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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

I understand you are excited about this truck. I just want to highlight that aside from the paint thing most of this applies to a Rivian or a Ford F-150 lightning. I am not really sure the "no body that gets easily dented" is true - time will tell how durable the body is.

But I am not arguing with you about your preferences. I am saying that for the broad base of consumers, most of these needs (except no paint) can be met by existing vehicles. The Rivian for example is getting great reviews, and I think it has great looks. And the F-150 is already the highest selling vehicle in the USA, so an electric version will be a good choice for many of those consumers. Tesla coming out with such a unique vehicle means they're really going to have to prove its worth.

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Yes, I’d be surprised if it outsells the electric F150. That being said, I would obviously rather have the cybertruck. Time will tell if it was a good business decision or not for Tesla. I think they’ll do alright though, and nothing stops them from bringing out a more traditional truck later as well.

Nothing stops them from coming out with a more traditional truck later except that it clearly takes them many years to ship a new model, and all the while customers who want a truck now or don't want a cybertruck are going to competitors.

Of course at this point they are committed to release. But I agree with others that releasing a more traditional truck would have been more savvy.

Why do you think they're committed to a release?

I don't know much about their status but other people in this thread suggest their factory is tooled up and they are close to release, so it might be a bad time to cancel everything and go back to the drawing board. Then they would have no truck for another 5 years.

But Mr. Musk is playing 11th dimensional chess that the rest of us are incapable of understanding. But more seriously, there are reasons they didn't start on it until now, maybe those reasons will persist and they'll get past the sunk cost fallacy and just decide to cancel it.

Even then, what's the chance that Tesla will remember who gave them a $99 deposit. SpaceX completely forgot about how I gave them $599 for a downlink terminal. I had to email them scans of my credit card bills to convince them to look for their records of the transaction so they could refund the charge on my credit card. (And even then, they only refunded $500 or the $599 I spent.)

But I'm grousing about SpaceX, I'm sure Tesla has a better AR/AP/CS system.

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