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Comment by blehn | Hacker News Reader

What's awful about the Cybertruck?

I personally think it’s terribly ugly and somewhat impractical as a work truck. But forget what I think: Tesla has in the past adopted an attitude of “let’s make electric cars look like really attractive but conventional non-EV cars”, and it’s worked for them (and for me.) The new approach flies directly in the face of that. It’s an experiment that might succeed brilliantly or fail brilliantly, whereas a more conventional approach would probably have succeeded just as well without the failure probability. For the reasons I stated above, I think it’s a bad thing for Tesla to bet its future on such weird, risky gambles at this stage in the company’s adoption strategy.

On the other hand, I don’t like trucks and the type of culture associated with trucks, but think the Cybertruck is super cool looking. Like something out of an 80s future that will really stand out in a crowd of otherwise boring and sameish vehicles.

What culture are you referring to? The working class that uses them to build housing and operate almost every skilled labor profession? Or maybe you mean farmers who grow our food?

For either - a truck that doesn't rust and can potentially last decades could be significant money saver.

Rust is not specific to trucks, it's more tied to using salt on the roads. Vehicles from the south have significantly less rust.

Still doesn't explain what you dislike about the "culture" associated with trucks. Maybe something like South Park S10E2?

I'm not an op, but to me trucks indeed look stupid. Cybertruck looks more like an SUV.

Trucks are about utility, focusing on looks is juvenile

I guess I shouldn't be surprised as the world is slowly becoming a highschool popularity contest...

I have no utility of normal truck, but Cybertruck would be way more useful to me.

If the F-150 Lightning is a serious project for Ford (and it seems to be), it will destroy the Cyber Truck in sales because Ford knows trucks, what buyers want, and how to sell them. The Cyber Truck has limited appeal to traditional truck buyers; it's a truck for someone who wants a truck but is worried about what their liberal friends will think.

>it's a truck for someone who wants a truck but is worried about what their liberal friends will think.

This is right on the money. Can't have a truck made by the Big 3 lest your progressive credentials be ruined.

The angular shape is definitely weird, but it's awesome that it's meant to be treated like crap and hold up well. No paint to worry about scratches on, and the skin should be super durable. And maybe they'll get the glass to where they thought it should be :-) I think it's one of the better weird ideas they've had.

They now have nearly a full line of "conventional" looking cars — S, 3, X, Y, Roadster — that are still years ahead of the competition. Cybertruck may be risky as an individual product, but the future of the company isn't on the line. On the other hand, if it's successful it only further distances Tesla from other manufacturers.

To really succeed in the US they need two things: a slightly larger SUV (the Y really is barely in this category) and some much cheaper cars. Trucks are also popular but maybe not essential. Insofar as they’re devoting resources to the truck line, those resources are coming away from other priorities. They should be in every market to succeed at this point, not to take “fashion” gambles against popular (upcoming) brands like Ford’s F150 Lightning.

Not sure what you mean by slightly larger SUV — the Y is the same size as an X3, the X is the same size as an X5. Cheaper cars, sure... and clearly that will be their strategy as they scale production.

You could also argue that the Cybertruck announcement puts additional pressure on competitors. Do they write it off as a certain flop and proceed with their plans? Or do they begin designing a similar truck so that they're not once again 10 years behind if the Cybertruck is successful?

The Y is clearly designed to compete with the X3 on dimensions and price, even if it looks like a car. The X is significantly more expensive than the X5; it’s in a different price category. Plus now it comes with a weird steering wheel that my wife would never put up with, and she’s the only one in the family who would even want a large SUV.

Its design is very dangerous to people drivers hit.

I don't think we know anything about its safety performance at this point.

How is it any less safe than any other truck, van, lorry or a bus?

I've seen prisons that were more thought out and far prettier. I have a feeling if the Cybertruck had any other name than Tesla, nobody would care about it

That's entirely subjective. Aesthetically, I think it's quite thoughtful and refreshing. Car design has been absolutely boring for 20 years — each generation with more lines, more shapes, more superfluous details.

It also drives like a Ferrari and has the utility of an F150, and of course is fully electric. Why wouldn't people care about that?

Well that's why I used "I" alot...but you're right it's subjective - Ferrari or f150 aside, it's a potato to me.

If you need a truck, you get a truck for utility. If you need a Ferrari, you get a sports car. This ends up being literally the worst of both worlds. I think they could have gone simple, without looking like a oddly-cut diamond

The cybertruck is the most attractive truck ever conceived by a real car company. Traditional cars are boring and ugly by comparison, just like traditional McMansions wither in comparison to a well-architected modern building. Give me some geometry in my life, I'm sick of the stone and stucco house and smooth swept bulbous car world.

Smooth and swept = aerodynamic

I understand your point tho, even if I don't agree about the particular car. I'm all for change, but I personally don't see anything creative behind it, just an attempt to be different, which is a bad goal imho

I initially hated it but the technical explanation made the "RTX off" design less terrible for me.

The Cybertruck is made of stiff stainless steel and current techniques that make these nice, curvy shapes in today's cars can't be used. Instead, they had to bend sheet metal, which severely limited artistic freedom.

Still not a fan overall, but I respect that choice.

People who use trucks for work have reported that they won't be able to use a Cybertruck because they can't load anything from the sides, a major inconvenience.

The design is polarizing

So was the design of the iPhone, and Yeezy sneakers. How is that "awful"?

The Cybertruck wouldn't be street-legal in Europe, since it can't meet pedestrian/cyclist collision safety requirements.

Take whatever fashionable discomfort you like, but let's not increase the danger to others.

"According to EU auto standards expert Stefan Teller the Cybertruc would have to undergo 'major modifications to the basic structure' because the Cybertruck 'contradicts the European security philosophy'"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/12/16/tesla-cy...

How is the design of the iPhone polarizing? It looks roughly like every other smart phone out there. That just seems like a bad example of the point you're trying to make.

The Yeezy, on the other hand, does remind me of the Cybertuck!

No, every other smart phone out there looks roughly like the iPhone. When the iPhone was announced, many people thought the lack of physical buttons and keyboard was a bad idea.

The iPhone took a fairly straightforward approach, which was that to have a working touchscreen interface you need to maximize screen real estate on a phone. Once you make that decision and price the components, everything else about the design falls out: the only “design” questions are about the casing material and whether the corners should be rounded. The iPhone didn’t succeed because people thought the fashion decisions were brilliant: it succeeded because people wanted a working touch-screen phone (because even before the iPhone we all recognized that previous phones sucked for browsing the Internet.)

I can’t figure out how the Cybertruck analogizes to this. Do people need a cab that can stop small-caliber bullets? It would seem that this is not what most people are excited about. But I am sometimes wrong.

The touchscreen interface is indeed a design decision, and it was a polarizing one. Many people did _not_ want a touchscreen interface in 2007. They insisted that the physical keyboards of their blackberries were more usable and more practical. In 2007, the iPhone was a polarizing product.

The comment I responded to implied that the cybertruck is awful _because_ it's polarizing. I gave two examples of wildly successful products that were also polarizing designs.

And my point is that there is a difference between a polarizing purely-aesthetic design choice and a polarizing feature-set choice. The decision to maximize screen real estate at the cost of a physical keyboard was primarily a feature-set tradeoff. It could have gone spectacularly wrong, but the tradeoff was at least calculated around producing some tangible benefits that people already admitted they wanted. It turned out to be popular in the end because people really wanted to browse websites on their phone, and physical keyboards make it hard to build a portable phone with an acceptable screen.

Similarly, the decision to build an electric-only car vs. an ICE/plugin-hybrid car (and in the process free up space under the hood, remove gas tanks, produce a different driving experience) is also a polarizing feature-set choice that produces some aesthetic results. By contrast the design of the Cybertruck, as best I can tell, is almost entirely aesthetic in nature. Insofar as it maximizes certain features, they’re “Mad Max bulletproof indestructibility (but not the windows)” features and I’m not sure those are going to carry the mass market. And Tesla really needs to carry the mass market if they’re going to stay in business long-term. Picking weird aesthetic hills to polarize on and/or betting that what the mass market really wants us to resist small-caliber rifle attacks might work out in the end, but it sure seems like an unnecessary risk.

Rust resistance might make cybertruck very resilient machine... Only question is how is Tesla going to support them without online DRM 20-30-40 years later.

> many people thought the lack of physical buttons and keyboard was a bad idea

I still do. To this day, I often wish that my phone had them.

That's fine, I'm merely refuting the assertion that a polarizing design is inherently awful or would prevent a product from being successful.

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