How common are these in the rest of America? I see them pretty often here in SF but assume it’s just a techie Elon stan thing.
I’m not in America, but they are fairly rare where I live (Canada). Like if I go for a drive in traffic on a commute, I maybe will see one or two at the very most. And it’s usually the same ones that I am seeing when I do see them.
I mean the market for a vehicle that’s >100k, looks like the truck you drew as a child when you were asked to draw a truck, that has almost zero utility and almost certainly has to be awkward as fuck to drive and park due to its width and size, I mean that market is right next to zero. My seven year old is pretty into them though.
Not super common where I live!
I see 1-2 a month, at most. Lots of other Teslas, but few people are buying Cybertrucks in the middle of the U.S.
I mean, Tesla employs a ton of people in þe Bay area. Þere’s a Tesla factory in Fremont, isn’t þere? Þere must be more Teslas per capita here þan anywhere else in þe world. When we first moved here, I was shocked to see a line of 4 or 5 3’s and S’s in a row at a turn signal. And Cyberturds, soooo many. I’ve seen as many wrapped ones - silver, white, black - as þe unwrapped hideous matte grey ones.
I don’t þink þe Bay area is at all representative of þe rest of þe US. Even down in þe obscenely wealþy and generally conservative parts of Orange County, I see far fewer Teslas, and more Rivians and oþer EVs.
Common enough in Seattle (but that may just be biased by how noticeable they are due to the incongruity of the shape).
Fiero wins again!
It might sometimes be on fire, but unlike a cybertruck you can put it out!
Man I LOVE the fiero… And I hate that I do.
I daily one, I know just what you are going though.
Man what a wonderful pile of pontiac shit it is.
You daily a fiero? Do you do the oil changes yourself? Which engine do you have? And did you or any previous owners change the gear ratios?
I love the fiero’s of people who know what they are doing with them. If I win the lottery I would get one and have it converted to electric.
I drive a 85 Gt, with the V6 but have 2 others as parts cars. No other owner has changed the ratios as I have standard transmissions in all 3 of them. I do most of my own work, oil on a fiero is no issue. Most recently I hit a deer and just finished changing parts and getting a new windshield in it (and added too many deer whistles).
I would like to convert one of the parts cars to electric, but the costs are kinda messed up.
Look up a Chevy spark EV, they were going for legit nothing a little while ago, might make a good donor car
Good idea, not many ever came here but should be cheaper then other options.
At least the Cybertruck makes sure you don’t need to buy a new car, by locking its doors. /s
Thank you, BYD.
aw shucks
More dangerous than the Pinto, too
The thing the Pinto was famous for, its fuel tank being in the rear and exploring, only killed 27 people according to the NHTSA. So pretty low bar.
Ford also voluntarily recalled 1.5 million of them and addressed the fuel tank issue that caused the problem.
“Fixing” the cybertruck would involve offering refunds scrapping them.
All that lithium sitting in storage lots, wasted. Tesla could save the CT with some sort of body kit conversion that tears it down to the frame and rebuilds it as a more traditional truck. It’ll still not be a great truck, but better than letting all those batteries rot.
The frame is unfortunately a piece of poorly designed garbage too, even ignoring the Whistling Diesel torture test. And you can’t make something that isn’t a cybertruck using it, because:
It’s not a traditional frame with a body built on top. It essentially is the cybertruck.
They could (but won’t) design a vehicle that isn’t ridiculous and offer cybertruck owners a rebate on trade in. Yank the batteries, motors, and anything else that can be reused and scrap the rest.
We used to have standards for our vehicles
This is actually really funny, because Ralph Nader literally started his activist career pointing out that they didn’t in 1965.
The book, critical of the automotive industry, argued that many American automobiles were generally unsafe to operate.
Auto manufacturers were eventually forced to add seatbelts and protection for roll-overs.
Nader’s book was cited as the reason to create what became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
When the original bill was passed,
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John William McCormack said the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was brought about by the "crusading spirit of one individual who believed he could do something: Ralph Nader.”
GMs president Alfred Sloane refused to install safety glass and boasted to investors: “GM doesn’t make cars, it makes money”.
He also had to modify the corvair he claimed was unsafe to cause it to do unsafe things… Nader is a piece of shit.
Oh totally, Nader is the piece of shit here…
In response to Nader’s criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader’s reputation. It “(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, ‘questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits’; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a ‘continuing’ and harassing investigation of him.”
Nader, on the other hand, literally took the money he won for GM’s harassment and intimidation and put it into a consumer protection organization.
Then
He went on to lobby for consumer rights, helping drive the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act, among others
You’re fucking delusional to pretend he was the bad guy in this situation.
If my fuel tank went exploring I’d be worried too
Capitalism turning electric vehicles into a horrible, unproductive, ugly symbol of right wing fascism is wild as shit to see in my lifetime.
I wish to say that while electric cars are better than ICE cars for the environment, their lifetime emissions especially if required infrastructure is taken into account is really high, and they aren’t as “green” as car manufacturers make them seem. It’s just an inefficient use of energy and space that requires massive amounts of polluting asphalt per person using that mode of transport.
This bullshit has been thoroughly debunked many many times.
Did you even read the article, because no.
Interestingly, the specific article cited is more making the case that all passenger cars are bad, and we’d be better off with e-bikes, transit, and walkable cities. i.e.: I don’t think hes saying 'EVs are worse than ICE," which is where the ‘lifetime emissions’ line usually goes. He’s saying “fuck cars, EVs not excepted.”
This is the reality many don’t accept.
We can’t everyone gets a private vehicle our way out of climate change.
We could if we got rid of wars, regulated environmental factors, and stopped letting rich people take private jets everywhere.
Car manufacturers promoting fascism are sadly a thing though. Ford loved Nazi ideology and let’s not even mention German brands.
Yeah, thats true.
… oh … oh dear, oh no.
That’s… no. No, don’t say that, VW, dear god.
Tbf it wasn’t VW, it was a Top Gear joke
Also Berlin to Warsaw in one tank is trivial so it wouldn’t be something to advertise anyway
Ok, thats… that makes more sense. I’ve not seen too much of Top Gear, but… that makes sense.
The skit was the the boys were going to make an ad for the new Volkswagen, this one was from Clarkson. It’s honestly hysterical
It kinda makes a lot of sense I feel that they’d fit together. You have a form of transportation that is dangerous enough that requiring government licensing is generally agreed to be desirable, meaning that if its the primary option, a government can effectively take away a person’s ability to participate in public life or make a living, and easily justify it on safety grounds. Cars are expensive, so a government can both funnel money to its partners in private industry by promoting them, and subsidize them for the populations it considers “desirable” as a means to seem like it has created abundance and luxury (see how how the VW bug came to be for example). And, a society built around cars is one that tends towards physical separation and isolation between people (because of space inefficient infrastructure and relatively quick travel outside of densely built areas), which promotes distrust of others. Thats not to say that cars are inherently fascist or that most people that promote them do so to benefit that sort of ideology, but that if I was some kind of fascist dictator seeking to control a population, Id probably want to push them into buying and relying on cars.
Wouldn’t fascists, to the definition, want a cohesive nationalistic society and identity? Fascists want a strong nation.
The Nazis promoted cars because nobody really had a car and they were coming out of a depression, they wanted to pump up their manufacturing industry for economic benefit and it was also a good excuse to build manufacturing capability for war. Cars were therefore very nationalistic, owning a car was good for Germany and German jobs.
Pushing for cars in most places does not benefit national industry, and pushes money and jobs offshore.
I feel like cars could only be potentially seen as a fascist tool if one were to ramp up national production of cars and tariff or ban imports of cars from other countries
Seems to me that it’s much easier to create a single cohesive nationalistic identity by destroying every other place where people can find identity. Which often involves groups of people interacting and finding ways to work together.
Bit like how people with few real life social connections are much more likely to fall into parasocial relationships.
Also a bit like the isolation step before the abuse starts.
Nice writeup!
Wouldn’t it be too late for that today because everyone already has access to cars? I mean more than the “brand” thing (they could probably do fascist sneakers and handbags for example).
Who could have possibly foreseen this?
Shhh!
What about datacenters in space??!! 😮😛!!!
They’ve moved on to mirrors in space now, after briefly experimenting with advertising on the moon which they gave up on when they realised no one would be able to see it.
Solar Roadways!!!
Also: !bulgroZ liah llA
I don’t get it ? It was designed so beautyfuuuARHEUD!.. …oh… …sorry, suddenly felt ill there for a moment. Okay, but if we look at the design philosophy of the Chassis, we see that the main lines leads our Eyes gently and smoo ht …uaRGHrgh …huh? …I mean its really not that baaADRGHUUDplft …HYyUDRHd … … …OKAY! …I get it I get it… enough… ffs…
Aesthetics wise, I used to think it kind of looked cool… when it was just a computer rendering with no exposure to conditions of the real world. In person all the flat and shiny but not like mirror-like surfaces mean that even the tiniest warp and defect is visible when the sun shines on it. Someone in my area has one ive seen a few times painted a somewhat matte black, which makes it even worse in that Ive been able to see fingerprints on it from across the street, and from a distance the colors of the windows and body blend together to look like some kind of featureless black monolith.
I really liked the concept art CD Projekt Red did for a CP77 version. The design itself isn’t all that bad, it just really doesn’t work for “In-Real Life 2024”.
I get that. The minimalist design is an antithesis to modern auto industrial design where subtle curves and swoops and curled body work are all over trucks these days. I always thought the extra curves were feminine and insulting to trucks marketed for heavy duty manly work. I agree with your observations on the cyber truck on every point. Still surprised it’s less successful than the Corvair though.
We’re going full circle
You wouldn’t know if from all the dumb fucks near me who have one.
Fun fact: the stainless steel body panels cannot effectively be repaired or refinished to insurance company standards, so if something should happen to even just cosmetically damage one of the main body panels, the entire vehicle is unrepairable and totalled.
This is one of several reasons why the things are extremely expensive and difficult to insure. And, of course, it tells you how to do your part in making them even more expensive and difficult to insure.
On the second part, why don’t you just leave peoples vehicles alone? I mean I dont like Nissans either, but I’m not out laying subtle hints to damage people’s property because I don’t like them. That doesn’t make anyone sympathetic to a cause, it makes them more steadfast for whatever you are against. Absolute 1d thinking.
Not saying you should damage either, but are Nissans also impossibility dangerous to anybody else out in public? I am pretty sure if a Cybertruck drove into a pedestrian even in modest speed it would total both.
Half of the panels on a cybertruck are just stuck on with glue and can be peeled off by hand.
It doesn’t seem like something all that hard to fix, they are falling off on their own already. If only they invented some mechanical way to hold car parts together instead of glue…Hm. Maybe forming some kind of"flange" with holes in it on the edges of the body panel that you could use to secure it with a fastener of some sort … like clips and screws! Perhaps even plastic “push fasteners” that are easy to remove with a flat screwdriver!
Brb, going to patent this original idea that’s never been done before.
I’d be more worried about the aluminum frame. Aluminum under cyclical stress will fatigue and eventually catastrophically fail. It’s why airlines have to constantly test aluminum parts so they can retire or replace them before they fail. It’s only a matter of time before cyber trucks start breaking in half while on the highway. It’s almost like there’s a reason no car manufacturers have made unibody frames out of aluminum before…
Your engineering knowledge needs some work. Most vehicles today have aluminum sub frames and suspension links. Aluminum only fatigues if stresses are beyond the design threshold. Whick is exactly why planes fly millions of miles, and are really only retired because of fuel efficiency.
[laughing in DeLorean]
I saw a swasticar in Stavanger the other day.
Had to look up the Edsel to see what a shifter in the middle of the steering wheel would look like.
I mean … I don’t hate it…
Half of cars today have push-button shifters anyway, and the steering wheel is kind of a fun and novel place to put them.
It’s definitely more intriguing than my boring airbag steering wheel.
Dude, the Edsel didn’t even have seatbelts.
I’ve been driving for years and I’ve never used my airbag even once. What a waste of money.
On the next car I design, the shifter will be located in the trunk. Just to keep things interesting.
I wish we had more variation in car designs but I suppose it would make licencing difficult. I’d like it if we could drive with foot pedals, push down to accelerate and twist left and right to turn like how it works on an aircraft. Then you could drive hands-free.
The only thing nuttier might be door release handles under the floor mats.
So you own a Tesla, I see.
Nah, but the crash after which four people burned to death while talking to the 911 dispatcher because they couldn’t open the doors happened just outside my city.
I’ve been in cars with electronic doors and the emergency latch is always super obvious, brightly coloured, and in one case glowed in the dark. For some reason Tesla feel the need to hide it.
Style points…
How about sticking it somewhere between the engine and transmission? When operating it in the winter, your fingers would stay nice and warm.
Maybe because it can’t survive a trip to the carwash
What’s that? OTA software update couldn’t fix that?!
