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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been seeing complaints on the internet about how all cars look the same nowadays. I think the cybertruck proves why. A lot of design has coalesced around the same thing, not just for cars but for websites and apps, logos, furniture, etc. because people like that stuff.

Something new and fresh can be accepted and loved, but it still needs to be familiar and somewhat iterative. A radical change like the cybertruck is hated for that reason. (People also hate it because of Elon, but they don’t hate the other Teslas nearly as much as they hate the cybertruck)

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When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.

By the time of its delayed release, Musk had become deeply unpopular with many of that original coalition of fans and buyers, the truck was more expensive than originally promised, his new ‘base’ probably couldn’t afford to buy many of them, and it was structurally a fairly normal car underneath the steel panels. It also suffered plenty of embarrassing issues, which people were of course gleeful to publicise.

It could have been a cool funky status symbol, but Musk screwed it all up.

> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.

People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.

Not universally. Your tech office and online spaces may have disliked it, but I also saw a lot of excitement and positivity about it, both online and IRL.

From my memory, a lot of the excitement was directed at what the design was trying to achieve: a structural body made from easy to make pressed steel panels. This was meant to enable a much cheaper car while also removing the bottlenecks plagueing Tesla's production lines at the time

None of this materialized. The truck that ended up in production was a traditional body construction, but with unpainted steel panels so it looks like the truck Musk presented. It ended up with all the drawbacks of a steel body, while still being expensive and hard to manufacture

I agree that this was part of it - I referred to this twice in my original post.

Once the structural body concept failed (has it ever been adequately explained why they failed?) it would have made sense to either drop the Cybertruck altogether, or pivot to a more traditional design. But ego prevailed, sadly.

IMO the big missed opportunity was to follow the model 3 with a 'model 2' - a smaller, cheaper car - probably in the VW Golf / BMW 1-series class.

The Cybertruck announcement was a couple years after the Thai Rescue Divers "pedo" incident, which was the tipping point for many people (including on the left) to realize he wasn't actually the Tony Stark character he pretended to be and actually a pretty shitty person.

This was well into the Tesla flamethrower/short shorts/funding secured/etc period of $TSLA meme stockification. Also pushing Dogecoin/crypto.

He certainly wasn't the "darling of the left" by then. But you are correct that his image was significantly less tarnished by political meddling and later obsession with woke/trans/culture war of the day stuff.

He was the darling of the emerging meme stock day trader/gambler/WSB crowd which in broad strokes tends to anti-correlate with the "left".

Yes - fair point. His image was on the move, but not full MAGA crazy. Maybe ketamine was in his orbit already.

Agreed. When it was first announced, I was kind of interested. I laughed at imagining it as a screenshot from an N64 game.

But it didn't live up to the selling points, it is very expensive, has design issues that weren't necessary for the aesthetic, and the company's owner turned out to be a really horrible person contributing meaningfully to changes in my country that are dangerous.

> Musk was still the darling of the left

I can assure you he was not.

I know this isn't Reddit, but I'm chuckling at your username :)

This is rewriting of history. It was ridiculed even by the reddit shitlibs that hung on to Papa Elon's every word. Breaking the glass twice was a meme.

No he was not. Progressive left noticed who he is first, long before that point.

And positive first reactions to that car came only from Musk fans bubble. I was seeing people calling it ugly from basically a day 1.

I think a lot of the reason most cars look the same is they all have to pass similar pedestrian crash standards. Once you account for all of that, the basic shape of the vehicle is set and there is only so much unique styling you can attach.

Have you seen any of the videos where they push fake kids in front of Teslas versus other cars?

I don't think the safety argument holds up here when you're comparing Teslas with standard automobiles.

Agreed. That's why its a pickup truck, which I believe is exempted from a lot of those pedestrian protection standards in the US

One thing I think gets overlooked in cybertruck discourse that I didn’t appreciate until I saw one in person is that it’s really big. It FEELS really big. With all those hard edges, it also seems more imposing and aggressive.

It doesn’t give me the impression of “radical change.” It felt familiar and iterative of the modern, oversized F250-style pickup truck in all of the worst ways.

The design isn't what led to its demise, the $80K-100K sticker price did.

Or maybe "I am not like other girls" is not a good personality to hang on. An exceptional athlete stands out. But so does the village drunk. Just being different is not enough.

The product failed because it was a shit product. In the grand scheme of unreliable American built cars, it was just another one. It was certainly not as bad as a Jeep. But it was ugly, and did not do what it was supposed to do; be a truck.

This is every top comment ITT, and I am checking user's post histories to confirm they are real. I understand I might be in the minority, but this belief that just being different is a merit unto itself is ridiculous.

There’s a school of thought that anything is better than blandly conformative design. In that school, the Cybertruck counts as progress.

To me, it’s more like answering a complaint about the blandness of pop music with electric bagpipes and nails on chalkboard: if you can’t be different and good, maybe don’t try so hard to be different.

Cars look the same because they're trying to his specific mileage and safety standards. There are a few common shapes that can do that, and every angle you flatten into a curve gets you a couple more MPG.

Trucks don't look quite the same because they have different standards to adhere to.

People don't just hate it because it looks different. They hate it because it's ugly, unreliable, and a symbol of the modern idolatry of the billionaire class.

Exactly so.

It's a massive, gaudy symbol of unfathomable decadence, and every purchase was made to visibly support the passion project of the world's most influential white supremacist.

It's one thing for a vehicle to be "ugly," but this one stands for so much more.

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