Comment by bilsbie
1 day ago
I really thought it would have had a lot of potential for cheaper manufacturing. No paint process is huge. And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
1 day ago
I really thought it would have had a lot of potential for cheaper manufacturing. No paint process is huge. And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
The steel exoskeleton idea didn't survive to production. The production truck has a mix of aluminum castings and welded steel unibody, with the stainless panels just acting as the skin. Maybe they bring some structural rigidity, but not like the origami plan that was originally discussed.
The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.
It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.
It’s staggering how much money they wasted because Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts. It was years late because stainless steel is so much harder to work with, especially when it has so many complicated geometries, and every one of those delays was a chance for him to say “maybe the people I hired for their expertise know something I don’t” rather than “I’m the boss, make it work”.
They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
Part of the delay was also the 48V architecture. So in addition to the obvious new things like stainless steel panels they also had to redesign mundane parts like window motors and interior lighting. The Cybercab is also using a 48V architecture so even though they've never talked about it being an R&D platform maybe they'll retcon it that way.
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Real experts said reusable rockets were impossible ...
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> They could’ve done something like the Slate truck a decade earlier.
They could have Roadstered it.
Buy Ford Transit 350 "gliders", work out how to make them FWD, RWD, or AWD using your own transaxles and batteries. Pickup, van, or just a bare chassis-cab to go to a coachbuilder, it doesn't matter.
The Transit has been around for 61 years. Sticking electric motors in it that you already have is a no-brainer.
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> Musk didn’t want to listen to real experts
"real experts" are not always correct. A bet a lot of people told him that the original Teslas were a bad idea or SpaceX would never...wait for it...take off.
But sometimes people win when they push the boundary of what might work, push the problems to the surface and then solve them.
I don't like the guy but you can't really deny his ethusiasm and single-mindedness.
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I mean once you buy the tooling, it’s still probably cheaper to produce stainless steel trucks than paint normal steel. I agree on everything else though
If that’s true it would only be the case if you could amortize that tooling across enough vehicles. Selling 10k-20k per year from a production line planned with a capacity of 125k per year won’t get you there.
Why?
Steel is heavy, you have to paint the frame anyway, people like cars with colors, the steel has to be maintained too (scratches etc.).
Not really. Stainless is expensive and brittle. It's a lot more work to form complex panels out of stainless, and then they're essentially scrap if there's even a tiny amount of damage. A small dent will start a crack.
At least it delivered on being bulletproof unless you shoot it.
It's 100% bulletproof except for the parts it's made out of.
Would be interesting to know how much the useless steel body detracts from the range compared to a lighter material.
Even more interesting would be how much the steel hurts the tons-to-orbit in the Starship.
Painted piece of plastic gonna be cheaper than sheet of stainless steel. Stainless is significantly more expensive than typical materials used on car, which would be normal steel or plastic depending on panel.
Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).
Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper
"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about
They developed, at great cost, the process used for the cars with the giga press and the plastic. It would've been a fine process for an inexpensive truck.
Speaking out of my ass here, but I would not be surprised if it's much cheaper to paint cheap stamped steel, compared to using more expensive stainless steel that's treated to remove all surface marring/scarring from the stamping process. Those panels don't come out all brushed from the metal presses...
Stainless steel is far harder to work than regular steel. There is no way that process was cheaper.
What happens if you scrape your fridge getting it into the kitchen?
You go to the DIY shop and buy a tin of white spray paint.
What happens if you scrape your brushed stainless fridge getting it into the kitchen?
Well, now you get to either live with it, or come up with some really clever ideas on polishing out the scratch and then sanding it back to disguise it with the rest of the surface which will never really look right.
Stainless would be standard on economy cars, and the Cybertruck would be painted so as not to look like a Ford Pinto.
Wait, not sure I understand you. Where are stainless panels used on economy cars?
Not sure I follow your ford pinto comment either.
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I don't think the poor sales is primarily due to the cost - it's just a design with limited appeal.
The original design is what gave them millions of pre-orders, it was the reduction in range and increase in cost that made most people cancel those pre-orders.
A $100 fully refundable deposit is not a very high bar of commitment. I suspect many of those reservations were non-serious.
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I wonder how many people liked the design vs tolerated it? If Ford offered a cybertruck trim on the F-150 without changing the price would people buy it?
No doubt there is some demand for an "out there" design, but I'd have to guess that the projected $40K price was itself a large part of the attraction.
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The design looks much better rendered on screen than in real life.
I thought the early images looked amazing but I see them all the time in real life (a few people in my neighborhood own them) and they just look so stupid on the road.
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A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper.
A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.
Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.
Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.
Bending stainless steel requires special tooling and strategies to overcome its tendency to work harden and high springback.
The folded steel exoskeleton has no potential, it was a bad idea that was abandoned. It was always going to crack at the folds.
This idea was never going to work out. In my opinion Slate have got a far more sensible approach with their replaceable body panels.
I live in the UK so I'll likely never be able to get one, but I'd love a car I can just buy new panels for and wrap them with minimal tools.
> No paint process is huge
Replacing a well-known manufacturing stage with a completely unproven one for no good reason is rarely a good idea.
Same. Initially I was optimistic about the Cybertruck because I though “flat metal panels and no paint is going to make both manufacturing and repairs so much easier and cheaper”.
Paint has been well studied. We know how to do it really cheap and automated these days. Cheap is relative. I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed. But on a scale of factory and for how long it will last, that's cheap.
Flat metal is more expensive than curved metal. Curved metal, you design the curves to help support the stress points: you can get by with thinner sheets. Flat metal requires thicker heavier more expensive sheets of sheet metal in order to be strong enough.
Curved metal also lets you design the whole thing to be more aerodynamic. which is an important consideration even with something as un-aerodynamic as a truck.
> I'm sure that we're talking tens of millions of dollars to get all the equipment needed.
Painting cars really is a hugely optimised process that materially affects performance characteristics such as weight.
Its very difficult to appreciate just how many cars are made worldwide wide, but just think if a completely optimised fully robot optimised line cost a billion dollars, in only needs to process a few million cars to fully pay itself off. Just look at how much a “paint option” costs. Enough people paying for a premium colour would completely pay for the entire production painting line.
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They built that truck backwards and upside down. The single-piece forged aluminum frame was basically impossible to repair and brittle. Typical truck frames flex, they're part of the suspension. For small accidents, the frame can be bent back. The CT would just crack, requiring extensive aluminum welding to fix which is waay harder than welding a steel frame.
I thought this is not relevant tbh.
Either you have a modern expensive car and insurance which knows how to handle it properly, or it doesn't matter anymore and you got to a cheap car doctor.
There were no flat panels. That was a sales pitch. In reality, a slight curve to a panel adds so much strength that it can be made considerably lighter/cheaper than a flat panel of sufficient strength. Flat panels also tend to dent inwards very easily, which is not a good look for a car. Then there is the issue of thermal expansion. A pre-bent bit of metal will expand in a predictable way. A dead-flat panel could buckle in multiple unexpected ways.
I had a jeep wrangler once. The window was "flat" but not if you looked at its reflection. There was an almost imperceptible but complex curve, no doubt for strength.
Repair will be easier and cheaper? :D
As the DeLorean community will tell you, repairing unfinished stainless steel to aesthetically pleasing levels is almost impossible.
Take a piece of tinfoil, crumple it, then try to uncrumple it to its factory finish.
Repairing painted bodywork is easy and cheap: hammer it to get a rough shape, apply fillers, then paint & polish to factory finish. Simple as.
how you repair steel panel and also make it look nice ?
...you don't. You replace it in whole. You can't use filler to mask small dents and paint over it, if you want it to look as before, you have to pretty much replace it.
A steel panel would we repairable with the same tools a curved panel is. You can pull out dents without filler - filler is for fiberglass.
I think they are mostly not doing paint going forward. CyberCab also doesn't use paint, but uses cheaper materials than stainless steel.
That original process was what should have led to lower prices. Instead, they couldn't do it and had to resort to gluing steel panels onto a body-on-frame design which is much more expensive. They still managed to keep it just as hideous, so kudos there I guess.
I doubt that replacing painted regular steel with fancy stainless steel is going to be cheap. Paint is expensive, but so is stainless steel. I also can't imagine the "origami" technique to be cheaper than stamping, the reason they suggested that is because their fancy stainless steel can't be stamped. And in the end, Tesla couldn't even do it, so they glued the parts on...
I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.
In that way the Slate pickup seems to be the truck Cybertruck promised to be
Slate hasn’t made a single delivery yet, so in that sense it’s definitely the truck Cybertruck promised to be.
> originally they were talking about
Elon talks about a lot of things. Consider if you might be part of the media ecosystem that enables that strategy.
They were also talking about how it could become a boat. All the hype in the world eventually has to meet reality.
Elon promised a lot but delivered almost nothing when it comes to the Cybertruck.
A “truck” that’s can’t haul, tow, or offroad is a very interesting product decision. Right up there with a two-person taxi.
It’s like they completely forgot the “what do people need” phase of product management.
Two-person taxi is actually reasonable for the modal journey, but absolutely doesn't cover all use cases or accessibility.
The cybertruck was an early example of what someone on bsky called the "everyone is twelve now" theory: it looks like it was drawn by a small boy's idea of "cool", with zero further thought.
There's a comparison that's been making the rounds on social media for a while.
In once panel, there's the Cybertruck whose owner bragged about it carrying a large round hay bale (weighs around 1,500lbs) with the suspension looking like it was about to die. Next to it is a shot of a circa-1980 Ford F250 carrying three of the same bales and sitting perfectly level. TBF, the F250 probably had air bags in the rear suspension, but still...
That thing is only a "truck" because they decided to call it that.
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Somehow everything turns into a misdirection with Elon, where failing to innovate yields ridiculous distractions. When the Cyberjunk was clearly a poor product, they pivoting to "doubling as a boat" and being bullet "proof". And also you can play shitty ports of video games, awkwardly, on your in-car screen.
At some point this gimmick misdirection nonsense has to stop working.
Oh look, if you have a transport-truck sized massive compressor in your garage and use 100kWh to spend a day filling a tank, your ComingSoonNow(TM wink) Roadster can do some silly stuff if you dedicate much of the interior to a giant explosion hazard.
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There's a pattern here: when an Elon Project is successful, he jumps in with Elon innovations, like cyber truck. The next example that will follow this pattern is building a rocket that's too big for orbital payloads, but takes 22 refueling flights to get beyond orbit.
What do you mean too big for orbital payloads? Mass to low earth orbit is what matters, which starship is well optimized for. You could always put a tiny third stage on there to go places, but that is back to the apollo style yeeting a tiny amount of mass somewhere else and would not help with getting serious tonnage to the moon and mars
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> And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.
It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.
At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.
The original wasn't what shipped. From what I read the cheaper easier process wasn't, which isn't unusual.
It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.
Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
Cheap hackable electric work truck (I imagine chassis with basic cabin that you can expand in various ways, like the EU van options have like half a dozen chassis) would be great but it's not something Tesla ever wants to make
>Why would Tesla make "cheap" ? That's not their customer base.
95% of their cars sold have been in the $30k to $60k range. They have long been the best bang for the buck electric car (in the US, since BYD isn’t allowed.
Isn't "hackable electric work truck" a bit of an oxymoron?
Just because the big batteries are so dangerous?
Who are their customer base? Musk seems to have decided to fire his actual customer base, but getting a new one more ideologically aligned with him hasn't quite worked out.
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https://www.xkcd.com/37/
I'm curious to see how the Slate trucks work out: https://www.slate.auto/en
I know its not fashionable to have such pesky concerns as priority in US, but pedestrian safety was simply non-present, hence it was banned all over Europe. Not missing it here, not missing that fugly ego whim of a sick man at all.