistic' defense? Do they just not care about what the CEO does and support him with their money anyways? Do they actively support his ideology?
I suspect it's likely a mix of these depending on the person, and probably more that I can't think of.
I mean they're good cars, no doubt, and it's a damn shame many decent engineers and workers put in so much effort to have it all tainted by such nasty politics.
But I cannot ignore those salutes, nor the myriad other slights starting with calling those Thai cave-diving heroes pedophiles. Tesla is dead to me, a victim of this insane time and its CEO.
> I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination.
I 1000% agree with this, in fact I love the way it looks, like something out of a SEGA Saturn game. But I would never buy one for the same reasons I would never buy any Tesla, or in fact any EV, or any post-2014 car at all. But the looks of it are not one of those reasons :)
I do have to laugh every time I see a Tesla with one of those “Bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!!” stickers, because to me they just read as “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. It's weird to me to think that other people are thinking that way about their automobiles, because I bought mine (Prius C) based on its features and how they fit into my needs and my life. I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.
> Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. I
I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.
Let me get this straight. You bought a "statement car" but not for its statement, and then you assume that other people driving a different "statement car" bought it because of the statement?
You're right about it looking like something out of a game. I passed one wrapped in fluorescent green at a gas station the other night (owner was checking the tire pressure) and it indeed made think 'low polygon count'. I would not have been entirely surprised if the driver had looked similar.
Thing is, after the initial momentary amusement the novelty quickly evaporates. It doesn't have the compelling presence of, say, a Tumbler. https://brucewaynex.com/pages/tumbler
> “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”
The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."
I understand you don't think it's a good car, which is fine, but most people who bought one did not agree with you.
Your comment is a little confusing because you obviously understand this concept, you bought a Prius because you thought it was a good car, not because of a political statement others may have projected onto your purchase. The same is true of most Tesla owners.
They may not have put it there because they were "self-conscious" about their "statement car." They may have put it there in an honest attempt to avoid having their car vandalized for something they had nothing to do with.
> I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.
... So you admit to falling for Toyota product placement in cartoons.
Politics or no, the price point ultimately dictated its maximum sales. By that measure it's a reasonable success, and if Elon was forecasting that they would sell multiple tens of thousands of vehicles per year at a $80,000 price point he needs to lay off the drugs. Elon sometimes seems like the living embodiment of "How much could a banana cost, Michael, $10?" parody of out of touch rich people.
I think if people who like trucks didn't see videos of things like the bumper ripping off when towing or minor failures leading to whole vehicle shorts it might have done better. The people who want trucks want resilience and ability to self-service more than the average car buyer.
Have we completely forgotten about how Tesla dealerships were shot up, firebombed? Video after video showing cybertrucks vandalized with scratches and spray paint?
It may be a terrible car from a terrible program, but these events at least bear mentioning. If you saw it happening in 2025, would it have a cooling effect on your decision to purchase? Who would want the trouble?
You can attribute the failure of this vehicle to politics if you like, but it's fairly obvious to anyone watching why it failed - it came out at double the proposed priced with half the proposed range. It's not even the hideous design, there were hundreds of thousands of "pre orders" who knew about the horrible design. It's the price and range.
I was already a Tesla owner and I reserved a Cybertruck right after I saw the original Cybertruck Unveil live stream on November 21, 2019. The infamous one where the window glass shattered.
That was when it was supposed to cost around $35,000.
Four years later when my reservation was ready to order, on December 8, 2023, the CyberTruck cost more than $100k.
Because it cost almost 3x more than what was originally advertised, I cancelled the order. I know many other people who canceled for the same reason. Keeping in mind this was after several delays, so I and many others with reservations were already frustrated with the product before it became available to order.
I'll applaud anything that tries to move us away from the current stale design trend where every car looks like the same boring bar of soap and every truck looks like the same aggressive, drivable, mechanized fist.
In my opinion it isn't useful at all because if the only thing you can get into a spot is a vehicle with 4-wheel steering, you have already fucked up your site planning. You aren't going to be delivering materials with that thing, bulk materials are too heavy and light materials are too large. Maybe tools, but it isn't that large to be a tool truck and too expensive for small handyman type work.
I'm one of the few people that love the cybertruck design, but even I can't look at one these days and not think "swasticar". It's terribly disappointing, really. Fully self-inflicted.
That is so right on the money. I attended the LA Auto Show a couple of months back and the takeaway was that every manufacturer pretty much makes the same safe car. There might be a feature here and feature there, but it's the same car.
In the years past they at least had lots of concept cars. This year, I maybe saw two and they weren't all that "concept".
> I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it.
Why? Do you want your other tools to be _different_ for no reason at all? Do you want your drill come with sharp corners you can't touch just because it'll look different?
It's just a darn shame that we're reduced to a simple measure of a single dimension, whether a right or left point on a single axis. You'll find many EV owners are multidimensional, a little bit up and down and all around an x-y plane, or even x-y-z cube. Conservative and liberal progressive alike in Europe are sick of Musk and it shows on the Tesla sales tanking.
> So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination.
Because utilitarian design and purpose of this vehicles has been established long time ago.
Cybetruck "wanted to be different" but it fails in every aspect of its own "innovation". It's ultimately stupid vehicles with so many flaws that arguing it tried something is pointless. Like, having a man walking to North Pole in runners - he's not trying something new, he's straight stupid and should be treated like that
The thing with Cybertrucks losing panels certainly didn't help.
A big part of the Cybertruck marketing was the robustness of its unusual design: exoskeleton! space grade materials! They smashed the door with a hammer and it didn't dent (just avoid pétanque balls...), Elon Musk commented that it would destroy the other vehicle in an accident. Morally dubious arguments sometimes, but it appeals to many potential customers.
And then, the vehicle that is supposed to be a tank falls apart by looking at it funny. And the glued on steel plates, is it that the exoskeleton? Not only the design is controversial, but it failed at what it is supposed to represent.
> So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
You haven't seen enough trucks and pickups then. The Cybertruck serves no utility purpose.
> I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.
IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.
Basically the only thing "left wing" about it is the fact that it's electric.
> Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
The only thing it actually did new was the drive-by-wire steering, which is by all accounts impressive but could have been done on any normal vehicle as well. The "unique" styling is mostly just re-learning lessons that John DeLorean taught the rest of the industry decades ago.
> IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.
Elon is an ass, but this is still the most crudely and childishly stereotyped thing I've read on the internet today. Congrats.
While largely true, that trucks have adorned the comforts of luxury cars, most are running 6' beds. This largely ignores the evolution of the truck and the job site. My family operates contracting and excavating businesses that operating in all manner of weather and terrain, no one is carrying loads in their truck beds anymore... its not even legal most places unless you convert to a dump bed...
Whats in their trucks? Well, a crew cab occasionally is used for car pooling workers, where they all park their vintage beater trucks at the business... Sometimes weather sensitive tools, or job related items, documents, you can just throw these in a glove box... The bed usually has a gas pump for refilling remote equipment. Cones and other safety shit. Sand hoppers for plowing. Yes they also use these "luxury" trucks to plow.
The thing is... These people are making decent salaries... my direct relatives are multi-millionaires who still pick up a welder, a hammer, a shovel.
Im see alot of assumptions about why trucks evolved the way they did, who owns them, and what for... I would argue the "luxury faker" is a very small crowd, one that likely moved to the cybertruck... and despite the trucks looking modernized, are beaten to pulp over long service lives.
Now, go get in a modern tractor, dump truck, or excavator. They are also all AC, Radios, Computers, Leather Seats, etc... People want to be comfortable.
Back in 2020, a friend working at Tesla told me how frustrated the engineers working on the cybertruck were, because they knew its design choices pushed by Musk made no sense, making the cybertruck way too complicated to design and build for no reasons, and everybody already knew the product would be a failure.
As someone who has used both light and heavy pickups for work, recreation, and farm work for decades, the Cybertruck is absolutely terrible at everything you want a truck to do.
It's a brodozer for people that are slightly environmentally conscious or have Elon issues.
And again, I say this as an actual cowboy, in that yes, I own cows. And a lineman who ferries manly men (and a few manly women) to do manly man work on high voltage power lines that will kill you so dead it's a guaranteed closed casket funeral. Trucks aren't just dick compensators, they exist to do work. And the Cybertruck sucks at all of that work. The F-150 lightning was a useful fleet vehicle due to the 120VAC outlets alone, aside from being, you know, a usable truck.
There's a reason most of the offering are very similar. We figured out what work pickup trucks need to do and how they're engineered to do it 50 years ago. The Hilux and friends made it highly economical. So you've got the Hiluxies and the SuperManlyMinivans and those are the two main kind of pickup trucks.
Trucks being dick compensators is also based on their association with the work they do. Easier to pretend to be a salt of the earth tough guy when you both drive the same truck but with a different trim package.
I'll always give Tesla, SpaceX etc props for the work they accomplish, even though Elon is at the helm, he's not a perfect dude but I will give him props when he gets something right too. At the end of the day his employees are doing incredible work and it should not be written off because of Elon. To any Tesla / SpaceX employee whether you agree with Elon or not, thank you for helping to build a more interesting tomorrow.
I mean as with most "product" things related to Musk, it's more about the meme stock than any fundamental coupling to finances in the real world.
Ford is a car company. They sell cars. The Lightning was a poorly selling car, so they stopped selling it. Pretty simple!
Tesla is a lifestyle company. They make line go up by owning the libs, catering to edgelord identity, and triggering speculation. The Cybertruck probably gained the company more memetic shareholder value than it lost as a real product.
Elon going off the deep end is the tail wagging the dog. It's an objectively terrible car.
The collapse of the company overall, particularly the Model Y, which is a great car, is all about Elon. Not only his unveiling as a fascist, but he essentially looted the company.
Honestly, both the Lightning and the Cybertruck are just bad trucks. Some review of the Lightning I read said it has less than a 100 mile range towing a full load.
> Some review of the Lightning I read said it has less than a 100 mile range towing a full load.
Because of course towing long distances is the only reason you'd ever want a truck.
Obviously we can start by acknowledging that the vast majority of F-150s (and other half-ton pickup trucks) sold in the US these days are purchased by people who maybe haul a load of mulch or dirt once a year and otherwise use them as daily commuter vehicles for which no part of their "truckiness" actually matters for any reason other than image. I absolutely agree that these people should drive something that's not a truck, but that's a battle we're not going to win, so I'd rather have them driving an EV truck instead of a gas-guzzling V8. It's an improvement in some ways even if in reality that suburban parent would be best off with a minivan as their daily and renting a pickup from Home Depot for that mulch run.
My one friend who has a Lightning is exactly this. She used to have a gas F-150, replaced it with a RAV4 that she didn't like so she rapidly replaced that with the Lightning and loves it. Lots of power, quiet, smooth, and never needs to go to the gas station. I don't think she's ever fast charged it, just plugs in at home and goes about her life.
Where I live there are a lot of people who actually do need a truck or truck-based SUV for recreational purposes but don't really go long distances, like towing their boat up to the lake for the weekend, towing ATVs to the trail, or towing a RV trailer to a nearby state/national park where they'll then plug in to the nice 50A outlet and charge back up overnight without having to think about it.
There are also an absolute ton of commercial fleets that need pickup trucks for one reason or another but their trucks never leave their metro area and always end up back at the office every night. Lawn care, delivery, etc. where the only downside of the current lineup of electric trucks is that they're all only offered as the ultra short bed crew cab configuration instead of a long-bed standard cab.
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EVs are absolutely the wrong choice for time-constrained long distance travel, like long-haul trucking or the midwestern three-day-weekend road trip, but the Lightning and its GM competition that were actually designed to be good at things instead of a pure image machine are very good at certain roles.
I'm very much on the left, and I honestly like the design of the Cybertruck. (I know this puts me in a minority.) It is disappointing that the original "unibody" design was abandoned. The new design where the body panels just randomly fall off is silly.
If it was made by some other company I would genuinely consider buying one. But I would never buy another Tesla. I owned an older Model X, before Elon went full-fascism. And even ignoring Elon, the car was awful. It was shoddily built, kept breaking down, and the service experience was shockingly bad. Absolutely atrocious.
But after all that, I can't give money to Elon ever again. I can't fund America's descent into fascism. I could not live with myself.
> I'm very much on the left, and I honestly like the design of the Cybertruck. (I know this puts me in a minority.) It is disappointing that the original "unibody" design was abandoned. The new design where the body panels just randomly fall off is silly.
Function should drive form. The design would be cool if it was for a cool function.
Say you have a beautifully-made, expertly-weighted tack hammer. That looks cool on your work bench and works well. If you refashion the hammer into a kitchen spoon, it looks dumb in the kitchen and works poorly for stirring a pot.
It's not just you, it's universally tasteless and that's the point: It is a contrarian vehicle.
In an age where the Internet has flattened subcultures into surface phenomenons, the only remaining way to publicly distance yourself from normality is by making patently, obviously bad decisions and using the backlash to further fuel your ego.
This is true. If I see a Tesla I don’t immediately assume that driver is personally aligned with Elon. It’s a popular and good car.
If I see a Cybertruck I’m extremely confident that driver approves of Elons antics and likely fervently supports them. It’s a physical manifestation of his ego and mostly bought by his legions of fans.
If you’re a Cybertruck driver and you don’t want people to think that, you’re in the wrong car.
There are plenty of reasons I don't want a Cybertruck, but I can assure you that your opinion (or any other Karen's opinion), doesn't even come close to making the list.
I think the dealership monopoly is partly to blame. Dealers get more reoccurring revenue from ICE vehicles, so they are incentivized to not stock EVs and to steer customers away from them. Ford seemed to understand this and attempted a direct sale program for EVs, but they canceled it due to dealer pushback.
Yes I think there's a real innovators' dilemma here for traditional automakers with dealer networks. Dealers make most of their money on servicing vehicles, not selling them. And EVs require almost no servicing.
I bought a used Audi etron a couple months ago. Agent was going to try to sell me a service plan and realized none of them apply to electric :) The downstream fanout of the auto industry is huge…
That looks alien to me. Here, in europe, the usual thing it's go to your car workshop of trust. And they know where and how pick the parts and service your vehicle. Some car workshops could be "oficial" for a car maker, and it's where you should go when your car is new and under warranty period.
Ford did try to make it up to them by offering a bevy of aftermarket add-ons for the Lightning that were sold through the dealerships. As a consumer, I wanted them to keep the EV and ICE versions as similar as possible, with the hope that parts would be cheaper and easier to find.
They seem to be flooded on dealership lots and are not selling whatsoever. OEMs force dealers to take the crap vehicles if they are to get the good ones. You have a vehicle that started off as a hard sell to the crowd that normally buys the vehicle and then you make it so the price is astronomical...forget the dealer reluctance, what did you think was going to happen?
I have a conspiracy theory take on traditional manufacturers being so anti-EV.
Basically the primary differentiator between car companies and the primary barrier to entry in the combustion vehicle business is the engine, especially in the US. Look at the marketing, horsepower and torque are always the topline numbers. Zero to sixty and quarter mile drag races are the favored metrics. Each company spent decades perfecting the engines and the majority of the engineering effort goes into them. Even the transmissions get second fiddle status.
But now EVs come along and the electric motors are commodity parts that are already well optimized. There's little one company can do to make the motor significantly better. Battery tech is cutthroat and also largely outside of the car company's scope, although Tesla does more than other car companies with their megafactories and experiments with oversized cells. If EVs become popular there's little to stop competition from sprouting up everywhere and killing profitability for the legacy auto manufacturers.
That's one way of seeing it, but the fact is that automobile parts are already nearly commodity parts. The wall that stops automaker upstarts in their tracks is the need for safety testing and approval from the US DOT.
Even if you had the chutzpah to get all of the materials together for a fleet of vehicles, you have to spend big cash and grease a lot of palms to get a vehicle you make certified. It takes years and millions of dollars to get to the 1st sellable vehicle.
This is a portion of why BYD, for instance, isn't selling in America.
There are other reasons of course, but one of them is the millions and millions of dollars you're putting at risk just to potentially be told "No" by the government.
> Ford seemed to understand this and attempted a direct sale program for EVs, but they canceled it due to dealer pushback.
Why didn't they just do it anyways? Dealerships seem like a pointless middleman, but I know absolutely nothing about what leverage they have. Self-driving cars can not come fast enough
Because dealerships are the automakers' real customers, at least right now.
You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.
Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.
That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.
That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.
As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
People think EVs are cars with tanks of electrons, and run aground the same way you would if you thought horses were cars full of hay. It's a different transport tool that gives the same results, you just have to know how to use it properly.
> It's a shame the Lightning got discontinued.
> As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
The F150 Lighting (and the Cybertruck) are failing precisely because it was impractical. It was expensive, has limited range when doing actual "pickup truck" work, like hauling tons of construction materials. It was built for the very niche market of buyers at the intersection of luxury pickups and EVs.
People who buy huge luxury pickups tend not to want EVs, and people who buy EVs tend not to want huge luxury pickup trucks.
A practical work truck needs to be smaller, less luxurious, and less expensive, electric or not. If Ford follows through and releases a plugin-hybrid Maverick with 150ish miles of EV range plus the onboard generator, that would be ideal.
A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
The lighting is fine for towing, especially the type that people usually do. You can tow up to 10,000lbs and the truck has ridiculous power to pull it.
What you can't do it tow it long distances (>90mi, worst case) without 40 minute stops every 1.5 hours. That sucks.
But the truth is very few truck owners are towing huge loads long distances.
However, if you are pulling your lawn care trailer around town, you will not have a problem, because every day you start with a full charge.
As an aside, the main killer of range for a trailer is a function of speed and drag. Low drag trailers driven at highway speeds (60-65) have marginal impacts on range, regardless of weight.
Again, the whole thing is ridden with misconceptions and misunderstandings. The majority of people who tow stuff, can still tow stuff while reaping cheaper operating costs.
I don't think that market is a niche at all. From what I can tell, most pickup owners don't use them as a pickup. They use them as a more masculine pavement SUV. So, you'd think, the F150 L and Cyber truck would be perfect.
Lots of people do exactly that. You can load it all the way past GVWR and it has little effect on the range. It's towing that hurts. Many people use these for business with great success.
> A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
You know that electric trains are very practical, not ?
Also, what about these EV trucks and EV vans ?
Yes, I've had conversations with ice owners and the misconceptions are enormous in their minds.
Practically speaking¹, normal people could buy a tesla and drive it like a gas car, except with a full tank of gas every morning. They could still drive across the state once a month to grandma's and they could supercharge if range got low.
This is due to a couple things that were not in place for early EVs.
- teslas have a lot of range/battery compared to early EVs
- superchargers are in many locations, have plentiful charging spots, and are reliable
- teslas have a good UI to navigate and charge
[1] 99% of the time. If you're an apartment dweller in the artic circle with a supercharger 2000 miles away, please scroll onwards.
The main thing holding EV back is the oil industry, not the tech. The US is the only country lagging on EV and its all because the industry puts so much effort in to squashing all progress.
EVs are simpler and cheaper. Look at how fast adoption is growing outside the US. If US citizens could buy a BYD for the same price as in China, the the US auto makers and oil companies would be in trouble.
I drive quite a lot throught southern Europe with my EV, and it's super frustrating that gas stations have the infrastructure on the highway while for my EV I have to go just outside the highway to a fast charger (wasting time), then I need to pay again (and waste a lot of time to go through the gate) to get back on the highway for example in Italy.
Spot on. The misconceptions, even from other EV owners is astounding. People are constantly confused about kWh vs kW, Amps, voltage, temperature, range, mi/kWh, etc. Even PhD Computer Science and other highly educated folks who have owned EVs for a long time can't quite communicate the difference between those units of measurement. So of course when a curious person asks them or others, they only quote the falsehoods that someone told them.
Some examples:
1. I constantly see EV owners install 60A/11kWh service, costing them on average $10k when their driving needs don't require it.
2. People thinking they need more than 300mi of range and think they will run out of batteries like they do on their headphones.
All of this needs an understanding of the aforementioned units and basic physics. But, you're not going to get that by just talking to people. Salespeople are especially not going to do that, they can't even do that for combustion cars.
Most households do not drive more than 100KM per day... yet people are obsessed with range.
My next EV will be a small BYD (dolphin or dolphin surf), these things can get between 200KM and 400KM per FULL charge, depending on your speed and settings. If you use the "slow" wall charger (that doesn't require installation or modifications to home circuits), not only will the batteries last longer, it will easily charge up your 100KM actual drive range in a couple of hours, typically overnight.
If you empty the battery each day and recharge it each night, that nets you 300KM per charge, or 2100KM per week. I don't know a single person or family that does 2100KM a week with their cars. So the whole range anxiety is rubbish. Just plug in every night and go to bed and tomorrow you have another 300km available.
Oh and then there are public fast chargers if you do get stuck. I live in Africa and this is solved problem.
Sorry for the rant..your comment about the expensive charger installations makes my blood boil as most people can just use the normal wall charger and charge overnight.
An F-150 Lightning and Cybertruck weigh somewhere between 6000 and 7000 pounds, so I personally think of them the same way as if you replaced your horse with a hippo.
It's not hard to convince people to move to electric, just make it such a better economic proposition that it would be silly not to.
I don't need a pickup truck, but if I ever did, I'd get whatever my landscaper has. Unlike most people with Rivians, Lightnings, Cybertrucks, Ridgelines, and Raptors, he totally relies on that truck for work.
So far it's Tacoma. Maybe some day he'll have an EV instead.
I disagree. I really want a Lightning but live in a very rural place, weekend in an even more rural place, and need to pull a trailer pretty often.
I already have a plug-in hybrid that gets 40+ miles/charge and have opined all over the internet that the perfect car is one that gets 100+ miles/charge before firing any gas engine.
It sounds like the next Lightning will give me that though I don’t put much stock in their promises. Personally the Scout is too bougie but it does similarly.
I don’t get plug in hybrids. All other engine types save you more money compared to the next less efficient alternative the more you use them, but plugins get closer to the less efficient alternative (regular hybrid) the more you use them. Add in the approximately 25% price hike over the hybrid version when there is one and it makes no sense to me.
I disagree along with you. EVs would work for 80% of the population, there is a long tail of people who an EV will never (well foreseeable future) work for.
Thankfully, the mass of humanity that should be transitioning lives in populated areas and never tows anything for more than 75 miles. There is no need to get bogged down in back and forths with the small subset of people who an EV will not work for.
Surprisingly to many, rural and very rural places are actually a great location for EVs - if they have enough range.
Because even very rural places have electricity - almost always. I can find quite nice homes that are 20 miles from a gas station, but have power and could easily charge a vehicle. If I lived there, a vehicle I could use without a gas station would be quite desirable.
Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm.
That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge", and extremely common to do the "Put car on charger for 13 minutes while going into [insert any of the gazillion places with chargers in the parking lot] to use the bathroom, stretch legs, and get a snack, or see a landmark"
Also you usually structure it so you arrive at your destination with very low charge, because you fill up while there. I've yet to be at a hotel with a gas pump in the lot.
Again, EVs function differently than gas, and that change of paradigm really gets people ruffled up and confused.
I can do a ten hour road trip with a family of four plus a dog in a used (2022) EV that I got for ~30k last year. I think the idea that price and range are problems is exactly the misconception that op was taking about. They are somewhat more expensive, although when I originally did the calculus, fuel savings made up the difference in monthly payments for a new vehicle, but that's going to vary a lot. The is a very small proportion of people for whom range is a legitimate concern.
You can buy 1-2 year old used Teslas and BYD's in Australia for ~30% below retail.
Meanwhile Toyota hybrids not just retain their value but there have been moments where used RAV4's are listed above retail because the waitlist for new was so long.
Depends a lot on the particular example. My Lightning was less expensive than the Powerboost I had been shopping for originally. And 250-300 miles is well beyond my typical daily driving range requirement (and Superchargers are pretty plentiful in most of the areas I ever find myself).
A 600 mile trip can (theoretically) be done with 1 charge, because you leave home with full range, and arrive with 0 charge (and fill up overnight). That one charge is done while eating dinner, or spaced out in increments over the course of the trip, stops which you would take anyway. I know few people who want to bang out 10 hours without stopping for at least 1-2 hours over the course of the trip. And those who do, can be the edge case with gas cars.
So you need to go 600 miles, and you need 1 full charge worth of energy during that.
If that one charge takes 1 hour, you can also break it up into four 15 minute sessions at any time of your chosing.
I'm sorry, but almost no regular person does 10 hours without at least four 15 minute stops.
Range is not at all the problem people make it out to be.
The main thing holding them back for me is the range.
A few times a year I do quite long drives, sometimes you get the odd road closure and you've added a day to your trip at best, could be stranded at worst.
There will be a phase shift where there are lots of fast chargers but in Australia we aren't quite there yet. Lots of my friends have EVs. The busiest routes are pretty good.
On the one hand I will be a late adopter of the tech but on the other at least I know it will be a significant upgrade when I get there.
...misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
What's the range of an F-150 Lightning when towing a small travel trailer? The Rivian R1T is ~150 miles give or take. I assume the F-150 is similar.
At least for towing, the math isn't great. Especially when you add in the cost - my Honda Ridgeline was $42k in 2021. EV trucks are roughly double that amount.
Judging from how many people seem surprised by my open frunk at the grocery store, saying things like "I had no idea Ford made an electric truck!" I think they could have done more to market it. I sometimes wonder if they really wanted to sell a lot of them.
I remember when tesla was young and elon talked about selling electric cars through dealers. He said it would not work, they would not be advocates, they would prevent sales.
And I think that is spot on.
I also suspect internally the thinking is that the f150 lightning costs more to make than sell, which means it won't get strong advocacy.
Thing is, I'm 100% certain years of tesla vehicles cost more to make than they sold for, just in the nature of developing new things.
I wonder who makes their decision by going to the dealer, though? Ford didn't even regularly stock Lightnings at the dealer, in fact, they basically sold them online and kept inventory at regional fulfillment centers. As soon as someone pulled the trigger, they'd ship the truck the last mile to the dealer of their choice.
Maybe the dealers could have done better. In fact, they definitely could have. Most did have a demo Lightning, in my experience, but that doesn't mean salespeople were pushing customers towards them.
I guess that’s kind of the defense of Musk on the cyber truck. If Ford can’t sell hem off their F150 platform, it means you need to make more of a splash. He just went too far…
At the size of Ford, sales numbers can be at a different mark for what is considered successful than others. Not to mention dealer gamesmanship fudges real sales numbers.
As to the Cybertruck it's both interesting and kind of ugly... repairability is another concern/issue as is pure cost...
I'm far more interested in the Slate[1] myself. It's probably closer to what a lot of consumers would want in an electric truck. It really feels like a spiritual successor to the OG Jeep (GP).
> At the size of Ford, sales numbers can be at a different mark for what is considered successful than others.
Does this really hold when Tesla has a considerably higher valuation?
Tesla is sitting at an egregious 30x market cap of Ford. If anything... I'd expect them to have sales targets that are ~30x the size of Ford.
When you consider that Ford also makes many more models than Tesla (Tesla has like 8 core models incl the cybertruck [and the not-yet-for-sale semi...] , Ford has like 20+)
By all measures - Tesla should be considerably more aggressive with sales targets for a core model, and it seems pretty clear the cybertruck is just a slow rolling market failure.
> Does this really hold when Tesla has a considerably higher valuation?
> Tesla is sitting at an egregious 30x market cap of Ford. If anything... I'd expect them to have sales targets that are ~30x the size of Ford.
It almost holds BECAUSE of that. Tesla's valuation has been wildly detached from its sales numbers for years, so having a poorly-selling Cybertruck doesn't really matter.
But admitting that a high-end high-profile product was a big failure, on the other hand, might be much more undesirable for the company whose valuation depends on vibes vs sales.
("Should" that be true, though? Well, that's a different question. ;) )
For 2025, Ford sold about 2.2 million vehicles, Tesla was like 1.6m. Given, more variety for Ford... But there's also margins and supply chains to consider.
The Cybertruck is kind of ugly and very expensive... not to mention that no EV truck really does towing well. The fact that the Lightning sold more than the Cybertruck doesn't make it a success.
The Cybertruck, imo, is not too different than a limited run sports car from a major car company... it's just a step above a concept car. The Lightning from Ford was an attempt to see if a market was really ready to shift to EV, it largely isn't. Even though I think it's probably a great option for a lot of work truck use, that doesn't include long distances or heavy towing, but then it likely prices itself out of that market segment too.
I'll be interested in the Slate when I can actually buy one. I've seen far too many startup car companies fail to launch to ever get my hopes up. Also, the hopes that the very first vehicle from a brand new company will be affordable are not realistic. Making affordable vehicles requires production at large scale, and that requires enormous capital investment, which generally means your company needs to already have income. Even if it just to prove to potential investors that you have basic competence.
Don't think that just because a billionaire is interested in the project that the funding will be easy. Billionaires don't like to spend their own money and can be easily distracted by newer and shinier projects.
When the cyber truck was announced we decided to buy a Super Duty instead. That was 5 years ago. It's now paid off and driven us and our RV all over the country, and still worth more than half it's purchase price with many more miles to go, and no issues at all (knock on wood).
A lightning, cyber truck, or even rivian can't do those things.
Instead of waiting for a slate just buy a little gas pickup and GO USE IT, live you life!!!
I see the slate as the successor of the now extinct (in Can + US) mini-truck. 90s trucks like the small Toyota Truck, old Ford Ranger, Nissan hardbody, etc.
The kind of trucks that landscapers are still using, that are beat to shit, and have three features, cheap, load carrying, reliable by way of simplicity.
I can see that, but I mean in terms of body specs and room to reshape/cover/modify the vehicle to different needs beyond pickup truck. Including a second row of seats.
It’s also the fact that Ford investors care about profits and its stock is not just a meme stock with no relationship to current or future profits like Tesla.
Same. The Slate is so close to what I actually want out of an EV: basic, utilitarian, cheap, not made out of 5 iPads. It's not perfect, but neither is any of its competition.
It says a lot that spacex had to buy so many trucks just to help the sales numbers. I always thought the ford lightning was a better option for most people anyway. It is too bad they are stopping production when it seems to be the winner.
5,600 units of Cybertrunk and Semi combined is basically 5,600 units of Cybertruck. The Semi is still a boondoggle. I can believe that number. Your maximum sales figures are capped by your price point, and the Cybertruck, as well as the S and X, are in that "Fully successful this vehicle will have sales in the mid-thousands" price bracket.
I sometimes wonder about a world where those trucks managed to hit their $40,000 price points. For the Cybertruck it was clear that Elon demanded way too much (four wheel seering? Come on) to ever get close to it, but for the F150 it seems more like the price was due to Ford halfassing the production.
There is also the optic that the premiere US EV company failed to deliver an EV pickup truck behind Rivian, Ford, Stellantis, and arguably did a far worse job at it.
The F150 lightning was always going to be a tough sell for die hard truck customers but it at least has all the fit and finish that those customers expect, with access to the F-series aftermarket.
I suspect the reasoning was similar to the reason Tesla bought Solar City or X.ai acquired the site previously known as twitter. Pure unvarnished investor value.
Armchair internet analysts think they know better than the biggest car producer in the world that reinvented the modern supply chain.
"But look at Tesla market cap!!!"
Toyota had the right intuition: focus on EVs when the global sales will make sense for it, meanwhile avoid throwing good money after bad like most legacy automakers did with EVs.
Toyota is not immune to throwing good money after bad. They have dumped billions into hydrogen fuel cell research and production over three decades. Last year they sold more Venzas than hydrogen cars.
Notably, the Venza was discontinued after the 2024 model year and those sales figures represent inventory leftover from prior years.
It wasn't canceled for poor sales. It was canceled because it was too expensive to produce, and would not fund all their other EV/battery projects. They found a better road to profitability in that front.
Exactly. Their truck was apparently quite nice but expensive. And then dealers made it worse by adding a hefty markup to that. It would have done fine at a much lower price point. But that would have required a manufacturing cost level that Ford could not deliver:
There are a few reasons for that:
- Ford designed this as a one off vehicle, not as a platform to build multiple vehicles on. So, a lot of the manufacturing process is making components in low volume just for this truck that they are selling in small numbers. It never hit the economies of scale where they could optimize and lower cost.
- It's a big heavy vehicle that needs lots of battery. Batteries are expensive.
- The tariff situation made importing components from Mexico, China, and elsewhere prohibitively expensive. Ford can't source everything they need locally just yet.
All this drives the production cost up. When they launched the vehicle a few years ago, they were still able to import components. They had a shot at sourcing much cheaper batteries from China down the line. All that went away and locally produced batteries aren't as cheap.
Another factor is that it's a product that was designed to be premium and more expensive than the ICE F150 in order to protect sales of that. It was forever going to be compared to that in terms of performance and towing capacity. And the combination of being more expensive than that while having less range and even less while towing is not a great selling point.
Companies like Rivian or BYD that have no ICE truck sales to protect can operate differently. They simply make the best and most affordable vehicle they can without artificially making it needlessly expensive. Rivian isn't cheap of course but they sell well because it's a desirable product. And Rivian has done a lot of work to lower cost and is now introducing cheaper models on the back of that. BYD is cutting well below F150 ICE prices with their Shark truck. Because they can. Not for sale in the US of course but it makes F150 Lightning international sales a bit unviable. As a US only niche vehicle selling in the low thousands per year the Lightning had no future.
And because they have problems as it is sourcing aluminum for more profitable F150 variants. Ford lives or dies based on the F150, they needed to focus on higher profit margins on the trucks they could actually build.
This is the answer, CyberTruck achieved positive gross margins in Q3 2024. The F-150 never did. So the Lightning is canceled and the CyberTruck lives on.
It seems China has won the race for EV dominance in battery technology and manufacturing. Probably not much the U.S. can do to catch up. From the insane oil needs of the U.S. Military to the gasoline needed for a functioning economy and transportation, China will be light years ahead in every category which will have huge implications for U.S. National Security.
EV dominance is not only defined by battery technology but also by ADAS functions, driving dynamics and many other considerations also common to ICE cars.
In Europe, Chinese vehicles are only selling in any meaningful quantities in the low and very low price segments. And that is mainly due to cheaper labor costs in China and very thin margins (something European OEMs are not interested anymore).
When it comes to higher price segments, European OEMs and Tesla dominate clearly due to superior technology offerings. As an example, the BMW iX3 is completely sold out for months even before market release, as it’s the first car so far that has reached 1000km without charging (Debrecen - Munich). That’s not only a battery technology achievement but also aerodynamics and drivetrain efficiency, where BMW leads together with Tesla.
The Chinese market is very competitive itself as well, and is clearly dominated by Chinese OEMs. Classic European OEMs are seen as vehicles for old people, and newer generations are opting for local manufacturers. Infotainment and ADAS are also driving customers towards Chinese OEMS, mainly because of looser regulation which allows Chinese offerings to edge what Europeans and Americans are offering at the moment. To the point that the big three, Mercedes, BMW and Audi had to switch their ADAS stack to a Chinese made one (Momenta) in order to not lose more customers.
Battery technology is quickly becoming commodity and margins are thinning. Same as it happened in other industries: no one knows who is manufacturing their Samsung or iPhone battery. They might know about the CPU but they clearly care about the brand and the software experience. Cars are becoming not different.
In Europe that software experience (including driving dynamics) is and will be dominated by European OEMs, while leaving the cheap offerings for Chinese brands. They might even recover long term in China if they can quickly adapt their software to Chinese needs.
American OEMs will do fine, they either have high quality software offerings like Tesla or Rivian, or they can easily partner with American software companies to provide Americans with their desired experience.
After 10 years batteries tend to have about 80% charge retention and a usable life of 20+ years and have basically no maintenance for the life of the vehicle. So, economics work out well for EVs.
Unless they come right back with a comparable implementation with a maverick/ranger type form factor, Ford is absolutely shot itself in the foot canceling the lightning. I’ve been Evie only for five years and have driven both the electric Silverado and the lightning. I bought the lightning. It’s fantastic. They are absolute idiots for discontinuing it.
Also bought a Lightning. I use it for plenty of truck related things that don't involve towing and it's great. I like to target shoot on family farm land, and it's awesome to toss my steel targets and equipment in the bed and offroad to the area I shoot on (there's an area pretty far in with a sharp elevation change that's created a large berm). Or going to lowes to get a ton of fertilizer/plants/gardening equipment for my spouse.
I also use it to commute, and it's even better at that (part of that is mine being the Platinum trim). Quiet, smooth, powerful, has Android Auto/CarPlay (unlike GM's products), etc.
They really are a fantastic vehicle for those who don't need to quickly tow heavy trailers 400 miles. Especially on the used market.
I think the issue was that Ford wasn't making much margin on them and they weren't moving sufficient volume to make up for that. (around 20K/yr avg)
I wanted an F-150 Lightning when it launched. Demand was high enough that I was told I'd have to pay over retail. I did not buy an F-150 Lightning and bought an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle. The depreciation of electric vehicles has made me appreciate those circumstances more and more.
> The depreciation of electric vehicles has made me appreciate those circumstances more and more.
The depreciation for most EVs isn't all that different from that of new ICE vehicles. For a while, MSRPs were artificially inflated by the EV tax credit, which could give artificially worse depreciation appearance.
> Demand was high enough that I was told I'd have to pay over retail
Meanwhile the article says "the Ford F-150 Lightning delivered approximately 27,300 units in the US."
I wonder how much dealers lie about these things. They tell you that there's not enough of them to go around, then Ford cancels them, because of what exactly?
There were not enough to go around when it first came out. A couple years latter and everyone who wants one has one and there are plenty. This is normal for new cars - people who want the latest model line up to buy them as they come off the assembly line, then they all have one and sales drop.
The depreciation though has meant that used EVs are a bargain now.
But yes, as usual, dealers killed an EV. Same story for so many EVs. They don't want to sell them. They saw their opportunity to milk and screw up a product they didn't want, because of scarcity, and effectively poisoned it.
Same here. I was told it would take a at least year on the waitlist. A month later I had 2 friends offer me their spot. They weren't impressed with the truck after a few reviews came out showing bad towing performance. I opted to buy a used ICE truck instead and have zero regrets.
imho, CT is horribly looking car with absolute disregard to any aesthetics. everything else is secondary. it has vibes of Aztec. one of the worst selling car ever.
I’m still shocked that the CT went into production.
I’m convinced that the CT could’ve become a legend if they had just done a limited run of like 500-1,000. At that level, nobody would care if it was poorly built or worked well as a truck. It’d just be a crazy collector item that would go to car shows.
The Cybertruck failed to sell because it is stupendously ugly. All other (technical) reasons are and were manufactured for political purposes. We're too itchy to stop picking at it, so we blame everything else we see and hear as an add-on reason, but really it was how it looked. Ford didn't cancel the electric pickup, they did even more research and decided the upcoming EREV F150 will eventually eat it's mother, so it is better to stop now.
This is a case study in the failure of product market fit.
There is tons of room for a low cost, high quality small electric or hybrid pickup in today’s market.
Ford Maverick sales have been exceptionally strong, setting records in 2025 with 155,051 units sold in the US of A, up almost a fifth from last year.
Tesla needs to make a product that people want, and continuing to try to sell one they don’t want just won’t work. Why not pivot and build the truck people are asking for? Otherwise, this program will fail.
They should’ve released the electric tuck for the segment that wanted the maverick. Even better would e been an electric lei truck, but I don’t know if you’d be able to stack enough batteries on one of their tiny li’l frames
I find it funny that car discussions here are so much busier than computer discussions. I wonder if over there at the mechanics forum they spend as much time discussing their laptops and ignoring the drills and screwdrivers
I see many many F-150 lightnings in Canada (Quebec at least) used by construction people. Are there any country or more detailed stats on where F-150s were sold?
Looks are subjective, but what I don't understand is why they put an enormous vision obscuring frunk on it. The vehicle could have been considerably easier to maneuver in tight spots and safer to pedestrians at the loss of just some dubious storage space with no loss in bed capacity. Or it could have been the same length or even a little shorter and have a full 4x8 bed in the back.
If anything the vehicle was designed more for aesthetics than for practicality. There is no engine up front. There's no need for all of that space in front of the driver. It's entirely possible to engineer crash resistance without needing 4 goddamn feet of crumple zone. They could have had both a crew cab and a full size bed. Or the short bed but a more practical size.
Be it as it may, its aesthetics are so distinct it isn't for everybody. Also a big part of the target audience expecting to buy an utility vehicle have cheaper, proven and more practical alternatives. I guess the fact its not road legal in the EU doesn't help either whilst other Tesla models are quite popular there.
Just before its release there was some press about a few high ups at Tesla who urged Elon to make a “traditional” looking pickup alongside the cyber truck in case it was a flip, but Elon shut them down hard.
I’d be really interested to know if they’re going to do that.
The tech is incredible and will filter into all vehicles in a decade or so (48v, Ethernet instead of CAN, etc)
They’re both things the legacy automakers have been trying to do for 10 or 15 years, but they just couldn’t pull it off without getting all the suppliers on board.
Both result in much lighter wiring, saving money.
The steer by wire is also very cool, but I don’t know enough to say if it’s justified on regular cars or a cost saving.
I love my EV, but for anything that needs the range they should have a super-efficient gas or diesel engine that can charge the batteries? It could be a much less complex engine.
That said, they big car makers only chased the government incentives, which was a great reason to have them.
Electric everything is the future. It is obvious (e.g. heat pumps, EVs).
I've owned a few F-150s over the last 20is years. It has the best fold up seats of any truck - entire back cabin floor is flat which is great for my dogs.
I rented a lightning on Turo and it was amazing - planned on getting one as my next truck. I would drive a CT depending on price but they just draw too much attention.
For people discussing about truck sizes, here is a good web sites that highlight the history of trucks and how they the cab size and bed size did a 180 [0].
And they announced the next version of the Lightning last month. People don't like that it isn't purely BEV, but I don't see the big deal.
Unlike a traditional hybrid, the F-150 Lightning EREV is propelled 100
percent by electric motors. This ensures owners get the pure EV driving
experience they love — including rapid acceleration and quiet operation —
while eliminating the need to stop and charge during long-distance towing.
Ford swapping pure EV for generator backed EV seems quite sensible. There's some youtube saying such vehicles have been a hit in China https://youtu.be/rTT5Wq49Ss4?t=286
Absolute sales numbers are not the determinant of whether or not a product is sustainable. It's unit profitability. Ford was spending 17k per pickup on the battery alone. Larger sales flow can improve efficiency and unit economics but so can savvy engineering
F-150 Lightning is better vehicle than Cybertruck - however Ford is a political company (not like Musk) as in the fortunes of Ford lie to an extent with politicians, unions etc
so hopefully ford can turn the F-150 into an Extended Range Electrical Vehicle
I'm as much of a Tesla Fan Boy that you can be but I have to say, the F-150 seems like a darn good vehicle and it's sad they're killing it. I especially like the V2X features.
I have one and it is an amazing vehicle. However, what they are planning with their new EREV system coming out in 2027 seems pretty interesting too. You get your usual battery only mileage and then a generator kicks in to recharge the battery for longer trips. I would imagine it wouldn’t be required in 95% of most people’s trips but it gives folks the option n long road trips or heavy tows.
I like it because it skips the usual hybrid approach of switching over to an ICE engine that drives your wheels in a different way and simplifies things immensely.
I remember when Elon promised that they would have an extended range battery option for the Cybertruck, but then realized the logistics of such a thing are extremely challenging and quietly dropped it.
I like the idea of easy additional range, but I use my frunk all the time and I don't think I'd give it up for additional range that would only benefit me two or three times a year. Along with additional things to maintain.
I don't think they're really killing it. The Lightning EREV is next, and my bet is it's almost identical to the BEV version but with an engine where the big beautiful frunk is now. Gives them something to sell the people who think they need big range numbers, but also gives them an easy path back to a full BEV. I kind of expect them to backpedal on the full cancelation and make both vehicles.
> my bet is it's almost identical to the BEV version but with an engine where the big beautiful frunk is now
Would be interesting how small and how cheap you can design a ~50kW genset to be (any smaller and you don't gain that highly coveted towing range). I don't think it's an easy task, you still need to integrate the crash compliant fuel tank, the emissions compliant exhaust system, water cooling for the engine, ect.
It's a pretty long BOM you're adding to an already expensive BEV, so you don't really have thousands of dollars of budget to add to the production cost.
Cars are almost a niche form factor at this point (sadly). The Mercedes-Benz GLS vastly outsells the S-class, and the same holds true for the BMW X7 vs. 7-series.
What evidence do you have of Tesla performing poorly as a whole compared to others in the space, and/or Elon not successfully growing the company at reasonable rates?
They are the worst of both worlds: not enough battery range to satisfy on long trips plus the weight and maintenance headaches of a gas tank and engine, especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range.
As a 2012 Volt owner I think EREV was a great idea in the 2010s given battery tech and networks at the time. In the 2020s, they seem a weak compromise that I wouldn't recommend to people.
> especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range
The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.
If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.
The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.
& battery tech continues to evolve at high speed. China is already selling 1000v 5min charging evs. Semi solid state are shipping. 500+ mile range cars exist. EREV is going to be obsolete in a few short years, if it isnt already.
No shit. The CT is ugly to most consumers' sensibilities, and not a "real" truck to most consumers in the truck segment. It only survives as long as it serves Musk's ego. But that's ok -- Tesla is Musk's company and shareholders are happy with that status quo. Who else cares?
The Cybertruck isn't a "real" truck, but the vast majority of trucks never do real truck stuff anyway so that's not as big of a gotcha as people think. Hell, even F-150s and Dodge Rams and GMCs have stunted vestigial cargo beds now, they're more like minivan utes. How many trucks can you buy today that can fit a standard everyday 4x8 sheet and a load of 8' studs in the back and close the tailgate?
> but the vast majority of trucks never do real truck stuff anyway so that's not as big of a gotcha as people think.
The whole point for those non-utilty buyers is the badass, tough-guy branding. Would a whiskey-drinking, steer-wranglin', meat-smokin', spur-boot-wearin', woodshop-havin', permanent-5-oclock-shadow BAMF drive a electric CT? No. Therefore the CT fails at the one thing they expect of trucks due to its lack truck aura.
The GOP cancelled he Lightning - it's not irony that Trump is touring their plants a week or two after them cancelling the Lightning, while going all in on oil.
What sickened me is our quarry wanted to buy 5 Lightning F150s a few months after they came out and no dealer near me in DFW would even take an order because “the wait list is too long”.
Ford sold more than 100K Lightnings. By many metrics that don't involve "compared to the best selling truck in America" that would be considered a successful run for a model.
Do you know how pickups became the most popular vehicle in America? By not being appealing to just one type of guy. There is no "truck guy", there is "everyone." (well, yes, there are some anti-truck people, but they're niche and mostly online).
SUVs are the most popular body type in America, not pickups.
Pickups always top the "best selling model" list, but there are only a couple models of pickup and dozens of models of SUV. If you total up all the SUVs, they sell much better than pickups.
It's sad to see how much of an echo chamber hackernews has become, used to see a a decent number of users engage in critical discussion and exchange perspective, now threads like this are just a gong show of self-reinforcement.
To give some weight to the above, this thread leans way too heavy into EVs being awesome and the main issue is "the people or industry" (misconceptions, misunderstanding, oil industry bad, etc) while backing that with "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO).
Here's some counter points to a bunch of claims made in this thread:
1) EVs are not as practical as this thread proposes:
- Battery degradation is still mostly an unsolved issue. 10% within 3 years is common on the latest models as reported by drivers, 15% within 5-7 years is also quite common. LFPs do better but provide considerably less ideal range. 20% degradation is the cliff, where degradation accelerates and lithium ion batteries are considered EOL. For cars that under ideal conditions do 500km - 550km that's not okay over the lifespan of the car where you want good performance in the 8 to 16 year range. In addition, average car on the road in the USA / Europe is at 12 years (many cars far above 12 years old). These batteries will be lucky to make it to 12 years so the average age of EV fleet will end up much lower than ICE (not great)(more disposable) unless you replace the battery. Battery replacements are $10k-$20k and poor warranties (4 years or less). Costs are not coming down for various reasons.
- Actual cold performance (under -10C) is not good, there's no way to resolve this without increasing ideal range
- Range is considerably lower at highway speeds than city driving due to energy dynamics, exactly the opposite of what users need. ICE cars have an advantage here because their power curve is non-linear and power output improves with RPM, RPM goes up with higher speeds in the final gear so efficiency improves for a portion of the curve.
- Charging when living in apartment complexes or in multi-home units is not competitive at all with filling up at a gas tank, time wise or cost (unless subsidized).
- Most people drive few miles daily but long road trips yearly, often to remote places without reasonable charging infra. Versatility of use cases is a core requirement for most car users and EVs are not competitive here.
2) Growth is not as significant and growth rate has significantly slowed down
- EV sales are not at 30%+ of all car sales world wide as someone proposed in this thread claiming China is at 50%. China is at 50% NEV, which stands for new energy vehicle and makes up hybrids, BEV and EREV. EREV + hybrids are 40% of sales in China. That means BEVs are only at 30% of total which is what the rest of the world considers EV. World can't be at 30% EV sales itself as the rest of the world is far behind this sales % compared to China.
- China is pushing higher EVs not due to tech superiority but for energy security for obvious reasons, i.e. a lack of traditional energy independence and rising geopolitical risk
- Subsides have played a huge role in the growth and removal of subsidies will depress sales growth more
3) "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO)
- No one has won this race because the tech is not technically sufficiently superior to the currently available. This will change when solid state batteries become common place, but the problems with the tech are hard with a long tail of issues so that's still many years away from being widely rolled out.
Cybertruck is a gimmick. And the fad has passed. No wonder they're not selling well.
And they don't age well. Most of the ones around here are starting to look... grimy. Or dingy. After just a couple of years. It's a poor advertisement for itself.
And, yeah, then there's cultural eye-rolling. It's really the only vehicle I hear people openly mock when they see one... And that's not a Tesla/Elon thing entirely, since people don't have the same reaction to other Tesla vehicles.
I swear, Telsa makes cars for gamers. If you're not in this demographic, it's not for you. Ford, GM, everyone needs to stop emulating Tesla. Practical people do not want this.
Unfortunately other automakers see this as the pinnacle of interior engineering; swoon over this and try to pull a "LETS REMOVE ALL OF THE BUTTONS, ITS WHAT CONSUMERS WANT" maneuver.
All consumers really need/want is an affordable, repairable, minimalistic and simple vehicle. What automakers are shoving down their throats is touch screens, animations, ridiculous LED light displays, etc. Then they wonder why electric sales suck.
My anecdata feeling from all the Tesla owners I know is that they stole customers wanting affordable, repairable, etc. from Japanese manufacturers and they stole customers who were luxury car buyers (Ford, GM, etc. weren’t even competitors) willing to forego some luxury for the EV.
If the Lightning OUTSOLD Tesla, is that really losing to them? Feels to me like an indictment of the scale that Tesla actually operates: an order of magnitude less than the big car makers. If Ford declares a truck that sold better than CT as a failure, it's because for their size it didn't sell enough. If that lesser number IS enough for Tesla, they're simply not a player in the same league as Ford.
This reflects a very common pronunciation of syllable-final Ls in English, called a vocalised L, but I've never seen it reflected in spelling in such a way. Very cool!
I'm extremely curious - did you go for that spelling as an intentional stylistic variation, or was it a typo reflecting your usual pronunciation?
I'm sure the usual detractors will be here to whine "Electrek is biased against Tesla!"
To which I would ask: Is it "bias" because they simply report on Tesla frequently? Would it be "less biased" if they ignored Tesla? Obviously Electrek can't simply invent positive press for Tesla to report on.
Putting that aside though. The Cybertruck by all measures has been an abject failure. Its production run was so limited that insurance companies refused to cover it [1] and the NHTSA took something like two years just to crash test the thing due to how few of them there were on the road.
Combine that with 10 fucking recalls for absolutely horrific safety issues [2] and the company making the batteries taking a 99% slash in its $2.8 billion dollar contract [3] the thing is a complete travesty
Fred Lambert (Electrek founder) was pro-tesla and was using his site to get a huge number of referral credits. Then Tesla changed the rules on that referral program.
That's what triggered the beef. Fred sold all shares, took down all the pro-tesla articles, and posts nearly exclusively only negative tesla articles since.
Seems both parties were/are within legal rights, but it is clearly bias.
Literally the only people who can think that this dude is anywhere remotely objective is if you are already a Tesla hater; he posts qualifications in every title and always adjusts the wording and tone to be negative. Every Electrek's take on an article is him describing how he warned everyone about the Elon/Tesla heel turn as you laid it out. It screams confirmation bias but since he isn't a journalist there's no code of ethics he's bound to follow.
I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.
That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
>I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics
That and also it's just a bad product.
>That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it.
A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
edit: agree there's a market for the raptor off-road tremor package thing, but it wasn't ford's first and they've been selling commerical trucks for 75 years. A true tesla f150 competitor would have sold like crazy, I think
> A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
The modern US pickup truck isn't built for utility. It's a $60,000 four-door lifted luxobarge with leather interior and a short bed. It signals (perceived) wealth while preserving working-class alignment. It can also be justified by way of having to pick up used furniture for TikTok refinish and flip projects or bimonthly runs to Home Depot to buy caulk and lightbulbs. Independent tradesman can write them off as work vehicles or, allegedly, use COVID-era PPP loans to buy them.
It's the suburban equivalent of a yuppie's Rolex Submariner. Investment bankers generally don't go scuba diving and if they did a dive computer would be vastly preferable.
I say all of that to say that making a pickup truck for that market segment isn't a bad idea from a numbers perspective. You just can't market it as a luxury vehicle because the whole point is that it is but it isn't.
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> A pickup truck should just be max utility
A working truck should be max utility. Around the core market of "working trucks," there are various wannabe truck products that do not have to be max utility. For example, a Subaru Brat or a Hyundai Santa Fe. Niche products compared to an F-150, but they had/have their fans.
I personally can't stand the design, but the idea of an impractical "halo vehicle" that appeals to a niche audience but burnishes the brand as "forward-looking" is not a bad one. It's just the execution of this particular halo vehicle that I would have a problem with were I in the market for a lifestyle look-at-me vehicle.
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>A pickup truck should just be max utility,
The problem is as soon as you go EV, you use a lot of utility from the get go. With a truck specifically, because its a brick aerodynamically. There is no reason to buy a Cybertruck or Lightning when you can get a gas or hybrid F150 (or a Raptor) for a little bit more, and be able to sit at 80 mph on highways without worrying about range.
The biggest suprise about the lightning is that Ford didn't put in a gas engine in it as a range extender. They have 3 cylinder ecoboost engines that would have been perfect for that.
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> max utility
As the owner of a rusty 1985 pickup with manual windows and no radio, I can tell you there is great demand for utility pickup trucks that the manufacturers WILL NOT MAKE.
The first problem is CAFE rules. Congress legislated the light pickup truck out of existence. To get around CAFE rules, manufacturers increased the size of trucks and added a back row so they could be reclassified in a way that skirted CAFE rules.
However, there's a big demand for pickups, so people bought these because they needed trucks, and nothing else was available. Manufacturers took advantage of demand and started adding features normal pickup drivers didn't want or need, to access a high-market class of buyers. "Where else are you gonna go?"
$100k pickups, here we are.
Manufacturers are in no hurry to go back to the low-margin pickup days, even though that is what classic pickup buyers actually want.
> A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
> 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...
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> pickup truck should just be max utility
Except the main demographic buying F150s is suburban dads driving to their office job.
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>A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
How do you even define that? Give it a heavy duty bed and you're wasting weight that could be put toward hauling/towing capacities (and lord knows how people here would feel about ignoring those). A big engine for "reasonable driving" when fully loaded guzzles fuel.
I don't know much about car economics but I'd think Tesla probably should have built a truck to sell as a fleet vehicle first. There are very few car brands that aren't part of a larger entity doing b2b vehicle sales.
I remember the unveiling (loved the "bullet proof" glass demo). That was before I understood who Elon really was and I was pro Tesla. I never would have bought such an ugly vehicle, and I don't normally use looks to evaluate a potential ride.
>A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
I don't think this is actually true, most pickup trucks aren't designed for maximum utility. They're designed to sell a lifestyle.
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> A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
That's very unrealistic considering the market.
> A pickup truck should just be max utility
Yet we are in a thread where one with max utility has been cancelled and one flop of the century continues to sell.
> That and also it's just a bad product.
I want whatever the v3 equivalent of the Cybertruk would be. Assuming they improve on it.
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> it's just a bad product. So you've never driven one?
> A pickup truck should just be max utility You don't know much about trucks? What does this even mean, max utility? Trucks are designed for different purposes. Should we eliminate all programming languages besides bash or python?
> especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one Seems like you don't know much about business either. Most new products should NOT try to do everything at once the first time.
BINGO: the folks buying these things are doing so to virtue signal their politics. If you need a truck for work or hunting, you're still buying a truck, not some Silicon Valley concept car like the Cybertruck.
Cybertruck is the greatest vehicle ever made.
But Cybertruck has better vibes. /s
That be easier to believe if there weren't so many Model 3 and Y vehicles that are clearly the new ones (changed headlights/taillights) all around. I'm sure Elon's "political" salutes gave their sales some headwinds, but I'm inclined to think it is more like 15% less sales (Q4 2024 vs Q4 2025). The CyberTruck factory is operating at <20% capacity.
The biggest problems are: it costs ~2x what Elon said it would, it has less than half the range he said it'd have, and it has had 10 recalls in its short life.
The recalls have been for things as basic as: light bar falling off, exterior trim falling off, bed trim falling off, the acceleration pedal falling off, inverter failures. It paints a picture of a low-quality product that has a very premium price.
I know this is a dead thread, but...
How do so many people justify buying the new redesign? I mean it came out after the CEO went in front of the world and gave two nazi-like salutes, then did DOGE!
Do they buy his 'autistic' defense? Do they just not care about what the CEO does and support him with their money anyways? Do they actively support his ideology?
I suspect it's likely a mix of these depending on the person, and probably more that I can't think of.
I mean they're good cars, no doubt, and it's a damn shame many decent engineers and workers put in so much effort to have it all tainted by such nasty politics.
But I cannot ignore those salutes, nor the myriad other slights starting with calling those Thai cave-diving heroes pedophiles. Tesla is dead to me, a victim of this insane time and its CEO.
> I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination.
I 1000% agree with this, in fact I love the way it looks, like something out of a SEGA Saturn game. But I would never buy one for the same reasons I would never buy any Tesla, or in fact any EV, or any post-2014 car at all. But the looks of it are not one of those reasons :)
I do have to laugh every time I see a Tesla with one of those “Bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!!” stickers, because to me they just read as “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. It's weird to me to think that other people are thinking that way about their automobiles, because I bought mine (Prius C) based on its features and how they fit into my needs and my life. I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.
> Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. I
I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.
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Let me get this straight. You bought a "statement car" but not for its statement, and then you assume that other people driving a different "statement car" bought it because of the statement?
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You're right about it looking like something out of a game. I passed one wrapped in fluorescent green at a gas station the other night (owner was checking the tire pressure) and it indeed made think 'low polygon count'. I would not have been entirely surprised if the driver had looked similar.
Thing is, after the initial momentary amusement the novelty quickly evaporates. It doesn't have the compelling presence of, say, a Tumbler. https://brucewaynex.com/pages/tumbler
> “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”
The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."
I understand you don't think it's a good car, which is fine, but most people who bought one did not agree with you.
Your comment is a little confusing because you obviously understand this concept, you bought a Prius because you thought it was a good car, not because of a political statement others may have projected onto your purchase. The same is true of most Tesla owners.
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They may not have put it there because they were "self-conscious" about their "statement car." They may have put it there in an honest attempt to avoid having their car vandalized for something they had nothing to do with.
> I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.
... So you admit to falling for Toyota product placement in cartoons.
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Politics or no, the price point ultimately dictated its maximum sales. By that measure it's a reasonable success, and if Elon was forecasting that they would sell multiple tens of thousands of vehicles per year at a $80,000 price point he needs to lay off the drugs. Elon sometimes seems like the living embodiment of "How much could a banana cost, Michael, $10?" parody of out of touch rich people.
I think if people who like trucks didn't see videos of things like the bumper ripping off when towing or minor failures leading to whole vehicle shorts it might have done better. The people who want trucks want resilience and ability to self-service more than the average car buyer.
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I remember the "under $40k" announcement price
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Have we completely forgotten about how Tesla dealerships were shot up, firebombed? Video after video showing cybertrucks vandalized with scratches and spray paint?
It may be a terrible car from a terrible program, but these events at least bear mentioning. If you saw it happening in 2025, would it have a cooling effect on your decision to purchase? Who would want the trouble?
The targeted vandalism/terrorism definitely stopped a lot of purchases.
Lots of people are still buying other Teslas.
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You seem to have forgotten why those things happened. It was the Nazi salutes Elon did at an official US government event.
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You can attribute the failure of this vehicle to politics if you like, but it's fairly obvious to anyone watching why it failed - it came out at double the proposed priced with half the proposed range. It's not even the hideous design, there were hundreds of thousands of "pre orders" who knew about the horrible design. It's the price and range.
Eh, that might explain failure to convert preorders to sales. But it doesn't really matter when comparing to other vehicles in the same market.
I was already a Tesla owner and I reserved a Cybertruck right after I saw the original Cybertruck Unveil live stream on November 21, 2019. The infamous one where the window glass shattered.
That was when it was supposed to cost around $35,000.
Four years later when my reservation was ready to order, on December 8, 2023, the CyberTruck cost more than $100k.
Because it cost almost 3x more than what was originally advertised, I cancelled the order. I know many other people who canceled for the same reason. Keeping in mind this was after several delays, so I and many others with reservations were already frustrated with the product before it became available to order.
> Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit
I think the Cybertruck was DOA and his involvement in politics got people who shared his views to buy one in order to signal the same.
Also the fact that many truck deliveries were literally DOA as in the truck bricked itself in the driveway.
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I'll applaud anything that tries to move us away from the current stale design trend where every car looks like the same boring bar of soap and every truck looks like the same aggressive, drivable, mechanized fist.
But anything in this case is a pedestrian-maiming, finger-slicing, dumpster on dubs. Not sure that's really a move in the right direction.
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The bar of soap is aerodynamic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient
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Elon Shithead promised a lot for apparently a good price and wasn't able to deliver.
It wasn't just the hate i think.
The Cybertruck also does the tightest turns because it has front and back wheel steering. I could imagine that to be useful on job sites.
The kinds of people buying cybertrucks aren't going to be caught dead on a job site.
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2002 GMC Sierras did this, it was called quadrasteer
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A full-size Ford Transit - which is much larger than a Cybertruck, and much more useful - turns in about an 11-metre kerb-to-kerb circle.
That's fully a metre and a half tighter than the Cybertruck.
In my opinion it isn't useful at all because if the only thing you can get into a spot is a vehicle with 4-wheel steering, you have already fucked up your site planning. You aren't going to be delivering materials with that thing, bulk materials are too heavy and light materials are too large. Maybe tools, but it isn't that large to be a tool truck and too expensive for small handyman type work.
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No it doesn't. A regular Suburban without 4 wheel steering still has a tighter turning radius. A fucking Suburban!
Not really, sites are pretty much always spaced out. Ironically, it’s best for city and daily driving - it’s a pure luxury feature.
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I'm one of the few people that love the cybertruck design, but even I can't look at one these days and not think "swasticar". It's terribly disappointing, really. Fully self-inflicted.
> many vehicles ... are almost indistinguishable
That is so right on the money. I attended the LA Auto Show a couple of months back and the takeaway was that every manufacturer pretty much makes the same safe car. There might be a feature here and feature there, but it's the same car.
In the years past they at least had lots of concept cars. This year, I maybe saw two and they weren't all that "concept".
> I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it.
Why? Do you want your other tools to be _different_ for no reason at all? Do you want your drill come with sharp corners you can't touch just because it'll look different?
It's just a darn shame that we're reduced to a simple measure of a single dimension, whether a right or left point on a single axis. You'll find many EV owners are multidimensional, a little bit up and down and all around an x-y plane, or even x-y-z cube. Conservative and liberal progressive alike in Europe are sick of Musk and it shows on the Tesla sales tanking.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/tesla-full-2025-data-europe-t...
> So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination.
Because utilitarian design and purpose of this vehicles has been established long time ago. Cybetruck "wanted to be different" but it fails in every aspect of its own "innovation". It's ultimately stupid vehicles with so many flaws that arguing it tried something is pointless. Like, having a man walking to North Pole in runners - he's not trying something new, he's straight stupid and should be treated like that
As much as this is to blame, don't forget the year plus delay, ~60% increase in price, omitted features, safety investigations, recalls, etc.
It's clear the design was half baked from the start.
The thing with Cybertrucks losing panels certainly didn't help.
A big part of the Cybertruck marketing was the robustness of its unusual design: exoskeleton! space grade materials! They smashed the door with a hammer and it didn't dent (just avoid pétanque balls...), Elon Musk commented that it would destroy the other vehicle in an accident. Morally dubious arguments sometimes, but it appeals to many potential customers.
And then, the vehicle that is supposed to be a tank falls apart by looking at it funny. And the glued on steel plates, is it that the exoskeleton? Not only the design is controversial, but it failed at what it is supposed to represent.
> So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination. Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
You haven't seen enough trucks and pickups then. The Cybertruck serves no utility purpose.
The main problem was that it was and is twice as expensive with less range as they said it would be with seemingly no push to address either.
It seems to be a good product (with compromises as any product) but its not a slam dunk to choose that as a Model 3/Y is.
> I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.
IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.
Basically the only thing "left wing" about it is the fact that it's electric.
> Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.
The only thing it actually did new was the drive-by-wire steering, which is by all accounts impressive but could have been done on any normal vehicle as well. The "unique" styling is mostly just re-learning lessons that John DeLorean taught the rest of the industry decades ago.
> IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.
Elon is an ass, but this is still the most crudely and childishly stereotyped thing I've read on the internet today. Congrats.
While largely true, that trucks have adorned the comforts of luxury cars, most are running 6' beds. This largely ignores the evolution of the truck and the job site. My family operates contracting and excavating businesses that operating in all manner of weather and terrain, no one is carrying loads in their truck beds anymore... its not even legal most places unless you convert to a dump bed...
Whats in their trucks? Well, a crew cab occasionally is used for car pooling workers, where they all park their vintage beater trucks at the business... Sometimes weather sensitive tools, or job related items, documents, you can just throw these in a glove box... The bed usually has a gas pump for refilling remote equipment. Cones and other safety shit. Sand hoppers for plowing. Yes they also use these "luxury" trucks to plow.
The thing is... These people are making decent salaries... my direct relatives are multi-millionaires who still pick up a welder, a hammer, a shovel.
Im see alot of assumptions about why trucks evolved the way they did, who owns them, and what for... I would argue the "luxury faker" is a very small crowd, one that likely moved to the cybertruck... and despite the trucks looking modernized, are beaten to pulp over long service lives.
Now, go get in a modern tractor, dump truck, or excavator. They are also all AC, Radios, Computers, Leather Seats, etc... People want to be comfortable.
I wager people care way more that it simply costs a lot, and they don't like it or need it
Elon had to ignore so many people who told him using stainless steel was a very bad idea
Back in 2020, a friend working at Tesla told me how frustrated the engineers working on the cybertruck were, because they knew its design choices pushed by Musk made no sense, making the cybertruck way too complicated to design and build for no reasons, and everybody already knew the product would be a failure.
As someone who has used both light and heavy pickups for work, recreation, and farm work for decades, the Cybertruck is absolutely terrible at everything you want a truck to do.
It's a brodozer for people that are slightly environmentally conscious or have Elon issues.
And again, I say this as an actual cowboy, in that yes, I own cows. And a lineman who ferries manly men (and a few manly women) to do manly man work on high voltage power lines that will kill you so dead it's a guaranteed closed casket funeral. Trucks aren't just dick compensators, they exist to do work. And the Cybertruck sucks at all of that work. The F-150 lightning was a useful fleet vehicle due to the 120VAC outlets alone, aside from being, you know, a usable truck.
There's a reason most of the offering are very similar. We figured out what work pickup trucks need to do and how they're engineered to do it 50 years ago. The Hilux and friends made it highly economical. So you've got the Hiluxies and the SuperManlyMinivans and those are the two main kind of pickup trucks.
Trucks being dick compensators is also based on their association with the work they do. Easier to pretend to be a salt of the earth tough guy when you both drive the same truck but with a different trim package.
I'll always give Tesla, SpaceX etc props for the work they accomplish, even though Elon is at the helm, he's not a perfect dude but I will give him props when he gets something right too. At the end of the day his employees are doing incredible work and it should not be written off because of Elon. To any Tesla / SpaceX employee whether you agree with Elon or not, thank you for helping to build a more interesting tomorrow.
Yeah SpaceX's tech is amazing. Funny China's like "star link launches are bad" then they're trying to do even more, China knows what's up.
gl getting out of one in case of a crash when the battery that opens the doors malfunction
I mean as with most "product" things related to Musk, it's more about the meme stock than any fundamental coupling to finances in the real world.
Ford is a car company. They sell cars. The Lightning was a poorly selling car, so they stopped selling it. Pretty simple!
Tesla is a lifestyle company. They make line go up by owning the libs, catering to edgelord identity, and triggering speculation. The Cybertruck probably gained the company more memetic shareholder value than it lost as a real product.
I mean, in certain circles online, people were literally calling Cybertrucks "Swasticars." Not the greatest for marketing.
Elon going off the deep end is the tail wagging the dog. It's an objectively terrible car.
The collapse of the company overall, particularly the Model Y, which is a great car, is all about Elon. Not only his unveiling as a fascist, but he essentially looted the company.
pumped the stock and then tried to use the twitter buy as a way to sell greatly without taking the price too hard.
they wouldn't let him out of the sale -- he sued 3 times to get out of the twitter buy agreement -- so now he owns that too.
I feel like kudos for making a public eye-sore merely because people typically don't make public eye-sores is a bit missing the point.
Honestly, both the Lightning and the Cybertruck are just bad trucks. Some review of the Lightning I read said it has less than a 100 mile range towing a full load.
It's a fashion statement, not a work vehicle.
> Some review of the Lightning I read said it has less than a 100 mile range towing a full load.
Because of course towing long distances is the only reason you'd ever want a truck.
Obviously we can start by acknowledging that the vast majority of F-150s (and other half-ton pickup trucks) sold in the US these days are purchased by people who maybe haul a load of mulch or dirt once a year and otherwise use them as daily commuter vehicles for which no part of their "truckiness" actually matters for any reason other than image. I absolutely agree that these people should drive something that's not a truck, but that's a battle we're not going to win, so I'd rather have them driving an EV truck instead of a gas-guzzling V8. It's an improvement in some ways even if in reality that suburban parent would be best off with a minivan as their daily and renting a pickup from Home Depot for that mulch run.
My one friend who has a Lightning is exactly this. She used to have a gas F-150, replaced it with a RAV4 that she didn't like so she rapidly replaced that with the Lightning and loves it. Lots of power, quiet, smooth, and never needs to go to the gas station. I don't think she's ever fast charged it, just plugs in at home and goes about her life.
Where I live there are a lot of people who actually do need a truck or truck-based SUV for recreational purposes but don't really go long distances, like towing their boat up to the lake for the weekend, towing ATVs to the trail, or towing a RV trailer to a nearby state/national park where they'll then plug in to the nice 50A outlet and charge back up overnight without having to think about it.
There are also an absolute ton of commercial fleets that need pickup trucks for one reason or another but their trucks never leave their metro area and always end up back at the office every night. Lawn care, delivery, etc. where the only downside of the current lineup of electric trucks is that they're all only offered as the ultra short bed crew cab configuration instead of a long-bed standard cab.
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EVs are absolutely the wrong choice for time-constrained long distance travel, like long-haul trucking or the midwestern three-day-weekend road trip, but the Lightning and its GM competition that were actually designed to be good at things instead of a pure image machine are very good at certain roles.
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I counted 49 pickup trucks with empty beds in the parking garage downtown this morning.
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I'm very much on the left, and I honestly like the design of the Cybertruck. (I know this puts me in a minority.) It is disappointing that the original "unibody" design was abandoned. The new design where the body panels just randomly fall off is silly.
If it was made by some other company I would genuinely consider buying one. But I would never buy another Tesla. I owned an older Model X, before Elon went full-fascism. And even ignoring Elon, the car was awful. It was shoddily built, kept breaking down, and the service experience was shockingly bad. Absolutely atrocious.
But after all that, I can't give money to Elon ever again. I can't fund America's descent into fascism. I could not live with myself.
> I'm very much on the left, and I honestly like the design of the Cybertruck. (I know this puts me in a minority.) It is disappointing that the original "unibody" design was abandoned. The new design where the body panels just randomly fall off is silly.
Function should drive form. The design would be cool if it was for a cool function.
Say you have a beautifully-made, expertly-weighted tack hammer. That looks cool on your work bench and works well. If you refashion the hammer into a kitchen spoon, it looks dumb in the kitchen and works poorly for stirring a pot.
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> it's not to my taste
It's not just you, it's universally tasteless and that's the point: It is a contrarian vehicle.
In an age where the Internet has flattened subcultures into surface phenomenons, the only remaining way to publicly distance yourself from normality is by making patently, obviously bad decisions and using the backlash to further fuel your ego.
This is true. If I see a Tesla I don’t immediately assume that driver is personally aligned with Elon. It’s a popular and good car.
If I see a Cybertruck I’m extremely confident that driver approves of Elons antics and likely fervently supports them. It’s a physical manifestation of his ego and mostly bought by his legions of fans.
If you’re a Cybertruck driver and you don’t want people to think that, you’re in the wrong car.
There are plenty of reasons I don't want a Cybertruck, but I can assure you that your opinion (or any other Karen's opinion), doesn't even come close to making the list.
I think the dealership monopoly is partly to blame. Dealers get more reoccurring revenue from ICE vehicles, so they are incentivized to not stock EVs and to steer customers away from them. Ford seemed to understand this and attempted a direct sale program for EVs, but they canceled it due to dealer pushback.
https://fordauthority.com/2025/02/ford-ev-inventory-hub-syst...
Yes I think there's a real innovators' dilemma here for traditional automakers with dealer networks. Dealers make most of their money on servicing vehicles, not selling them. And EVs require almost no servicing.
I bought a used Audi etron a couple months ago. Agent was going to try to sell me a service plan and realized none of them apply to electric :) The downstream fanout of the auto industry is huge…
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That looks alien to me. Here, in europe, the usual thing it's go to your car workshop of trust. And they know where and how pick the parts and service your vehicle. Some car workshops could be "oficial" for a car maker, and it's where you should go when your car is new and under warranty period.
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Ford did try to make it up to them by offering a bevy of aftermarket add-ons for the Lightning that were sold through the dealerships. As a consumer, I wanted them to keep the EV and ICE versions as similar as possible, with the hope that parts would be cheaper and easier to find.
Also dealers are one of the most reliable GOP funding sources. The GOP does not like EVs.
I doubt that. I suspect there are virtually no customers who step into a dealership unsure if they want to buy EV or ICE.
They seem to be flooded on dealership lots and are not selling whatsoever. OEMs force dealers to take the crap vehicles if they are to get the good ones. You have a vehicle that started off as a hard sell to the crowd that normally buys the vehicle and then you make it so the price is astronomical...forget the dealer reluctance, what did you think was going to happen?
[1]:https://youtu.be/F0SIL-ujtfA?t=532
Yeah I mean the obvious problem is that consumers specifically want to buy new ICE cars.
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I have a conspiracy theory take on traditional manufacturers being so anti-EV.
Basically the primary differentiator between car companies and the primary barrier to entry in the combustion vehicle business is the engine, especially in the US. Look at the marketing, horsepower and torque are always the topline numbers. Zero to sixty and quarter mile drag races are the favored metrics. Each company spent decades perfecting the engines and the majority of the engineering effort goes into them. Even the transmissions get second fiddle status.
But now EVs come along and the electric motors are commodity parts that are already well optimized. There's little one company can do to make the motor significantly better. Battery tech is cutthroat and also largely outside of the car company's scope, although Tesla does more than other car companies with their megafactories and experiments with oversized cells. If EVs become popular there's little to stop competition from sprouting up everywhere and killing profitability for the legacy auto manufacturers.
That's one way of seeing it, but the fact is that automobile parts are already nearly commodity parts. The wall that stops automaker upstarts in their tracks is the need for safety testing and approval from the US DOT.
Even if you had the chutzpah to get all of the materials together for a fleet of vehicles, you have to spend big cash and grease a lot of palms to get a vehicle you make certified. It takes years and millions of dollars to get to the 1st sellable vehicle.
This is a portion of why BYD, for instance, isn't selling in America.
There are other reasons of course, but one of them is the millions and millions of dollars you're putting at risk just to potentially be told "No" by the government.
https://www.atic-ts.com/north-america-motor-vehicle-componen...
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> Ford seemed to understand this and attempted a direct sale program for EVs, but they canceled it due to dealer pushback.
Why didn't they just do it anyways? Dealerships seem like a pointless middleman, but I know absolutely nothing about what leverage they have. Self-driving cars can not come fast enough
Because dealerships are the automakers' real customers, at least right now.
You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.
Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.
That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.
That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.
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Extensive regulatory capture -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes
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It's a shame the Lightning got discontinued.
As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
People think EVs are cars with tanks of electrons, and run aground the same way you would if you thought horses were cars full of hay. It's a different transport tool that gives the same results, you just have to know how to use it properly.
> It's a shame the Lightning got discontinued. > As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
The F150 Lighting (and the Cybertruck) are failing precisely because it was impractical. It was expensive, has limited range when doing actual "pickup truck" work, like hauling tons of construction materials. It was built for the very niche market of buyers at the intersection of luxury pickups and EVs.
People who buy huge luxury pickups tend not to want EVs, and people who buy EVs tend not to want huge luxury pickup trucks.
A practical work truck needs to be smaller, less luxurious, and less expensive, electric or not. If Ford follows through and releases a plugin-hybrid Maverick with 150ish miles of EV range plus the onboard generator, that would be ideal.
A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
The lighting is fine for towing, especially the type that people usually do. You can tow up to 10,000lbs and the truck has ridiculous power to pull it.
What you can't do it tow it long distances (>90mi, worst case) without 40 minute stops every 1.5 hours. That sucks.
But the truth is very few truck owners are towing huge loads long distances.
However, if you are pulling your lawn care trailer around town, you will not have a problem, because every day you start with a full charge.
As an aside, the main killer of range for a trailer is a function of speed and drag. Low drag trailers driven at highway speeds (60-65) have marginal impacts on range, regardless of weight.
Again, the whole thing is ridden with misconceptions and misunderstandings. The majority of people who tow stuff, can still tow stuff while reaping cheaper operating costs.
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I don't think that market is a niche at all. From what I can tell, most pickup owners don't use them as a pickup. They use them as a more masculine pavement SUV. So, you'd think, the F150 L and Cyber truck would be perfect.
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> hauling tons of construction materials
Lots of people do exactly that. You can load it all the way past GVWR and it has little effect on the range. It's towing that hurts. Many people use these for business with great success.
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> A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
You know that electric trains are very practical, not ? Also, what about these EV trucks and EV vans ?
There is a market for luxury electric pick-ups, and it's dominated by Rivian.
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Yes, I've had conversations with ice owners and the misconceptions are enormous in their minds.
Practically speaking¹, normal people could buy a tesla and drive it like a gas car, except with a full tank of gas every morning. They could still drive across the state once a month to grandma's and they could supercharge if range got low.
This is due to a couple things that were not in place for early EVs.
- teslas have a lot of range/battery compared to early EVs
- superchargers are in many locations, have plentiful charging spots, and are reliable
- teslas have a good UI to navigate and charge
[1] 99% of the time. If you're an apartment dweller in the artic circle with a supercharger 2000 miles away, please scroll onwards.
It's not 99% of the time, it's for people who own single-family homes. Apartment dwellers maaaybe have EV spots but can't leave their cars there.
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The main thing holding EV back is the oil industry, not the tech. The US is the only country lagging on EV and its all because the industry puts so much effort in to squashing all progress.
EVs are simpler and cheaper. Look at how fast adoption is growing outside the US. If US citizens could buy a BYD for the same price as in China, the the US auto makers and oil companies would be in trouble.
US was the first to make EVs mainstream
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It's not only US, it's global.
I drive quite a lot throught southern Europe with my EV, and it's super frustrating that gas stations have the infrastructure on the highway while for my EV I have to go just outside the highway to a fast charger (wasting time), then I need to pay again (and waste a lot of time to go through the gate) to get back on the highway for example in Italy.
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Spot on. The misconceptions, even from other EV owners is astounding. People are constantly confused about kWh vs kW, Amps, voltage, temperature, range, mi/kWh, etc. Even PhD Computer Science and other highly educated folks who have owned EVs for a long time can't quite communicate the difference between those units of measurement. So of course when a curious person asks them or others, they only quote the falsehoods that someone told them.
Some examples:
1. I constantly see EV owners install 60A/11kWh service, costing them on average $10k when their driving needs don't require it.
2. People thinking they need more than 300mi of range and think they will run out of batteries like they do on their headphones.
All of this needs an understanding of the aforementioned units and basic physics. But, you're not going to get that by just talking to people. Salespeople are especially not going to do that, they can't even do that for combustion cars.
Most households do not drive more than 100KM per day... yet people are obsessed with range.
My next EV will be a small BYD (dolphin or dolphin surf), these things can get between 200KM and 400KM per FULL charge, depending on your speed and settings. If you use the "slow" wall charger (that doesn't require installation or modifications to home circuits), not only will the batteries last longer, it will easily charge up your 100KM actual drive range in a couple of hours, typically overnight.
If you empty the battery each day and recharge it each night, that nets you 300KM per charge, or 2100KM per week. I don't know a single person or family that does 2100KM a week with their cars. So the whole range anxiety is rubbish. Just plug in every night and go to bed and tomorrow you have another 300km available.
Oh and then there are public fast chargers if you do get stuck. I live in Africa and this is solved problem.
Sorry for the rant..your comment about the expensive charger installations makes my blood boil as most people can just use the normal wall charger and charge overnight.
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An F-150 Lightning and Cybertruck weigh somewhere between 6000 and 7000 pounds, so I personally think of them the same way as if you replaced your horse with a hippo.
It's not hard to convince people to move to electric, just make it such a better economic proposition that it would be silly not to.
No pickup is light. A Lightning weighs about the same as a gasser F250, and less than a diesel F250.
I don't need a pickup truck, but if I ever did, I'd get whatever my landscaper has. Unlike most people with Rivians, Lightnings, Cybertrucks, Ridgelines, and Raptors, he totally relies on that truck for work.
So far it's Tacoma. Maybe some day he'll have an EV instead.
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I disagree. I really want a Lightning but live in a very rural place, weekend in an even more rural place, and need to pull a trailer pretty often.
I already have a plug-in hybrid that gets 40+ miles/charge and have opined all over the internet that the perfect car is one that gets 100+ miles/charge before firing any gas engine.
It sounds like the next Lightning will give me that though I don’t put much stock in their promises. Personally the Scout is too bougie but it does similarly.
I don’t get plug in hybrids. All other engine types save you more money compared to the next less efficient alternative the more you use them, but plugins get closer to the less efficient alternative (regular hybrid) the more you use them. Add in the approximately 25% price hike over the hybrid version when there is one and it makes no sense to me.
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I disagree along with you. EVs would work for 80% of the population, there is a long tail of people who an EV will never (well foreseeable future) work for.
Thankfully, the mass of humanity that should be transitioning lives in populated areas and never tows anything for more than 75 miles. There is no need to get bogged down in back and forths with the small subset of people who an EV will not work for.
Surprisingly to many, rural and very rural places are actually a great location for EVs - if they have enough range.
Because even very rural places have electricity - almost always. I can find quite nice homes that are 20 miles from a gas station, but have power and could easily charge a vehicle. If I lived there, a vehicle I could use without a gas station would be quite desirable.
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Seems to me like the Chevy Silverado with the 200 kWh battery pack is the EV pickup to beat.
I disagree that EV-s are held back by misconceptions. More their price and range.
Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm.
That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge", and extremely common to do the "Put car on charger for 13 minutes while going into [insert any of the gazillion places with chargers in the parking lot] to use the bathroom, stretch legs, and get a snack, or see a landmark"
Also you usually structure it so you arrive at your destination with very low charge, because you fill up while there. I've yet to be at a hotel with a gas pump in the lot.
Again, EVs function differently than gas, and that change of paradigm really gets people ruffled up and confused.
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I can do a ten hour road trip with a family of four plus a dog in a used (2022) EV that I got for ~30k last year. I think the idea that price and range are problems is exactly the misconception that op was taking about. They are somewhat more expensive, although when I originally did the calculus, fuel savings made up the difference in monthly payments for a new vehicle, but that's going to vary a lot. The is a very small proportion of people for whom range is a legitimate concern.
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Resale value is starting to ward some people off.
You can buy 1-2 year old used Teslas and BYD's in Australia for ~30% below retail.
Meanwhile Toyota hybrids not just retain their value but there have been moments where used RAV4's are listed above retail because the waitlist for new was so long.
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Depends a lot on the particular example. My Lightning was less expensive than the Powerboost I had been shopping for originally. And 250-300 miles is well beyond my typical daily driving range requirement (and Superchargers are pretty plentiful in most of the areas I ever find myself).
Exactly, price is a huge problem. IIRC, the average selling price of F-150 is ~50k.
The extended range Lightning tended to be $60k and up. Sure, it had AWD, but lots of people didn't need that. The Cybertruck is even more expensive.
Both had huge preorders when they were announced at ~50k.
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A 600 mile trip can (theoretically) be done with 1 charge, because you leave home with full range, and arrive with 0 charge (and fill up overnight). That one charge is done while eating dinner, or spaced out in increments over the course of the trip, stops which you would take anyway. I know few people who want to bang out 10 hours without stopping for at least 1-2 hours over the course of the trip. And those who do, can be the edge case with gas cars.
So you need to go 600 miles, and you need 1 full charge worth of energy during that.
If that one charge takes 1 hour, you can also break it up into four 15 minute sessions at any time of your chosing.
I'm sorry, but almost no regular person does 10 hours without at least four 15 minute stops.
Range is not at all the problem people make it out to be.
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Thanks for illustrating the point.
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The main thing holding them back for me is the range.
A few times a year I do quite long drives, sometimes you get the odd road closure and you've added a day to your trip at best, could be stranded at worst.
There will be a phase shift where there are lots of fast chargers but in Australia we aren't quite there yet. Lots of my friends have EVs. The busiest routes are pretty good.
On the one hand I will be a late adopter of the tech but on the other at least I know it will be a significant upgrade when I get there.
...misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
What's the range of an F-150 Lightning when towing a small travel trailer? The Rivian R1T is ~150 miles give or take. I assume the F-150 is similar.
At least for towing, the math isn't great. Especially when you add in the cost - my Honda Ridgeline was $42k in 2021. EV trucks are roughly double that amount.
> my Honda Ridgeline was $42k in 2021. EV trucks are roughly double that amount
My Lightning was <$51K in 2024.
of course your ridgeline has other ways to hurt you :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWyjfbS7MMA
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I don't think that's the only thing holding the technology back.
The only EV pickups in the US are like $60-$120K. Price is a huge barrier to entry.
Average sale price, per Gemini:
There needs to be a sub $40K EV pickup for it to be a real option for many.
Judging from how many people seem surprised by my open frunk at the grocery store, saying things like "I had no idea Ford made an electric truck!" I think they could have done more to market it. I sometimes wonder if they really wanted to sell a lot of them.
I remember when tesla was young and elon talked about selling electric cars through dealers. He said it would not work, they would not be advocates, they would prevent sales.
And I think that is spot on.
I also suspect internally the thinking is that the f150 lightning costs more to make than sell, which means it won't get strong advocacy.
Thing is, I'm 100% certain years of tesla vehicles cost more to make than they sold for, just in the nature of developing new things.
I wonder who makes their decision by going to the dealer, though? Ford didn't even regularly stock Lightnings at the dealer, in fact, they basically sold them online and kept inventory at regional fulfillment centers. As soon as someone pulled the trigger, they'd ship the truck the last mile to the dealer of their choice.
Maybe the dealers could have done better. In fact, they definitely could have. Most did have a demo Lightning, in my experience, but that doesn't mean salespeople were pushing customers towards them.
Tesla made a lot of their money selling carbon credits so it is likely some of their cars didn't break even.
Making it look too much like a regular F-150 was a mistake. You need the vehicle to look distinctive enough for it to market itself.
I guess that’s kind of the defense of Musk on the cyber truck. If Ford can’t sell hem off their F150 platform, it means you need to make more of a splash. He just went too far…
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I would argue against that! If anything, I hated the firs hybrids that where distinctly different, and ugly.
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the dealerships did not want them, this already made it unlikely to succeed (towing range mania was the other thing)
Why did the dealerships not want them? (Honest question, I have no idea about any of this)
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Taking a 7k lb vehicle to the grocery store is beyond dumb. If you can afford that EV, get a small car for in the city.
At the size of Ford, sales numbers can be at a different mark for what is considered successful than others. Not to mention dealer gamesmanship fudges real sales numbers.
As to the Cybertruck it's both interesting and kind of ugly... repairability is another concern/issue as is pure cost...
I'm far more interested in the Slate[1] myself. It's probably closer to what a lot of consumers would want in an electric truck. It really feels like a spiritual successor to the OG Jeep (GP).
> At the size of Ford, sales numbers can be at a different mark for what is considered successful than others.
Does this really hold when Tesla has a considerably higher valuation?
Tesla is sitting at an egregious 30x market cap of Ford. If anything... I'd expect them to have sales targets that are ~30x the size of Ford.
When you consider that Ford also makes many more models than Tesla (Tesla has like 8 core models incl the cybertruck [and the not-yet-for-sale semi...] , Ford has like 20+)
By all measures - Tesla should be considerably more aggressive with sales targets for a core model, and it seems pretty clear the cybertruck is just a slow rolling market failure.
> Does this really hold when Tesla has a considerably higher valuation?
> Tesla is sitting at an egregious 30x market cap of Ford. If anything... I'd expect them to have sales targets that are ~30x the size of Ford.
It almost holds BECAUSE of that. Tesla's valuation has been wildly detached from its sales numbers for years, so having a poorly-selling Cybertruck doesn't really matter.
But admitting that a high-end high-profile product was a big failure, on the other hand, might be much more undesirable for the company whose valuation depends on vibes vs sales.
("Should" that be true, though? Well, that's a different question. ;) )
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For 2025, Ford sold about 2.2 million vehicles, Tesla was like 1.6m. Given, more variety for Ford... But there's also margins and supply chains to consider.
The Cybertruck is kind of ugly and very expensive... not to mention that no EV truck really does towing well. The fact that the Lightning sold more than the Cybertruck doesn't make it a success.
The Cybertruck, imo, is not too different than a limited run sports car from a major car company... it's just a step above a concept car. The Lightning from Ford was an attempt to see if a market was really ready to shift to EV, it largely isn't. Even though I think it's probably a great option for a lot of work truck use, that doesn't include long distances or heavy towing, but then it likely prices itself out of that market segment too.
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I'll be interested in the Slate when I can actually buy one. I've seen far too many startup car companies fail to launch to ever get my hopes up. Also, the hopes that the very first vehicle from a brand new company will be affordable are not realistic. Making affordable vehicles requires production at large scale, and that requires enormous capital investment, which generally means your company needs to already have income. Even if it just to prove to potential investors that you have basic competence.
Don't think that just because a billionaire is interested in the project that the funding will be easy. Billionaires don't like to spend their own money and can be easily distracted by newer and shinier projects.
This.
When the cyber truck was announced we decided to buy a Super Duty instead. That was 5 years ago. It's now paid off and driven us and our RV all over the country, and still worth more than half it's purchase price with many more miles to go, and no issues at all (knock on wood).
A lightning, cyber truck, or even rivian can't do those things.
Instead of waiting for a slate just buy a little gas pickup and GO USE IT, live you life!!!
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I see the slate as the successor of the now extinct (in Can + US) mini-truck. 90s trucks like the small Toyota Truck, old Ford Ranger, Nissan hardbody, etc.
The kind of trucks that landscapers are still using, that are beat to shit, and have three features, cheap, load carrying, reliable by way of simplicity.
I can see that, but I mean in terms of body specs and room to reshape/cover/modify the vehicle to different needs beyond pickup truck. Including a second row of seats.
Get a vintage pickup off Autotrader for low 5 figures and put the Edison electric conversion kit on it. It will absolutely melt faces and hearts.
It’s also the fact that Ford investors care about profits and its stock is not just a meme stock with no relationship to current or future profits like Tesla.
Same. The Slate is so close to what I actually want out of an EV: basic, utilitarian, cheap, not made out of 5 iPads. It's not perfect, but neither is any of its competition.
the god awful range of the Slate is not closer to what a lot of consumers would want in an electric truck
Plenty of people use pickup/work trucks and travel under 150-250 miles a day.
It says a lot that spacex had to buy so many trucks just to help the sales numbers. I always thought the ford lightning was a better option for most people anyway. It is too bad they are stopping production when it seems to be the winner.
5,600 units of Cybertrunk and Semi combined is basically 5,600 units of Cybertruck. The Semi is still a boondoggle. I can believe that number. Your maximum sales figures are capped by your price point, and the Cybertruck, as well as the S and X, are in that "Fully successful this vehicle will have sales in the mid-thousands" price bracket.
I sometimes wonder about a world where those trucks managed to hit their $40,000 price points. For the Cybertruck it was clear that Elon demanded way too much (four wheel seering? Come on) to ever get close to it, but for the F150 it seems more like the price was due to Ford halfassing the production.
If you sell five thousand units but built production capacity for a quarter million units, that's not a success.
There is also the optic that the premiere US EV company failed to deliver an EV pickup truck behind Rivian, Ford, Stellantis, and arguably did a far worse job at it.
The F150 lightning was always going to be a tough sell for die hard truck customers but it at least has all the fit and finish that those customers expect, with access to the F-series aftermarket.
I take it that SpaceX looked at all the trucks on the market and chose the cyber truck to maximize investor value and do what's right for SpaceX.
I suspect the reasoning was similar to the reason Tesla bought Solar City or X.ai acquired the site previously known as twitter. Pure unvarnished investor value.
I've seen headlines / stories giving Toyota grief about not going 'all-in' on BEVs while many other companies did.
It seems that the hybrid-first strategy has been working pretty well for them. (The 2026 RAV4s are hybrid-only with no ICE-only options, AIUI.)
Armchair internet analysts think they know better than the biggest car producer in the world that reinvented the modern supply chain.
"But look at Tesla market cap!!!"
Toyota had the right intuition: focus on EVs when the global sales will make sense for it, meanwhile avoid throwing good money after bad like most legacy automakers did with EVs.
Toyota is not immune to throwing good money after bad. They have dumped billions into hydrogen fuel cell research and production over three decades. Last year they sold more Venzas than hydrogen cars.
Notably, the Venza was discontinued after the 2024 model year and those sales figures represent inventory leftover from prior years.
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> Armchair internet analysts think they know better than the biggest car producer in the world
The car producer that still seems to think hydrogen is the future? The armchair internet analysts seem closer to correct.
~40% of global car sales are EV.
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It wasn't canceled for poor sales. It was canceled because it was too expensive to produce, and would not fund all their other EV/battery projects. They found a better road to profitability in that front.
Exactly. Their truck was apparently quite nice but expensive. And then dealers made it worse by adding a hefty markup to that. It would have done fine at a much lower price point. But that would have required a manufacturing cost level that Ford could not deliver:
There are a few reasons for that:
- Ford designed this as a one off vehicle, not as a platform to build multiple vehicles on. So, a lot of the manufacturing process is making components in low volume just for this truck that they are selling in small numbers. It never hit the economies of scale where they could optimize and lower cost.
- It's a big heavy vehicle that needs lots of battery. Batteries are expensive.
- The tariff situation made importing components from Mexico, China, and elsewhere prohibitively expensive. Ford can't source everything they need locally just yet.
All this drives the production cost up. When they launched the vehicle a few years ago, they were still able to import components. They had a shot at sourcing much cheaper batteries from China down the line. All that went away and locally produced batteries aren't as cheap.
Another factor is that it's a product that was designed to be premium and more expensive than the ICE F150 in order to protect sales of that. It was forever going to be compared to that in terms of performance and towing capacity. And the combination of being more expensive than that while having less range and even less while towing is not a great selling point.
Companies like Rivian or BYD that have no ICE truck sales to protect can operate differently. They simply make the best and most affordable vehicle they can without artificially making it needlessly expensive. Rivian isn't cheap of course but they sell well because it's a desirable product. And Rivian has done a lot of work to lower cost and is now introducing cheaper models on the back of that. BYD is cutting well below F150 ICE prices with their Shark truck. Because they can. Not for sale in the US of course but it makes F150 Lightning international sales a bit unviable. As a US only niche vehicle selling in the low thousands per year the Lightning had no future.
And because they have problems as it is sourcing aluminum for more profitable F150 variants. Ford lives or dies based on the F150, they needed to focus on higher profit margins on the trucks they could actually build.
This is the answer, CyberTruck achieved positive gross margins in Q3 2024. The F-150 never did. So the Lightning is canceled and the CyberTruck lives on.
It seems China has won the race for EV dominance in battery technology and manufacturing. Probably not much the U.S. can do to catch up. From the insane oil needs of the U.S. Military to the gasoline needed for a functioning economy and transportation, China will be light years ahead in every category which will have huge implications for U.S. National Security.
I am not so sure about it.
EV dominance is not only defined by battery technology but also by ADAS functions, driving dynamics and many other considerations also common to ICE cars.
In Europe, Chinese vehicles are only selling in any meaningful quantities in the low and very low price segments. And that is mainly due to cheaper labor costs in China and very thin margins (something European OEMs are not interested anymore).
When it comes to higher price segments, European OEMs and Tesla dominate clearly due to superior technology offerings. As an example, the BMW iX3 is completely sold out for months even before market release, as it’s the first car so far that has reached 1000km without charging (Debrecen - Munich). That’s not only a battery technology achievement but also aerodynamics and drivetrain efficiency, where BMW leads together with Tesla.
The Chinese market is very competitive itself as well, and is clearly dominated by Chinese OEMs. Classic European OEMs are seen as vehicles for old people, and newer generations are opting for local manufacturers. Infotainment and ADAS are also driving customers towards Chinese OEMS, mainly because of looser regulation which allows Chinese offerings to edge what Europeans and Americans are offering at the moment. To the point that the big three, Mercedes, BMW and Audi had to switch their ADAS stack to a Chinese made one (Momenta) in order to not lose more customers.
Battery technology is quickly becoming commodity and margins are thinning. Same as it happened in other industries: no one knows who is manufacturing their Samsung or iPhone battery. They might know about the CPU but they clearly care about the brand and the software experience. Cars are becoming not different.
In Europe that software experience (including driving dynamics) is and will be dominated by European OEMs, while leaving the cheap offerings for Chinese brands. They might even recover long term in China if they can quickly adapt their software to Chinese needs.
American OEMs will do fine, they either have high quality software offerings like Tesla or Rivian, or they can easily partner with American software companies to provide Americans with their desired experience.
Maybe they can sell them at the announced prices instead of the inflated ones. Used is selling around $40k with 20-40,000 miles.
New started at 40k, went to 60k for sale, pre-order fulfillment fell off a cliff so it sunk to 56k, and settled around 50k.
2022: 15,617 sold
2023: 24,165
2024: 33,510
2025: “Around 27,300 units sold in the U.S”
$4k-$6k per battery module replacement. Full pack $25k-$50k.
8 years of battery warranty though.
After 10 years batteries tend to have about 80% charge retention and a usable life of 20+ years and have basically no maintenance for the life of the vehicle. So, economics work out well for EVs.
Unless they come right back with a comparable implementation with a maverick/ranger type form factor, Ford is absolutely shot itself in the foot canceling the lightning. I’ve been Evie only for five years and have driven both the electric Silverado and the lightning. I bought the lightning. It’s fantastic. They are absolute idiots for discontinuing it.
Also bought a Lightning. I use it for plenty of truck related things that don't involve towing and it's great. I like to target shoot on family farm land, and it's awesome to toss my steel targets and equipment in the bed and offroad to the area I shoot on (there's an area pretty far in with a sharp elevation change that's created a large berm). Or going to lowes to get a ton of fertilizer/plants/gardening equipment for my spouse.
I also use it to commute, and it's even better at that (part of that is mine being the Platinum trim). Quiet, smooth, powerful, has Android Auto/CarPlay (unlike GM's products), etc.
They really are a fantastic vehicle for those who don't need to quickly tow heavy trailers 400 miles. Especially on the used market.
I think the issue was that Ford wasn't making much margin on them and they weren't moving sufficient volume to make up for that. (around 20K/yr avg)
I wanted an F-150 Lightning when it launched. Demand was high enough that I was told I'd have to pay over retail. I did not buy an F-150 Lightning and bought an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle. The depreciation of electric vehicles has made me appreciate those circumstances more and more.
> The depreciation of electric vehicles has made me appreciate those circumstances more and more.
The depreciation for most EVs isn't all that different from that of new ICE vehicles. For a while, MSRPs were artificially inflated by the EV tax credit, which could give artificially worse depreciation appearance.
So now that the tax credits are gone we should expect to see the sticker prices on new EVs to drop right? Right? Any day now?
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> Demand was high enough that I was told I'd have to pay over retail
Meanwhile the article says "the Ford F-150 Lightning delivered approximately 27,300 units in the US."
I wonder how much dealers lie about these things. They tell you that there's not enough of them to go around, then Ford cancels them, because of what exactly?
There were not enough to go around when it first came out. A couple years latter and everyone who wants one has one and there are plenty. This is normal for new cars - people who want the latest model line up to buy them as they come off the assembly line, then they all have one and sales drop.
> Meanwhile the article says "the Ford F-150 Lightning delivered approximately 27,300 units in the US."
In one year. Total was north of 100K
The depreciation though has meant that used EVs are a bargain now.
But yes, as usual, dealers killed an EV. Same story for so many EVs. They don't want to sell them. They saw their opportunity to milk and screw up a product they didn't want, because of scarcity, and effectively poisoned it.
Truth. EV's need less service and will kill the dealership model if adopted at scale.
Same here. I was told it would take a at least year on the waitlist. A month later I had 2 friends offer me their spot. They weren't impressed with the truck after a few reviews came out showing bad towing performance. I opted to buy a used ICE truck instead and have zero regrets.
imho, CT is horribly looking car with absolute disregard to any aesthetics. everything else is secondary. it has vibes of Aztec. one of the worst selling car ever.
I’m still shocked that the CT went into production.
I’m convinced that the CT could’ve become a legend if they had just done a limited run of like 500-1,000. At that level, nobody would care if it was poorly built or worked well as a truck. It’d just be a crazy collector item that would go to car shows.
The Cybertruck failed to sell because it is stupendously ugly. All other (technical) reasons are and were manufactured for political purposes. We're too itchy to stop picking at it, so we blame everything else we see and hear as an add-on reason, but really it was how it looked. Ford didn't cancel the electric pickup, they did even more research and decided the upcoming EREV F150 will eventually eat it's mother, so it is better to stop now.
This is a case study in the failure of product market fit.
There is tons of room for a low cost, high quality small electric or hybrid pickup in today’s market.
Ford Maverick sales have been exceptionally strong, setting records in 2025 with 155,051 units sold in the US of A, up almost a fifth from last year.
Tesla needs to make a product that people want, and continuing to try to sell one they don’t want just won’t work. Why not pivot and build the truck people are asking for? Otherwise, this program will fail.
They should’ve released the electric tuck for the segment that wanted the maverick. Even better would e been an electric lei truck, but I don’t know if you’d be able to stack enough batteries on one of their tiny li’l frames
I find it funny that car discussions here are so much busier than computer discussions. I wonder if over there at the mechanics forum they spend as much time discussing their laptops and ignoring the drills and screwdrivers
It's because people have a bone to pick and aren't actually invested in the car industry
I see many many F-150 lightnings in Canada (Quebec at least) used by construction people. Are there any country or more detailed stats on where F-150s were sold?
> Tesla is actively trying to hide its Cybertruck sales performance.
Have they tried cladding it in flat, steel panels, to get it off everyone's radar?
Why was it so ugly? The front lightbars execution looked cheap and toy-like. Expecting awesome designs for future Ford electric trucks lets go!
Looks are subjective, but what I don't understand is why they put an enormous vision obscuring frunk on it. The vehicle could have been considerably easier to maneuver in tight spots and safer to pedestrians at the loss of just some dubious storage space with no loss in bed capacity. Or it could have been the same length or even a little shorter and have a full 4x8 bed in the back.
If anything the vehicle was designed more for aesthetics than for practicality. There is no engine up front. There's no need for all of that space in front of the driver. It's entirely possible to engineer crash resistance without needing 4 goddamn feet of crumple zone. They could have had both a crew cab and a full size bed. Or the short bed but a more practical size.
The Lightning was done the way it was because they were able to re-use a lot of existing F150 tooling/etc and keep the R&D cost lower in the process.
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Similar complaint for the chevy silverado, why can't they just make it look just like the regular silverado?
because they want to avoid selling these things as long as possible!
Same reason they shot the Volt in the back before it even hit the production floor.
They want you to get made fun of by your foreman for driving it,
so they sell very few,
and they can shrug at the government, or whoever, and say “See? Toldja nobody wants any.”
Be it as it may, its aesthetics are so distinct it isn't for everybody. Also a big part of the target audience expecting to buy an utility vehicle have cheaper, proven and more practical alternatives. I guess the fact its not road legal in the EU doesn't help either whilst other Tesla models are quite popular there.
Just before its release there was some press about a few high ups at Tesla who urged Elon to make a “traditional” looking pickup alongside the cyber truck in case it was a flip, but Elon shut them down hard.
I’d be really interested to know if they’re going to do that.
The tech is incredible and will filter into all vehicles in a decade or so (48v, Ethernet instead of CAN, etc)
The steer by wire that adjusts how much the wheels turn based on speed is by far the most innovative part of the cybertruck
Any other tech? Because Ethernet and 48v don't sound "incredible." They sound "incremental."
They’re both things the legacy automakers have been trying to do for 10 or 15 years, but they just couldn’t pull it off without getting all the suppliers on board.
Both result in much lighter wiring, saving money.
The steer by wire is also very cool, but I don’t know enough to say if it’s justified on regular cars or a cost saving.
I love my EV, but for anything that needs the range they should have a super-efficient gas or diesel engine that can charge the batteries? It could be a much less complex engine.
That said, they big car makers only chased the government incentives, which was a great reason to have them.
Electric everything is the future. It is obvious (e.g. heat pumps, EVs).
I've owned a few F-150s over the last 20is years. It has the best fold up seats of any truck - entire back cabin floor is flat which is great for my dogs.
I rented a lightning on Turo and it was amazing - planned on getting one as my next truck. I would drive a CT depending on price but they just draw too much attention.
https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/check-out...
Like this?
> I would drive a CT depending on price but they just draw too much attention.
That's your deciding factor? Not all of the other things wrong with it and the brand?
For people discussing about truck sizes, here is a good web sites that highlight the history of trucks and how they the cab size and bed size did a 180 [0].
[0] https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history
I thought the F-150 was cancelled because their aluminum supply caught fire?
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69147125/ford-f-150-light...
And they announced the next version of the Lightning last month. People don't like that it isn't purely BEV, but I don't see the big deal.
https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/us/en/articles/2025/next-ge...
Ford swapping pure EV for generator backed EV seems quite sensible. There's some youtube saying such vehicles have been a hit in China https://youtu.be/rTT5Wq49Ss4?t=286
Absolute sales numbers are not the determinant of whether or not a product is sustainable. It's unit profitability. Ford was spending 17k per pickup on the battery alone. Larger sales flow can improve efficiency and unit economics but so can savvy engineering
I do not understand why we haven’t seen someone take a cybertruck and drop a new body on top. I see “put a model 3 into x” on YouTube all the time.
I would love to buy a cybertruck chassis with a VW bus or minivan on top (current political issues of Tesla aside).
The Cybertruck is a unibody, not body on frame, so it would be a lot of work.
Not only that, it's aluminum. The first bit of work would be giving it a real frame.
F-150 Lightning is better vehicle than Cybertruck - however Ford is a political company (not like Musk) as in the fortunes of Ford lie to an extent with politicians, unions etc
so hopefully ford can turn the F-150 into an Extended Range Electrical Vehicle
The Musk suite of companies all exist at least partly to promote Musk's politics and policies.
I'm as much of a Tesla Fan Boy that you can be but I have to say, the F-150 seems like a darn good vehicle and it's sad they're killing it. I especially like the V2X features.
I have one and it is an amazing vehicle. However, what they are planning with their new EREV system coming out in 2027 seems pretty interesting too. You get your usual battery only mileage and then a generator kicks in to recharge the battery for longer trips. I would imagine it wouldn’t be required in 95% of most people’s trips but it gives folks the option n long road trips or heavy tows.
I like it because it skips the usual hybrid approach of switching over to an ICE engine that drives your wheels in a different way and simplifies things immensely.
I remember when Elon promised that they would have an extended range battery option for the Cybertruck, but then realized the logistics of such a thing are extremely challenging and quietly dropped it.
I like the idea of easy additional range, but I use my frunk all the time and I don't think I'd give it up for additional range that would only benefit me two or three times a year. Along with additional things to maintain.
I don't think they're really killing it. The Lightning EREV is next, and my bet is it's almost identical to the BEV version but with an engine where the big beautiful frunk is now. Gives them something to sell the people who think they need big range numbers, but also gives them an easy path back to a full BEV. I kind of expect them to backpedal on the full cancelation and make both vehicles.
> my bet is it's almost identical to the BEV version but with an engine where the big beautiful frunk is now
Would be interesting how small and how cheap you can design a ~50kW genset to be (any smaller and you don't gain that highly coveted towing range). I don't think it's an easy task, you still need to integrate the crash compliant fuel tank, the emissions compliant exhaust system, water cooling for the engine, ect.
It's a pretty long BOM you're adding to an already expensive BEV, so you don't really have thousands of dollars of budget to add to the production cost.
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What's there to brag to be a fanboy of a company?
I keep looking for good deals on a R1T, CT, or Lightning in the used market. To be fair they’ve dipped but not enough to make an amazing deal.
Until you solve the tow range problem of electric trucks, it’s going to be hard to replace ICE-based vehicles.
I'm surprised S sales are so low. I would have thought they'd be much better than the cybertruck.
Cars are almost a niche form factor at this point (sadly). The Mercedes-Benz GLS vastly outsells the S-class, and the same holds true for the BMW X7 vs. 7-series.
Trucks in general are doomed to decline in sales.
Meanwhile they're so high value, organised criminals are stealing them from driveways and shipping them to middle east: https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/family-...
The Cybertruck was always the Homer car.
At a normal auto company the board would have fired Elon long ago. It's a shame too, because the right CEO could really turn Tesla around.
What evidence do you have of Tesla performing poorly as a whole compared to others in the space, and/or Elon not successfully growing the company at reasonable rates?
Tesla sales peaked in 2023
It also came in almost double the promised price. AWD costs $80K vs $50K as promised. In comparison Model 3 and Model Y pricing is bang on!
Range extended EVs make far more sense. Smaller cheaper batteries but range benefit of a gas tank. 90% of trips are less than 30 miles.
They are the worst of both worlds: not enough battery range to satisfy on long trips plus the weight and maintenance headaches of a gas tank and engine, especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range.
As a 2012 Volt owner I think EREV was a great idea in the 2010s given battery tech and networks at the time. In the 2020s, they seem a weak compromise that I wouldn't recommend to people.
> especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range
The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.
If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.
The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.
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& battery tech continues to evolve at high speed. China is already selling 1000v 5min charging evs. Semi solid state are shipping. 500+ mile range cars exist. EREV is going to be obsolete in a few short years, if it isnt already.
Motor generators allow for new engine form factors that are much smaller and lighter.
No shit. The CT is ugly to most consumers' sensibilities, and not a "real" truck to most consumers in the truck segment. It only survives as long as it serves Musk's ego. But that's ok -- Tesla is Musk's company and shareholders are happy with that status quo. Who else cares?
The Cybertruck isn't a "real" truck, but the vast majority of trucks never do real truck stuff anyway so that's not as big of a gotcha as people think. Hell, even F-150s and Dodge Rams and GMCs have stunted vestigial cargo beds now, they're more like minivan utes. How many trucks can you buy today that can fit a standard everyday 4x8 sheet and a load of 8' studs in the back and close the tailgate?
The CT is even worse on these metrics than common lifestyle trucks like the F150.
> but the vast majority of trucks never do real truck stuff anyway so that's not as big of a gotcha as people think.
The whole point for those non-utilty buyers is the badass, tough-guy branding. Would a whiskey-drinking, steer-wranglin', meat-smokin', spur-boot-wearin', woodshop-havin', permanent-5-oclock-shadow BAMF drive a electric CT? No. Therefore the CT fails at the one thing they expect of trucks due to its lack truck aura.
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Ford doesn't have a benefactor worth close to 1T usd...
Nether does Tesla
Right. Musk extracts value from Tesla shareholders, rather than the other way around.
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Are you suggesting that markets are rational?
Another truck thread on HN, another 150 bad comments about how trucks are pointless.
The GOP cancelled he Lightning - it's not irony that Trump is touring their plants a week or two after them cancelling the Lightning, while going all in on oil.
What sickened me is our quarry wanted to buy 5 Lightning F150s a few months after they came out and no dealer near me in DFW would even take an order because “the wait list is too long”.
Not surprising. The Cybertruck looks awful and scary, like something out of a nihilistic dystopian scifi film, maybe Mad Max. Hostile.
So what? They're from different companies with different product lines and economies of scale.
I mean, Cybertruck sold specially poorly, it's not a hard bar to surpass.
Ford sold more than 100K Lightnings. By many metrics that don't involve "compared to the best selling truck in America" that would be considered a successful run for a model.
I will take your word for it, I have no idea what the metric for "good" sales is.
Have you met truck guys? Truck guys call you gay for driving an EV. Yes yes, not all truck guys.
Do you know how pickups became the most popular vehicle in America? By not being appealing to just one type of guy. There is no "truck guy", there is "everyone." (well, yes, there are some anti-truck people, but they're niche and mostly online).
SUVs are the most popular body type in America, not pickups.
Pickups always top the "best selling model" list, but there are only a couple models of pickup and dozens of models of SUV. If you total up all the SUVs, they sell much better than pickups.
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It's sad to see how much of an echo chamber hackernews has become, used to see a a decent number of users engage in critical discussion and exchange perspective, now threads like this are just a gong show of self-reinforcement.
To give some weight to the above, this thread leans way too heavy into EVs being awesome and the main issue is "the people or industry" (misconceptions, misunderstanding, oil industry bad, etc) while backing that with "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO).
Here's some counter points to a bunch of claims made in this thread:
1) EVs are not as practical as this thread proposes:
- Battery degradation is still mostly an unsolved issue. 10% within 3 years is common on the latest models as reported by drivers, 15% within 5-7 years is also quite common. LFPs do better but provide considerably less ideal range. 20% degradation is the cliff, where degradation accelerates and lithium ion batteries are considered EOL. For cars that under ideal conditions do 500km - 550km that's not okay over the lifespan of the car where you want good performance in the 8 to 16 year range. In addition, average car on the road in the USA / Europe is at 12 years (many cars far above 12 years old). These batteries will be lucky to make it to 12 years so the average age of EV fleet will end up much lower than ICE (not great)(more disposable) unless you replace the battery. Battery replacements are $10k-$20k and poor warranties (4 years or less). Costs are not coming down for various reasons.
- Actual cold performance (under -10C) is not good, there's no way to resolve this without increasing ideal range
- Range is considerably lower at highway speeds than city driving due to energy dynamics, exactly the opposite of what users need. ICE cars have an advantage here because their power curve is non-linear and power output improves with RPM, RPM goes up with higher speeds in the final gear so efficiency improves for a portion of the curve.
- Charging when living in apartment complexes or in multi-home units is not competitive at all with filling up at a gas tank, time wise or cost (unless subsidized).
- Most people drive few miles daily but long road trips yearly, often to remote places without reasonable charging infra. Versatility of use cases is a core requirement for most car users and EVs are not competitive here.
2) Growth is not as significant and growth rate has significantly slowed down
- EV sales are not at 30%+ of all car sales world wide as someone proposed in this thread claiming China is at 50%. China is at 50% NEV, which stands for new energy vehicle and makes up hybrids, BEV and EREV. EREV + hybrids are 40% of sales in China. That means BEVs are only at 30% of total which is what the rest of the world considers EV. World can't be at 30% EV sales itself as the rest of the world is far behind this sales % compared to China.
- China is pushing higher EVs not due to tech superiority but for energy security for obvious reasons, i.e. a lack of traditional energy independence and rising geopolitical risk
- Subsides have played a huge role in the growth and removal of subsidies will depress sales growth more
3) "rest of the world is winning the race" (FOMO)
- No one has won this race because the tech is not technically sufficiently superior to the currently available. This will change when solid state batteries become common place, but the problems with the tech are hard with a long tail of issues so that's still many years away from being widely rolled out.
This list is not exhaustive. Moving on.
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Cybertruck is a gimmick. And the fad has passed. No wonder they're not selling well.
And they don't age well. Most of the ones around here are starting to look... grimy. Or dingy. After just a couple of years. It's a poor advertisement for itself.
And, yeah, then there's cultural eye-rolling. It's really the only vehicle I hear people openly mock when they see one... And that's not a Tesla/Elon thing entirely, since people don't have the same reaction to other Tesla vehicles.
I swear, Telsa makes cars for gamers. If you're not in this demographic, it's not for you. Ford, GM, everyone needs to stop emulating Tesla. Practical people do not want this.
Unfortunately other automakers see this as the pinnacle of interior engineering; swoon over this and try to pull a "LETS REMOVE ALL OF THE BUTTONS, ITS WHAT CONSUMERS WANT" maneuver.
All consumers really need/want is an affordable, repairable, minimalistic and simple vehicle. What automakers are shoving down their throats is touch screens, animations, ridiculous LED light displays, etc. Then they wonder why electric sales suck.
My anecdata feeling from all the Tesla owners I know is that they stole customers wanting affordable, repairable, etc. from Japanese manufacturers and they stole customers who were luxury car buyers (Ford, GM, etc. weren’t even competitors) willing to forego some luxury for the EV.
Short term Ford thinking again, that’s why they’re losing to Tesla.
If the Lightning OUTSOLD Tesla, is that really losing to them? Feels to me like an indictment of the scale that Tesla actually operates: an order of magnitude less than the big car makers. If Ford declares a truck that sold better than CT as a failure, it's because for their size it didn't sell enough. If that lesser number IS enough for Tesla, they're simply not a player in the same league as Ford.
> If the Lightning OUTSODE Tesla
This reflects a very common pronunciation of syllable-final Ls in English, called a vocalised L, but I've never seen it reflected in spelling in such a way. Very cool!
I'm extremely curious - did you go for that spelling as an intentional stylistic variation, or was it a typo reflecting your usual pronunciation?
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The Tesla model Y is the best selling car in the world.
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I would gladly own a Cybertruck if prices come down.
Approximately 100k for a truck of any type is ridiculous.
I'm sure the usual detractors will be here to whine "Electrek is biased against Tesla!"
To which I would ask: Is it "bias" because they simply report on Tesla frequently? Would it be "less biased" if they ignored Tesla? Obviously Electrek can't simply invent positive press for Tesla to report on.
Putting that aside though. The Cybertruck by all measures has been an abject failure. Its production run was so limited that insurance companies refused to cover it [1] and the NHTSA took something like two years just to crash test the thing due to how few of them there were on the road.
Combine that with 10 fucking recalls for absolutely horrific safety issues [2] and the company making the batteries taking a 99% slash in its $2.8 billion dollar contract [3] the thing is a complete travesty
[1] https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/insurance...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/home/electric-vehicles/every-tesla-cybe...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/tesla-cyb...
Fred Lambert (Electrek founder) was pro-tesla and was using his site to get a huge number of referral credits. Then Tesla changed the rules on that referral program.
That's what triggered the beef. Fred sold all shares, took down all the pro-tesla articles, and posts nearly exclusively only negative tesla articles since.
Seems both parties were/are within legal rights, but it is clearly bias.
Literally the only people who can think that this dude is anywhere remotely objective is if you are already a Tesla hater; he posts qualifications in every title and always adjusts the wording and tone to be negative. Every Electrek's take on an article is him describing how he warned everyone about the Elon/Tesla heel turn as you laid it out. It screams confirmation bias but since he isn't a journalist there's no code of ethics he's bound to follow.
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Elecdrek's bias against Tesla is only surpassed by its gushing over any/everything China.