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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Are you really going with the "they made it ugly on purpose to avoid selling too many of them" defense? Come on just because this is tesla doesn't mean you need to be realistic. It's a multiplia, someone had a brain fart and we end up with a fugly. It happens.

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What? Its like a delorien and an el camino had a baby. Its glorious! I think makes me wan reread all my favorite cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk was supposed to be a fictional dystopia.

But such a stylish dystopia! Its kind of like how preppers talk excitedly about the breakdown of civilization. Some part of them wants that to happen because they envision it as a world they are more suited to survive in, an in some cases that might even be true for people whose primary skills are combat and wilderness survival. A world where the benefits of social intelligence or physical strength are dwarfed by those of technical prowess makes the worlds of snowcrash or neuromancer alluring to people that have or think they have that technical prowess.

I'm not sure we read the same Snowcrash. Yeah, Hiro had to be a good hacker, but he was also fucking killer with a blade. There was a lot of very physical activity in that book (and the world in general).

Elon literally said as much during a previous earnings call. They were going to make it polarizing and then walk it back to a more conservative design if sales were too low.

Interesting. Honda did the same thing with their late entry into the pickup market, the Ridgeline. The first generation (2006-2014) was a polarizing design. (But I liked it.) The second gen (2017-present) looks more mainstream and is a bit more functional but lacks the disruptive panache of gen 1. I like it less, but actually bought one. So who knows what will happen with Tesla. Maybe its weirdness will soften into something more sustainable given time.

You realize for every person who thinks it’s ugly another things it’s fucking awesome? Yes, I think it looks fucking awesome and can’t wait to buy one. Also my friends at work felt similarly.

Weird how some people have different opinions on subjective matters right??

Judging by responses here, it is more like 1 person who finds it awesome for every 9 people who find it ugly. Otherwise you are right.

Not that it isn't fugly but I think they purposely do not want it to look like any other pickup because their target market includes a lot of people who don't like the image pickups often project.

A well compensated white collar professional will get judged hard for driving a pickup in some social circles and I think this styling is to help get around that.

> A well compensated white collar professional will get judged hard for driving a pickup in some social circles

Is this a fact in (I'm assuming) NorCal?

I'm in one of the parts of the country where everyone drives pickups, so it kind of boggles my mind.

Does no one tow or haul things there?

I live in the same part of the country, and while everyone has a truck, I'd say about 1 out of 5 owners actually use them for utility purposes.

The rest are pristine showroom objects that have never even touched a gravel road, let alone dirt.

> The rest are pristine showroom objects that have never even touched a gravel road, let alone dirt.

And that haul one single person to the office and back every day at 12 MPG. Hooray.

My 2016 f150 gets 12.7 l/100km highway, closer to 27 mpg.

edit: woops 12.7 l/100km is actually 18.5 mpg. All these years I thought 10l/100km was 30 mpg! must have done the conversion wrong once and been basing my whole life off it ever since. It's great to find out something you thought was true is not sometimes.

That's OK. My 2019 Ridgeline gets 30 MPG highway, about 20 MPG city. That's an advantage of living in the US -- our gas mileage formula is more intuitive.

I don't see how you can claim that MPG is objectively "more intuitive" than L/100km....

I need x-much gas to go 100 km... Seems pretty intuitive to me.

Don't forget his lunch box! That thing can get heavy!

I've always refused to own a truck due to the "image" that people often have of pickup truck owners (which are everywhere here). I'd drive this.

You don't need to own a pickup truck just because you need to haul or tow things three of five times per year. You can own a more economical car and rent a pickup if / when you need it.

fwiw I live in a place where everyone owns a pickup (I use mine to plow snow, pull a gravel dump trailer, and to collect large items from Costco) but I never hear of anyone renting a pickup. I'm sure it's possible somehow but I doubt you can just roll into Hertz and sign out an F-250..

Not sure about Hertz, but everytime I go to Home Depot I see the F250s for rent in the parking lot.

https://www.homedepot.com/tool-truck-rental/load-n-go-truck-...

U-Haul and HomeDepot is where I’d go to rent one.

If I had to rent a pickup truck on short notice, I'd hit up U-Haul, who has a bunch of them.

Last time I had to leave my car in the body shop after it was hit, my insurance got me a rental car from Enterprise. The only rentals available at the time were F-250s, so I drove a pickup truck to work and back for a week.

Why do you think that pick up trucks are unrentable?

At the Hertz down the street from work I can rent a cherry-picker or a forklift if I want (definitely not an airport Hertz). Pretty sure a pickup wouldn’t be asking too much. I’ll check next time I walk by. Me, I just rent my trucks from Home Depot.

I rent a pickup from Uhaul when I need one.

I can jam quite a lot of lumber in/on my Mazda Protege though, so it’s rare I need an actual truck.

I'm a big fan of sticking things on the roofs of station wagons. A lot of things (sheet material and long things) are easier to haul this way than in a truck bed or minivan.

That said, having more vehicle than you need is definitely a means of social signalling and if you're regularly shoving 5 people in your 5-seat compact or regularly hauling large things on the roof of your car or regularly burying your AWD mom-mobile in the mud you will give off lower class vibes so I understand why a lot of people buy more vehicle than they strictly need.

You can rent a 26' F-650 (6.8L V10) from any Uhaul with stock. They require ~$50 on a credit card and a driver's license (standard, not CDL).

It's "technically" 1 lb shy of the GVWR requiring a CDL.

It has enough power to sheer off a 3/4" utility pole climbing spike, in reverse, with a slight tap of the gas. Don't ask me how I know.

Hmm. Around here I can easily rent telehandlers and excavators but not pickups. Perhaps because everyone already has at least one pickup?

You can actually. Friends of mine rented one for a group camping trip a couple years back. Worked pretty well. A quick google search shows that Enterprise and Avis will both rent you one.

> I'm sure it's possible somehow but I doubt you can just roll into Hertz and sign out an F-250.

I don't know about an F-250, but the last time I rented a car it was a walk-in at an Enterprise in Harrisburg, PA and I walked out with a Nissan pickup 30-ish minutes later.

Also, your average Home Depot or U-Haul typically has pickups for rent, specifically for this use case.

Come now. Most of the people who drive pickups rarely if ever use them to tow or haul things. They drive pickups because driving anything else means you're gay, or communist, or smoke marijuana.

I know plenty of pot smoking gays that drive pickup trucks. Not sure of they're communist, but likely they have a socialist bent.

I'm a bay area pickup owner. Maybe everyone is judging me behind my back, but no one has ever said anything even slightly negative to my face.

Nah.

If anything I get asked if I'm a contractor.

Norcal? The occasional toy hauler or boat. But no. For the most part they don't. Not that many trucks around tech buildings either.

Other parts of CA you'll get a lot of campers, boats, dirt bikes, mountain bikes... so yeah.

Not really.

I'm a well-compensated white collar professional in the bay area. I drive a 23yo bigass diesel pickup that I use for offroading, towing, hauling, camping, etc.

I don't get judged hard at all. Most folks thing it's quirky. I'd say I get judged more positively than not.

In NorCal outside of the bay area there are plenty of pickup trucks and the culture that goes with that.

I live in Norcal and had a little Toyota pickup. I had more than one lady from the city be very impressed "oooh a truck, its so manly!". Where Im from a little Tacoma truck is not really a truck. Truck culture is not really a city thing out here.

I doubt it was the size of the truck that impressed, but rather how you handled it. ;)

There are a few perks to being country in the city.

> A well compensated white collar professional will get judged hard for driving a pickup in some social circles and I think this styling is to help get around that.

I think Tesla could've met that desire without making the truck look like a low-polygon model from a teenager who just learned to use Blender.

Tesla's design language from it's other models could have been smartly applied to a truck design and they would've had a winner.

Judged for driving the WRONG type of pickup. Ford Raptors are quite popular with techy car folks cause they're "performance vehicles" so it indicates you aren't the wrong kind of person.

Also the older the truck, the more OK it is (ironic considering older trucks are horrible on gas mileage) because then its a quirky hipster thing.

Suppose thats kind of the point you're making though, they're building a pickup that has indicators that its OK for "classy" people to drive.

The risk with making your product mostly a fashion statement is that you may appeal to too few people or to many people but not enough for them to fork over $45K for the limited utility. Unlike the Raptor, the Cybertruck has no machismo. This truck will sell only if enough people are willing to buy into its singular sense of style way over its utility. That's a bold bet.

A more-useless-than-average truck (no bed capacity; a back seat w/ headroom for children only; difficulty refueling or getting repairs in the backcountry; very high center of gravity) will have limited appeal aside from the novelty from being the first to own one. But that will fade within year one of ownership. Then where will non-pickup owners find themselves? With an especially fashion-motivated vehicle that's no longer fashionable. Or useful. Strike three.

The kind of people who are worried about the image driving a truck will project upon them simply don't buy trucks. They'd rather buy a model Y or a Model X anyway.

I'd be curious to see a definition of "in some social circles". In particular, I'd like to see what parts of the country those social circles exist in.

Because I'm in Dallas, and wealthy white-collar professionals driving big pickup trucks is pretty normal here. I could point out several in my company's parking lot.

Economics 101. Any producer would rather sell a tenth of the units at ten times the cost. This is one way to do that.

I'd rather sell 100% at 10x the cost than 10% at 10x the cost. What's the benefit of deliberately reducing demand? Why not sell 10% at 100x instead of 10% at 10x by producing something that actually appeals to more, and is desirable by more?

>>> Any producer would rather sell a tenth of the units at ten times the cost

* 10 times the PRICE. 10 times the cost means taking on 10 times the risk if units don't sell, while keeping the same reward (profit). :)

Is ugly because it’s a popular opinion and everybody needs to call it the “ugliest vehicle ever” to make a social splash

This is probably the most accurate statement in this whole thread.

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