Comment by afavour
2 days ago
Looks like a sensible turning down of the Cybertruck aesthetic into something that looks good.
That said, the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these. Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls. Tesla has torched their engineering reputation lately and this page is making a lot of promises about revolutionary things.
> what glued panels fall off
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
Lotus did this on their chassis not because it was cheap, but because it allowed them to use lighter, thinner aluminum which would have been ruined by welding. It was almost certainly not cheaper than welding, they had to add little protrusions that kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart, which is what made for the best bonding. They went to a lot of trouble to make this process work, and it resulted in one of the best sports cars of all time in terms of pure driving experience.
Tesla has very different reasons for doing what they did on the cybertruck. It's very much a form over function. Lotus has always been function over form (to a fault, in terms of their financial position).
> kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart
You can add glass microspheres to adhesives to guarantee bondline thickness. It's often done nowadays whenever you have different metals meeting with a glue bond because it keeps them electrically isolated, preventing galvanic corrosion.
So? My Silverado had wheel flairs attached with adhesive. This is extremely common.
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> Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
It's also way more expensive to issue a recall on a million cars than to do it on a thousand cars.
Christian von Königsegg mentioned in a radioshow (Sommar i P1, Swedish) a while back that the reason he got into luxury cars is that it was what he could afford having the mechanic skills and time but not a heap of research or automation money.
That is the norm in all "sporty" stuff. Expensive car/motorbikes/bicycles use light alloys that wear out much faster than heavier, cheaper materials
Most cars have glued joints and body panels these days.
The issue isn't glue, its that parts are falling off.
> Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls.
Sound advice for people looking for a practical car. But if you have Lambo money who cares? I have never seen a supercar described as reliable.
People with lambo money generally also want a car that doesn't fall apart constantly AND rapidly lose its value.
If you care about the car not rapidly losing value, you definitely don't have lambo money and you're too poor to be dabbling in supercar silliness.
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No people with lambo money want what’s the coolest and will Make them look coolest. Their mental ability is that of a 12 year old with tons of money.
All supercars fall apart constantly and rapidly lose their value.
Er, is that not what Lambos do?
I always heard they were a pain to get serviced with long wait times. Not sure how well they hold their value either.
This type of vehicle isn't intended to drive at speed, at least not very far. It's targeted at collectors who will park it in a garage with their other supercars. It's a status symbol with wheels, not transportation or even a toy for track days. (And I don't mean that as a criticism, there's nothing wrong with wealthy people buying collectibles.)
> (And I don't mean that as a criticism, there's nothing wrong with wealthy people buying collectibles.)
there's a whole lot of systemic issues with wealthy people buying low-poly cars to their collection.
Don't make fun of the Delorean. Or The Thing.
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What systemic issues?
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It’s not premium enough for collectors. I could see plenty of tech people buying one as a daily driver that they also take to the track though.
$250k deposit for the mid tier? They’ll be in some Saudi collections for sure.
Everyone is talking about the Cybertruck, but both the 3 and the Y have plenty of engineering problems as well. I believe both cars are listed as below-average reliability by CR.
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.
I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
Early Model 3/Ys built in the US were unreliable. The ones built in Shanghai, though, are excellent. Berlin is somewhere in the middle.
FWIW, I'm into my fourth year of (Chinese-built) Model 3 ownership and it's been rock solid, the only services so far were to replace the air filter and wipers.
Several countries have stats that show a few year old Teslas as by far the least reliable cars. Germany for one. Sure, let's say yours is different, but these stats doesn't lie:
https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2026/
Ooh, and tires I hope! Mine eats tires.
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Kind of a silly question but I want to be sure I’m piecing together a fair picture: both of those are five minute tasks you do yourself outside the auto parts store / driveway, right?
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So many things you just said are wrong. The control arms are 100k mile parts, and you can easily replace them with Unplugged Performance versions for under $1k.
And I have no idea what kind of driving he's doing to spend 2-3k$/y . I got Front Upper Control Arms replaced under warranty, exactly once, in the lifetime of my 2019 M3 (also Fremont-built). I do a yearly inspection just to catch issues before they have a chance to become really problematic, but for the past 4 years I've always been told that "the car's underside is just perfect, there's nothing wrong with it".
Would you like to see the bills I got from Tesla? I've shared them before and I'm happy to do it again.
(Also my Tesla is 74.5k miles, so nowhere near 100k)
-edit-
I was a victim of misinformation from my local EV repair shop.
https://www.dormanproducts.com/pages/products/oe-fix/article...
The prices you are talking about are incorrect but there are 3rd party parts now.
> My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
This is less about EVs vs ICEs and more about Toyota's engineering quality vs Tesla's engineering quality, which is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Homer Simpson's barbecue pit.
I should note that I didn't mean to imply it was inherent that EVs were less reliable, but rather, that engineering mattered and Tesla's engineering always had underdeveloped parts.
Hey now. Homer’s BBQ pit was a work of art, built through pure passion of emotion.
That was my first thought, Cybertruck: The Car. But then it drove up a wall and stopped on the ceiling and flew down. That was awesome. I'm sure it will be a nightmare to own.
> glued panels fall off at speed
Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.
Hardly a concern when you can't afford one.
> revolutionary things
Even if they make this work, what exactly is it revolutionizing?
Every generation of high-dollar sports cars has had something you could point to and say "that was way ahead of its time" or "they pioneered that." A few examples: fuel injection in the 1950s, variable valves and CFD the 1980s-1990s, dual-clutch transmissions in the 2000s, hybridization and electrification more recently.
You cannot tell me with a straight face that 20 years from now, my commuter will be outfitted with cold-gas thrusters and fans sucking it into the pavement.
Supercars have always been gaudy playthings for the wealthy. I think the difference is that Tesla doesn't even pretend the Roadster represents anything else.
It's what we have collectively dreamed of for decades: a flying car. The things you mentioned are what I'd call implementation details of what boils down to a box with four wheels and a steering wheel.
This isn't anything practical. It's just cool. Like a hoverboard. Or landing on the moon.
Brake by wire and steer by wire are the obvious ones.
Though they have not confirmed it, it’s basically a given it has teslas new networking, and is 48v which both lead to vastly less wiring (lighter, cheaper)
ALL of those things will be in every automobile within 10 years.
> Brake by wire and steer by wire are the obvious ones.
There are 20 year old family sedans with brake by wire. Unless you're referring to EMB specifically.
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I liked the rounded one lots better:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/NextGenT...
(just personal preference)
Looks good? The previous version looked incredible. This looks like the Delorean and the Cybertruck had an unwanted child.
at least the CyberTruck shipped.
9 years since the announcement of Roadster v2, people who paid 50k deposits are still waiting.
Time to up the promises, and ask for more $50k deposits for v3!
> the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these
I'd argue it's not the Cybertruck that is evidence of lack of care, but the fact that this car was promised 10 years ago and Elon took people's money to fund it. And now it's going to "fly" somehow and it's still years away.
I think the front view reminds me of the old lamborghini countach.
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Lamborgh...
Reminds me of the car they'd dress up to look like a Countach, the Fiero.
I just wanted to get one for $1mln I have laying somwhere, but now I'll wait for more reviews. Thanks for the tip.
Just buy it in 15 years when it has depreciated to nothing /s
Looks like a Fiero
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Tesla's most recent project was the largest flop in automotive history lol.
You mean Cybertruck? Hate it or not, there are bigger flops in automotive history. The history is long and broad.
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The latest car Tesla released, the cybertruck, was one of the biggest automotive flops ever, production is essentially halted, demand is non-existant.
Tesla announced and started taking reservations for their roadster TEN YEARS AGO. People who made reservations and paid the $50k-$250k cost are STILL WAITING.
And now Tesla has announced yet another vapourware car, with a controversial design, taking reservation money again.
If you fall for this, you are a fool.
Financial flop, maybe. I put down the pre-order fee on day one, then paid foundation series price for delivery and 2 years later it's still objectively the best car I could have for my family (space for toys, self-driving, safest truck on the road; not every family has these requirements). If they stop making it for financial reasons, that's fine, I'll have gotten my years of use out of it and hopefully someone else will have figured out how to put FSD on a production car.
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I don't hate Tesla either. I'm actually a bit disappointed knowing that I will never consider buying one for the rest of my life.