The point of the design wasn't to be pretty, but to be different, edgy, and look rugged.

But they made a mistake by announcing the design long before they were able to produce it. By the time they had built it, the hype cycle was over, and the design was already old news.

It was also supposed to be bulletproof (presumably looking like a tank), but in reality, it turned out to be a brittle underbody with glued-on panels that were peeling off.

At the $35K starting price that Elon hyped, it could have been excused as a utilitarian design. But Tesla instead released a beta-quality product at a luxury price.

The revolutionary new cheap Tesla batteries that were supposed to make that price point possible turned out to be as real as all the other stuff Elon promised.

Not really. The point of the design was a single sheet of heavy steel folded origami style into an exoskeleton that the powertrain, suspension and other bits all hanged off of.

That completely novel design would have been neat to see, and perhaps worth the required aesthetic. But that was not to be.

They dropped the origami single steel panel, then they abandoned the whole idea of an exoskeleton design and opted not for a body on frame like all good pickup trucks, but a unibody that puts them in the Ford Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz category, light duty, but at 4 times the price with a pretty awful aesthetic, and from a company whose owner has become a pariah among decent people.

> a company whose owner has become a pariah among decent people

That's the "cherry on top" of this dung-heap.

In 50 years cybertrucks are going to be worth something, just because they're different enough to be recognizable. Same as the DeLorean.

The DMC-12 has a classic movie attached to it. If it didn't, most every single one of them that exists today would be in the scrap heap.

Instead of a movie the cyberpunk is attached to a highly polarizing political conflict, which ignoring the nuance, is highly memorable.

I hazard you that there's little to no market for things that are solely "highly memorable," especially politically polarizing ones. Most people don't want to own a Hitler Youth knife, for example.

There is actually a market for HJ knives.

Sure; emphasis on "most people."

But in this case, what’s interesting is if there is a market, not what “most people” will do.

I predict that in 50 years, the cyber trucks in mint condition will be worth a decent amount of money. It is the first of its kind(electric SUV).

It’s still a crappy car.

A better comparison would be the AMC Gremlin.

The DeLorean was not a particularly good car, but it featured prominently in a movie series that remains a cultural touchstone.

The AMC Gremlin was just endearingly ugly. Today, it has a bit of a cult following, but that has not made it a particularly valuable car.

This style is coming back — Rivian R3X looks eerily similar, just with more even proportions.

Teslas are more locked down software-wise than iOS, so their worth in half a century should be around whatever scrap metal is going for then.

I hear ya, but I think 50 years is wildly generous. I give it 20 years before they're entirely gone except for a few novelty chasers. It's the Yugo of the 21st century, except at luxury prices, actually, then maybe like combining a Yugo with the Cadillac Cimarron or the Pontiac Aztec. Garbage in every way that won't survive a human generation.

> In 50 years cybertrucks are going to be worth something, just because they're different enough to be recognizable. Same as the DeLorean.

Nobody would know anything about the Delorean if it weren't for its starring role in one of the most famous movie franchises ever.

I wonder will they run or be fixable in 50 years. Not just the big battery, but every other such component too. In the end DeLorean is relatively simple car and you could even install different engine in it if you have to.

Hardly will be worth more than just plonking that $ into an investment account and letting it accrue interest for 50 years.

Of course, most collectible categories underperform the market. But people like to collect things.

DeLoreans are rare (only 9,000 were built).

Had it been the exoskeleton design they promised, or even a classic truck body on frame construction, and had they actually built it from a few large "origami" folded structural metal panels, all the things they said it would be at the outset, that kind of novel design would have made the aesthetic at least interesting.

Instead, they failed at the exoskeleton design. They failed at the origami several large folded panels structure. And they kept the ugly design that those novel approaches to car building led to, but slapped it on a barely-a-truck unibody that can't compete with any other real trucks in its price range, in any dimension, and then rushed it out with serious quality issues.

A $100K unibody truck with silly aesthetics that don't actually separate it at any fundamental level from actually useful trucks, well, that just doesn't work at any scale that could make Tesla whole on the investment, much less provide them some edge in the market.

So, it's a novelty for people who enjoy getting flipped off a lot. I especially love pulling in front of them on I280 and slowing to a crawl while flipping the bird out my sunroof--and it brings extra joy when those "alpha males" have their families along.

I agree with your overall point but please don’t fuck around in traffic. You are putting peoples lives at risk just for your own egos sake.

The design was meant to be functional. Tesla wanted to use stainless steel that doesn't need paint, which is a significant part of the car cost.

But stainless steel is much milder than normal steel, so you need to use thicker panels. But thicker panels are more difficult to stamp. So why not then double down on thickness, and make the panels structural? It makes them impossible to stamp, so double down on the "flat" design.

Well, it didn't work out as intended. The whole flat panel look ended up being a total gimmick.

The structural panels never happened. That idea was shitcanned when they dropped the exoskeleton design for a unibody. Now the extra heavy panels are a stupid vestige of a design that never came to fruition. The truck is a damned unibody auto structure, hardly worthy of being called a truck, much closer to a Hyundai Santa Fe than a Ford F-150 and worse for having to carry all those heavy bolt on panels that do absolutely nothing for the truck functionality of the vehicle.

It sounds like a few software projects I've worked on. Incorrect base assumptions and not swapping out the components that were made unwieldy by those assumptions not reflecting reality.

> why people pay around 100k for something so ugly. Maybe just to show off that you can have one

Showing off has been a well understood reason for buying luxury cars from the very beginning of automobiles (when they were all luxury).

The CT just happens to be on the extremely ugly (or unconventional looking) end of the spectrum.

It was supposed to be a novel structural design with an affordable price tag. Instead it's a unibody with heavier than needed panels slapped on it. Might as well be a Ford Maverick for its value as a pickup truck.

It's an Edsel.

How many of you all have ever seen or even heard of Edsel? That's CyberTruck in half a century. It's not going to be remembered by most, much less collected. Those who do remember it will scoff like we do Edsels and would have done for that coked out* car maker, John DeLorean's monstrosity, had it not got a starring role in one of the greatest movies of all time and the franchise that followed.

* To be fair, we were nearly all coked out in 1975 :D

> It was supposed to be a novel structural design with an affordable price tag

Who buys a car for its "novel structural design"?

Most buy a car for some combination of transportation/utility, comfort/performance, and social signaling, in varying proportions depending on their needs/circumstances, desires, and personality.

The CT's appeal seems to lean heavily on the last 2 of those characteristics, since as you point out, a common pickup truck would be more functional and far cheaper.

The way I imagine it, it was designed to look like a wireframe vector graphics video game tank, a la battlezone 1980. The design is based on the sci-fi “rule of cool”, the origami exoskeleton is retconned justification that turned out to be too tall of an ask for Elon’s engineers.

It’s subjective. I think it’s currently ugly but subtly so. I think with a few changes (that I can’t articulate) it would be a pretty good looking vehicle.

I mean, I'd buy it if it was like $5000, a compact car, and the person running the company wasn't an unlovable sociopath. Some people like the janky cheap aesthetic.

But $100k for a car like that is a complete insult to good taste. It'd be like selling a luxury 1.5m container home. The low price tag is the entire point of the jank aesthetic. You're supposed to be communicating that you reject the idea of "keeping up with the Joneses" and wear the aesthetic imperfections of the lower economic class as a badge of honor.

Of course, as with every cultural movement of any nuance, real world Dr. Eggman completely missed the point here and shat all over everything with his tone-deaf Rich Frat Boy With Asperger's schtick.

I think they look super cool. I’ve thought that since they were first announced. Just the coolest looking vehicle I’ve ever seen. My kids go “look dad, a Cybertruck!” Every time one passes.

I bought a Toyota Sequoia around the time they first started rolling out, but seriously considered the Cybertruck but it didn’t seem like it’d be able to haul a travel trailer as well as we’d have liked.