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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Tesla needs to fire Musk, abandon the childish and already dated Cybertruck and just build a normal truck/SUV. One that can compete with popular offerings from Rivian, Ford etc. and soon to be Porsche, RangeRover etc.

And that can be easily sold globally unlike Cybertruck which has concerns from Australian regulators (and likely others) about whether it would be street legal given its unique sharp metal corners at children height design.

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I don't disagree that Musk probably isn't doing Tesla any favors lately, but even absent Musk, does the company actually know how to directly compete against established car makers in the same market segment? Tesla benefited a lot from being first with the "electric cars are cool now" approach, and they've been able to ride that early momentum pretty far as the other automakers struggled to catch up.

Now all the other companies are coming out with competing EVs, it's not obvious Tesla as a company has moved beyond a strategy based on being your only nice EV option to actually being better than the competition. The Cybertruck is an absolute joke for the truck market compared to competitor vehicles, which also have the advantage of being products you can actually purchase.

But even beyond the Cybertruck, the rest of the Tesla product lineup isn't the obvious choice it was even a few years ago. You can get a lot of nice EVs these days made by companies that also have a long history of being good at building cars in general and that you're fairly confident will be around for decades to come. Early on, the basic argument for Tesla was obvious...they were basically the only option for a cool, upscale EV. What's their marketing pitch in 2023?

Tesla's 2023 marketing pitch should be "Hey, look! We can make vehicles without government subsidies!"

Nevermind. They're still getting the federal subsidies plus whatever tax deferral / forgiveness they negotiated with Texas.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vw-rivian-nissan-bmw-lose-140...

Yeah, after new rule rollout Tesla in one of the few manufactures still eligible for the EV subsidy. Unfortunately they made the rules too stringent focused on US manufacturing. Which is great in theory, but in todays world of global supply chains isn't exactly practical.

Tesla is going to win on cost. They keep driving down the cost to manufacture EVs. That will bring down the selling price as well. Legacy auto makers offering EVs won’t be able to compete on price with Tesla without huge losses.

If you bet against Elon, you will lose.

Many US SUVs can not be sold globally. If they make a "normal" one, they will have the same problem.

Car manufacturers don't need to sell the same model everywhere anyway. Regional markets are large enough to absorb a full model's production.

And yet Porsche, Range Rover, Rivian etc manage to sell the same cars globally.

I'm not a rocket science/engineering/business genius like Musk but pretty sure having one design that may require some minor regional modifications is going to be significantly cheaper than having two completely different cars.

Porsche (~300k units/year) and Range Rover (~90k units/year) are niche brands, Rivian isn't even profitable and a volume manufacturer. Conversely, the Model Y was the US' 6th best selling vehicle last year [1], is currently the 4th best selling vehicle in 2023, and will likely the world's best selling car in 2023 [2] based on demand and supply forecasts.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/629993/tesla-model-y-6th-bestsell...

[2] https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1177/tesla-model-y-set-to-...

> According to a report from Focus to Move, the Model Y is now the fourth best-selling vehicle worldwide after an astonishing 88 percent jump from 2021 to 2022. There were 759,000 Model Ys sold last year, just 28,000 units behind the third-place Ford F-150 which has been the best-selling truck for the previous 46 years. Toyota claimed the top two spots, with the RAV4 at 870,000 and the Corolla selling 1.12 million.

(waiting on my cybertruck)

The Model Y has a very conventional style, so the fact that it sells well would seem to be a point in favor of the GP’s argument. It also sells in many continents, which Cybertruck might not be able to do.

Consider Tesla did not copy existing manufacturers. They built their own markets (S->X->3->Y). People complain online loudly about the touchscreen, quality, but I'll be damned, these units get moved regardless (well on our way to almost 3M/year [1]). For example, Harley can't woo younger riders to the brand because their attempt to acquire them turns off older Harley fans who are slowly dying out. Tesla doesn't have to attract legacy truck owners (Ford, Ram, Chevy), they're targeting young buyers and then locking them into the brand [2]. Buying a car is an emotional purchase [3], they're not going to convert older folks, they're going entrench themselves in youth purchasers as older, sticky auto buyers age out with their legacy preferences.

Cybertruck doesn't have to sell well, it just has to have greater demand than supply globally. Global pickup truck market is ~4M/units annually, so Tesla should do just fine carving out some of that for itself.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/03/tesla-sales-up-40-to-re...

[2] https://electrek.co/2023/02/27/tesla-dominates-brand-loyalty...

[3] https://martecgroup.com/emotional-car-buying-journey/

The original Tesla Roadster was based on a Lotus chassis, and the models after that weren’t major deviations from the norm (aside from maybe the gull wings, but even those have some design heritage). Elon was a car guy before Tesla—one of his first splurges when he got rich was a McLaren F1, which he infamously crashed with Peter Thiel in the passenger seat—and as a result, Tesla cars all seem reminiscent of European sports cars. He’s not a truck guy, though. So while his personal tastes have been beneficial for Tesla in the past, I think they miss the mark with Cybertruck.

Also, trucks are functional vehicles, and Cybertruck violates a lot of common functionality that most “legacy” trucks have. There are probably a lot of people who drive trucks who don’t need that functionality—i.e. poseurs—and maybe some of them will buy Cybertrucks.

Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331546

Agree, most people who buy trucks don’t use them as trucks. That’s the primary Cybertruck market. Most of life is status and signaling. Sell what people want.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...

> Consider Tesla did not copy existing manufacturers.

I own a Model 3 and was considering a BMW 3-series (non-EV) briefly before I bought the Tesla. While shopping I was surprised to notice how closely the price of Model 3 option packages tracked the BMW equivalent packages, almost within a few dollars (although the Tesla had fewer packages.) It seemed obvious to me that Tesla had done this on purpose, in an effort to carefully market the Model 3 towards an existing successful market. Similarly, the crossover they came out with next was named the “Model Y” and seemed almost perfectly tuned to compete with some of BMW’s popular X-line of crossover SUVs, again an existing market that could easily be optimized against. So while I would not use the word “copy”: it sure seemed like Tesla was carefully targeting existing markets, with slightly more flashy vehicles and similar price points — all with enormous success! The Cybertruck, on the other hand, throws this successful and cautious strategy into the garbage and then backs over it.

> For example, Harley can't woo younger riders to the brand because their attempt to acquire them turns off older Harley fans who are slowly dying out.

That cuts the other direction as well, if Tesla/Musk just alienate 90% of the population and the backlash builds against their touchscreens and build quality then they may find that they're just selling to fanbois.

And the EV Ranger is the vehicle that is targeting the kids of the people who presently drive F150s.

A car/truck purchase is emotional, and if you live in Astoria, OR a cybertruck is going to get you a ton of shit from everyone you know.

The successful Tesla models have had styling that pretty much looked like any other vehicle and didn't stand out a lot and any cachet was based around what it was and how it performed.

So... the strategy is to not appeal to older buyers who have money and instead court younger buyers who can't afford your vehicle so they're "locked in" to a brand they can't purchase. Interesting.

The Cybertruck has to be released before it can fail in the market-place.

Cybertruck has 1.5 million preorders and revolutionizes the technology used today in cars and trucks. It may be ugly but it will win in every other category.

Porsche and Range Rover are popular in the SUV space. But please explain the thought process.

That if a company is popular and profitable they should always build an entirely different product for each country. Makes you wonder why tiny companies like Apple and Nike don't follow this brilliant idea.

And the cybertruck (~0 units/year) is a mainstream brand...

Is there a point to sell 'trucks' globally?

Profit?

I think their point is probably that the personal-use pickup truck (_presumably_ the Tesla truck isn't intended as an actual utility truck) is _mostly_ an American phenomenon; the idea of having a personal pickup truck is just far less common in most countries (I think it's somewhat a thing in Australia). So there may not be much of a global market for this _anyway_.

As far as I can tell they still haven't added the third brake light, so I don't think it's street legal anywhere.

Musk behavior is significantly weighing the stock down. I saw Tesla early on as a slam dunk investment. But at a certain point when everyone began to see them this way (vain hope!), I had serious doubt they could deliver.

And 10 years later, I realize anyone else with industrial experience could have done a better job of delivering cars than Musk could.

We are giving this guy more credit than he deserves. There have been far too many layoffs at Tesla, good employees with similar vision, all because this guy was a billionaire jerk, without the billionaire title.

And at the end of the month, Elon's got to sell another chunk to fund the Twitter debt payment. But I'm sure he's playing 11th dimension chess and knows what he's doing. I'm sure when he doesn't have cheap debt to do a stock buy-back TSLA will go up instead of down.

Yeah because Tesla is doing so poorly as of late /s The Model 3/Y’s success must be entirely independent of Musk’s leadership huh?

"Just build a normal truck" will mean adding an extra 2-5 years before production. I'm confident that will make things worse, not better.

The current product is not even remotely one that can compete in the market. It has to be redesigned, or they’re going to end up shipping the Pontiac Aztek of EV trucks.

Says somebody who has never driven, never seen and never read a review of the cybertruck.

We have all seen one, it’s called YouTube.

Jay Leno hit the nail on the head “this doesn’t look anything like a pickup truck” which is exactly what the problem was with the Aztek. Crossovers are a huge market but the totally ridiculous body style was a flop.

If Tesla priced this more like a Raptor, in order to market it as a futuristic status car, it might work. That’s not what they’re doing. Rivian is eating their lunch here and will continue to do so.

If you're basing your criticism on looks, there are two responses:

1. it's an opinion, and there are a substantial number of people who like the cybertruck

2. a truck is a functional vehicle, and functionality is the primary consideration. Lots of people think the Ram is the best looking truck, but it's substantially outsold by F-150 & GM.

Unless it massively changes between now and launch (which is possible) Tesla is only going to outperform traditional trucks on one functional vector, which is speed and acceleration, but they don't outperform other EVs on that front. The Ford F-150 Lightning, Hummer EV, and Rivian's truck are all among the most powerful EVs you can buy. On other functional vectors like reliability and towing capacity they either don't really matter or Tesla won't win.

Rivian's truck in particular has solidly beaten them to market with a highly functional vehicle that has a ton of incredible design details and has some of the highest driver satisfaction ratings of any new car models on the market. They have already captured a significant chunk of the market in luxury SUV and truck EVs, also partially due to the fact that a lot of rich liberals don't want to be associated with Elon Musk in any way now, and Tesla has moved downmarket pretty hard.

Separately, a big part of the reason Ford massively outsells Dodge or other brands is because Ford is particularly loved by fleet buyers. Expect them to continue to do so with the Lightning.

So that leaves the Cybertruck to pin its whole hopes on style/appearance, selling to the same type of bros that might buy a Ford Raptor or higher end Tacoma/Tundra model at similar price points. Not exactly a move poised to win the EV truck market overall, given how polarizing the design is.

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