>I wonder if you exclude "recalls" resolved by software updates, for all cars, where it would rank then?
Why have you put "recalls" in quotes? It gives the impression you think this makes it somehow lesser. The cybertruck, for example, was subject to a recall because the rearview camera wouldn't come up, but the mirrors are insufficient to back the vehicle up safely without the camera.
That's a safety issue, irrespective of whether or not the fix was in software.
The problem is that those issues shouldn't happen on a public road vehicle to begin with. Tesla's approach is shipping beta software to customers, and using them as testers. This is an insidious practice in modern software development, but is criminal when that software is running a 3-ton vehicle, regardless if it can be fixed with an OTA update or not. There are reasons why strict car safety regulations exist. You can't just sell early access cars and fix issues as customers experience them.
Think about how, even in software, knowing that a physical shipping of a product (CD / Blu-ray) can be updated from "day 1" has led to poor quality releases with last minute patches.
The cost of having to physically recall / resend CDs back in the day meant that what went out had to work. The cost of sloppy software has now been externalised.
It's not just Tesla. All the online services you depend on are run this way, and none of it's regulated. Governments don't know how to regulate software companies like Tesla. They know how to regulate people constructing homes, cooking food, and building bridges but most attempts at regulating software development have petered out. This is a good thing. Thanks to Tesla's modern approach to car manufacturing it is now possible for anyone in the middle class to purchase a self-driving bulletproof truck that's faster than a Lamborghini. You can't make this stuff up. I swear.
I need to ask - is this a joke? No, Tesla is not particularly bulletproof compared to other cars. Its doors may stop a 9mm sure enough, but the windows won't manage even that, and anything above 9mm will go through the doors as well. And 9mm is not even that common among criminal shooters, they usually go for bigger calibers / higher penetration naturally already.
I'm not sure I agree. From the perspective of a customer, not being able to drive the car due to it being unsafe is the part that matters, not where and how the manufacturer has to fix it.
If you're opposed to it based on the assumption that it wouldn't take as long, I agree that might be true, but by that logic we should be categorizing _all_ recalls based on length (regardless of whether it's a software update or otherwise), since I'm not convinced that the average length of time until a problem is fixed will always be perfectly split with the software ones being super quick and the ones that would need to happen in person being super slow. What if the mechanics are already aware of how to fix the issue and can do it the same day, or if the software issue turns out to take a long time due to the developers needing a lot of time to fix the bug?
If you're opposed to it purely from the perspective of linguistics and "recall" sounds like "return to the manufacturer", I think I'd disagree due to the word "recall" not being super commonly used for that in other circumstances. If anything, the other usage of the word that springs to mind most readily to me is recalling someone or something "from service", which I think fits perfectly here.
Recall is the industry-standard (and populace-understood) term for “this vehicle has a safety or reliability issue that must be resolved by the manufacturer.” It is all encompassing; anything from possibly loose lugnuts to faulty airbags to engine failures to yes, the reverse camera failing to appear. It doesn’t matter if the manufacturer ships an OTA update, shows up at your house with a loaner and a flatbed to take your car, or requires you to go into the dealership for service, it’s a recall.
It might be industry-standard term, but it’s certainly not understood that way by layman, including car customers. To the public, “recall” will always carry the implication that the vehicle needs to go back to the manufacturer for a fix.
If I have a flat tyre it's not a recall. Not everything about not being road-legal and requiring immediate action is a recall. That's a bad definition.
This is a point which comes up regularly when discussing right to privacy laws (hello EU). Startup culture wants to move fast and break things - including my bones in this case - while evil regulations only come in the way of progress.
> Startup culture wants to move fast and break things - including my bones in this case - while evil regulations only come in the way of progress.
All car companies comply with thousands of regulations, and it's fine. If you have a simple view of the world, I don't think inverting it and claiming the people you think are the baddies hold that inverted view is going to get anyone closer to understanding anything.
> You can't just sell early access cars and fix issues as customers experience them.
But then how will you know what you HAVE to fix. /s
To be frank I find the whole Tesla cult to be mind blowing. Seems to be the realization of believing in something that seems so good to be true alwith a company who promises to do so many great things, delivers non road worthy vehicles and people still dedicate their time and money defending them.
Is it sunk cost fallocy? Or just people who just wish Tesla was what they promised they would be?
Well, the OED definition of 'recall' is "official order to return to a place" and a software update or fix requires no return to the place of purchase. I wonder how may legally defined 'recalls' Microsoft Windows has experienced with each new version.
I think the gist is "recall" is the same saying "safety issue that needs to be fixed in the software or hardware" since we don't have a word for software issues, which carry a bit more weight on a fly-by-wire vehicle like the Cybertruck.
Interesting to note that this thread seems to be full of a lot of people choosing to be pedantic over the word "recall" rather than taking a critical look at the Cybertruck and it's issues. While I agree that language is important (and dynamic), I suspect that discussion around this vehicle is also charged by politics and sycophantic thinking.
If I remove my personal opinions about Musk, I find that I actually do not hate the Cybertruck. Sure, I think it looks absolutely stupid and it bothers me that the flat paneling does not line up perfectly, but I am also cheering on it's attempts to break some rules, try something different and possibly spark some future innovation. With that in mind, it's easy for me to expect that it will have problems since anything new that breaks the mold tends to, so with that reframing, a lot of recalls make sense and could even be looked at as good since solutions are being developed.
They are called recalls because that’s what the term for legalisation mandates. They are issued when a vehicle is unsafe to drive and they are mandated because a manufacturer is required to take a lot of steps to remedy their failure. If they fail to repair the issue they are forced to issue full refunds as an example.
So no, the word recall is used because is the official terminology used for these issues regardless of the solution required to fix them.
The word does have its origin in a world where solutions were rarely software updates. That they are software issues make them no less serious though. I suspect that in some cases the software issues might indeed be far more dangerous than errors which mandate physical recalls.
At the very least, it puts the quality control of Tesla in question, as those are failures which should have been caught PRIOR to a commercial launch.
Tesla is treating its product-launches like it's just some browser-game in the cloud, instead of treating it as what it is: The handover of a 6000 pound bullet into the hand of a customer who will fire it into a crowd in expectation to not hit anyone...
The word recall sort of implies that the vehicle is recalled to the manufacturer. Calling a software update that happens in your garage at night and takes 20 minutes a “recall” definitely is worthy of quotes.
The word bug sort of implies that the device was struck by a terrestrial arthropod animal. Calling a software defect that happens due to a programming error a "bug" definitely is worthy of quotes.
(The etymology of a word can be quite different from its current meaning today.)
Getting an OTA software update to your vehicle is far less disruptive to your life than having to take it in to the dealer. Obviously safety issues shouldn't happen, but how easy they are to fix also matters.
If you think about the financial implications then probably yes. Software issues, safety related or not, can probably easily be fixed OTA and thus don’t even cause a fraction of the costs a (let’s call it "real") recall costs.
Also, in the head of most people, I think, a recall is something where the car needs to be returned physically. But still, obviously, the issues can be as serious as physical issues. It’s just that we’re used to physical recalls.
Maybe, to eliminate ambiguity (and make it sound cooler), they should call it a "roadworthiness directive", similar to "airworthiness directive" for aircraft. Of course airworthiness directives are issued by the authorities (the FAA in the US), while "recalls" are from the manufacturers, but still...
A recall is about the issue, not how it's resolved. A recall means there are some serious security flaws that needs fixing. Even if they can be fixed OTA, they're still a flaw, and Tesla has had many of those.
Couldn't agree more. Recall means "sufficiently dangerous to need to recall the vehicle to the manufacturer" - yes, in the modern world it can be fixed OTA, but it's still dangerous enough to require a mass fix to a fast-moving death machine.
Very few others have recalls that can be done OTA. Even if it is just software, expect an hour to days at a service center to do the update, if the techs can figure it out.
For Tesla, the software recalls are nearly automatic (one click install, just like other update), such that few owners even know that their car ever had a recall.
Sure, but "recall" in the automotive market has a very precise meaning, and refers to safety issues (at production line level, so impacting many VINs)that needs to be fixed. In Tesla's case, unlike most of other vendors, generally these recalls can be fixed with an OTA update.
The CT OTOH had many "classical" physical recalls due to hardware issues.
This is kind of true. Say what you want about Tesla, but they have the best software experience out of the other car manufacturers. I love my BMW i4, but had to take into the shop just to fix a botched softwares update. Well, at least the cabin is silent.
I've bought several new cars in the past few years and zero of them have had a recall I'm aware of, software or otherwise. My old car went almost 20 years with just two recalls that I can remember.
Even ignoring software recalls, then, the Cybertruck has a significantly higher recall rate (per unit time) than anything I've owned, so the fact that it has had even more recalls that could be serviced OTA is really neither here nor there. The user-facing software systems in these modern luxury cars really do seem to cause a lot of issues.
Recalls come in two types, soft recalls that can be fixed by a software update, and hard recalls that cannot. Many people are still not used to regarding the former as recalls, as they associate the word not with the safety issue itself but the way it gets resolved. It would be nice for articles discussing recalls to point out what type it entails, both for being more immediately informative, and to get people used to software updates being able to qualify as recalls.
> I wonder if you exclude "recalls" resolved by software updates, for all cars, where it would rank then?
While I agree that the term "recall" is overloaded, the Cybertruck has had some pretty spicy safety related "recalls". Issues that, frankly, it should not have been allowed onto public roads with.
Are these "recalls" just simple over the air software updates? Just because car people are not used to this doesn't make it necessarily bad. Obviously no bugs are better than some bugs. But people here tend to know how software development works.
This always comes up. A “recall” is not a description of the remediation, it is a description of the problem.
A recall is a public dangerous defect notice. The dangerous product version can no longer be deployed, existing systems suffering from the dangerous defect are identified, and then the version with those dangerous defects is removed from the market with all due speed by either refunding, replacing, or remediating at the manufacturer’s expense. The defective version is thus no longer present, i.e “recalled”.
The term has a precise meaning as I laid out. Unfortunately, it has been so thoroughly intentionally poisoned by bad actors in recent years that the term should be retired. We should use the descriptive term: “Public Dangerous Defect Notice” to avoid such bad faith misrepresentation going forward.
Yes that's a much better term. In peoples minds "recall" means MY vehicle has to be transported somewhere to be fixed.
For the individual customer, a recall can be a massive frustrating hassle, which an OTA isn't. That doesn't change the severity of the issue, but a model that has 9 physical recalls to fix some brake issue, and 1 OTA update is going to be seen as a disaster, while a model that has 0 physical recalls and 10 OTA updates will be seen as a pleasure to own.
Recalls in consumers' minds are a frustration measurement more than a safety record. Most recalls are about very small/hypothetical risks, so the risk I want to avoid when I look at manufacturers recall history is the risk of having to fix my vehicle physically. Because that's a real/large risk, while the risk of it catching fire spontaneously could be catastrophic but is usually tiny.
To your point, both things can be true. The CyberTruck can have recalls worse than 91% of all 2024 cars, but many of its recalls can be cheap to for Tesla to fix.
I think that is where the two clusters of people that I see commenting here are converging / possibly arguing past each other.
One popular form of headline that comes to my mind from business new channels of which I remember no specific instance basically goes like this: “Car manufacturer recalls X many cars costing over them Y dollars because of some fault”. X is usually in the tens of thousands or more and Y is usually in the millions of dollars (now maybe tens of millions of dollars).
> The term has a precise meaning as I laid out. Unfortunately, it has been so thoroughly intentionally poisoned by bad actors in recent years that the term should be retired.
Nah, that's a sleigh of hand. Recall literally means recall. Whatever the actual technical definition, the common-man understanding has always been "manufacturer asking you to give your car back, because they screwed up badly enough to be legally forced to fix it". The focus is, and always has been, on the physically give your car back to manufacturer part.
The precise meaning you laid out? That's arguably a typical case of using ancillary aspects of a thing as a proxy, because they're much easier to precisely pin down than the thing you actually want. Think every other term explicitly defined in any contract - the definition tends to not be what's intended, but something that mostly overlaps with intent and is easier to spell out concisely.
The overall point being: regardless of what the technical meaning of "recall" is, if you put Tesla's OTA fixes together with everyone's repairs that require shipping the car itself to the manufacturer, and then treat them all as equal, that's just blatant, bald-faced lie, a clear indication of purposeful dishonesty.
> A recall is issued when a manufacturer or NHTSA determines that a vehicle, equipment, car seat, or tire creates an unreasonable safety risk or fails to meet minimum safety standards. Most decisions to conduct a recall and remedy a safety defect are made voluntarily by manufacturers prior to any involvement by NHTSA.
> Manufacturers are required to fix the problem by repairing it, replacing it, offering a refund, or in rare cases repurchasing the vehicle.
So the person you're replying to seems to be correct, or is there another source that shares your claim that "the focus is, and always has been, on the physically give your car back to manufacturer part"?
Just because we tolerate it doesn't mean others should too.
Legacy industries view software projects as a 1-and-done deal. The "we'll fix it live" approach in tech is a short-coming of our discipline. We can ignore it when failure means a mild inconvenience. But, hard engineering isn't as forgiving.
Even if the fix is 'just' a software update, the bug can put lives at risk. [1]
Each industry and its regulators come with certain norms. Cars are expected to be delivered as 'complete' products. If Tesla can't abide by that expectation, then that's their problem. Don't drag the entire software industry into this.
> Just because car people are not used to this doesn't make it necessarily bad.
Of course it's bad. If this were a purely software discussion, would anybody be saying "It's OK they have a bazillion zero-days every year because they're quick to fix them when they learn about them"?
Also, remember that the flipside is also true: with aggressive OTA updates, they have the ability to create new issues that weren't there to begin with. I wouldn't trust somebody with that bad a QA track record to not introduce new issues.
Mine has two physical recalls active, but they’re not serious so I haven’t scheduled any maintenance yet. Unlike my Honda civic a couple of decades ago which had an airbag that was killing people. That one I got taken care of quickly.
Except that this is car development with clear guidelines and if you don't adhere to them you have to live with your bugs being labeled as recalls. People should be made aware of when players don't adhere to industry standards with safety implications and you don't get that by just sweeping them under the carpet as "bugs".
It is not the only one. While it's true this affects roughly 1/5 to 1/3 of all Cybertrucks sold so far this year (depending on which random sales numbers online you believe), some of the others have affected every Cybertruck sold, such as the wiper motor burning out or the pieces of bed trim falling off while driving.
I cannot find any evidence that previous physical recalls this year only affected a few hundred units. Two are 2000+ units and the others seem to be however many had sold by the date of the recall (10k+ in both instances).
Recall means safety issue, which is necessarily bad. It's nice that they can fix these things over the air, but there was still some elevated risk before they caught it.
Despite this, seems like at least the regular Teslas are among the safest vehicles on the road all things considered.
Completely unrelated to safety, these vehicles don't look like they are aging well. They are all completely new but the ones I am seeing on the road already look a bit beat up. That finish on them and their general styling emphasize every minor blemish.
Car panels are convex on nearly all other cars for very good reason. Flat panels are structurally susceptible to damages which wouldn’t mark a standard panel. Adding a highly reflective surface was another great move.
I wonder what tests car companies generally do to predict how durable a style choice is (how scratches, corrosion, etc will impact the look). Protecting your brand is also about what people will see in the future, not just what is on the showroom now. If 5 years from now all of these vehicles look terrible that won't help sales for any of their models.
I know in the past they've looked at data from used cars, and they also have HALT/HASS (highly accelerated life/stress) testing which does things like e.g. spray the car with concentrated salt solution in a wind tunnel, things like that.
I believe many manufacturers also look at data from people like Munro & Associates who tear down cars, figure out what they're made from, and how they were made.
To each their own on this matter because styling is a matter of taste. I remember the shift from the '70s style boxy cars to the mid to late '80s rounded style cars. I wasn't a fan of that new style when it came out but it did eventually grow on me.
For me the cybertruck looks like something out of a low budget'70s Sci-Fi movie. Who knows in 10 years maybe it will start to appeal to me but for right now it doesn't.
Nah, it's objectively not good-looking, and in a few years it'll be more obvious. There are probably more than 0 people who still genuinely think the Pontiac Aztek looks good, and they're wrong.
Stainless steel can definitely rust. Leave your favorite knife in the sink for a few weeks and watch what happens, especially if it has any scratches on it.
I have no dog in this fight, but its worth nothing that its an odd experience to hear your anecdote wipes out numerous others because waves magic wand media sensationalism. Then, this sort of makes me think again and realize that unless you think metal will neverever rust, it seems odd to say it was "sensationalism" thats implied to be "fixed"
So is the media sensationalist, or what I need to read to understand the media was sensationalist? :)
(sorry, I'm just cranky about Duh Media characterization in general. there's a wide set of experiences in this world, and its not nefarious to describe some of them!)
most people care about scratches because they look like shit.
paint is a bit more than just corrosion protection at this point, otherwise mfgs would just slap on the thickest toughest machine-tool grade enamel and call it a day.
The article has about equal time about what Cybertruck owners dont care about, safety, reliability, etc.
> Similar to other critics (earlier this year, a CNN reviewer called the pickup a “disturbing level of individual arrogance in hard, unforgiving steel”)—Drury believes Cybertruck buyers are people “who think ‘I don’t care if I kill people when I drive this thing down the street,’” he says. “There aren’t many of those people out there, so there’s a relatively small market for the Cybertruck.”
What's the term right wing folks use? Virtue Signaling? The cyber truck is that.
People buy them because they are politically charged, and you can be seen as a tribe member.
But I kinda think it's sad, because I think most tribes make fun of the cyber truck buyer, so they've bought a very expensive, very shoddy ticket into an in group, only to mark themselves as an outsider who bought their way in.
Like nearly all gigantic trucks driven in cities (and almost never off road), though the cybertruck is a new low in likelyhood to kill innocent pedestrians. The most accurate term for this phenomenon is either Emotional Support Vehicle or Gender Affirming Vehicle.
Why there is always so much fuss about labels? Across so many different domains. Cars needed OTA update to be driven safely. Why is it important whether we call it a recall or not?
I am not trying to make a point here. Clearly some people care about that. I'm legitimately curious why.
I don't know about you but there are some kind of car brand and models that if I see on the road i know i must be very carefull of its driver. For instance, brand new Peugeot you know the driver might mistake at some point the brake for the accelerator.
I have yet to see a cybertruck in Europe but god knows i will be careful of them. No sane people could ever buy them.
I consider this as a feature for other drivers, it's like a big red sign pointing 'i put crayon up my nose'.
Ah, another frog with the same system! Same when I see Korean SUVs, personally. To be honest, I at least respect the Cybertruck for trying to look truly different in a sea of homogeneous bland, but I would never buy one.
Sadly there are already multiple. I think there’s one in Poland because their standards are low and negotiable, iirc there was one in or near Austria as well?
Saying that I’m not up to snuff with type approval is an understatement but I think for imports there‘a probably ways to play silly buggers with temp plates if you have the money. But if you’re the sort of persons who decides to import a cybertruck to the eu I don’t think that’s going to stop you.
Hell, I think you can drive for up to a year on non-eu plates before the car has to be locally registered as an import.
If this piece of crap is worse than only 91% of all 2024 vehicles, I really wonder what the other 9%, vehicles that are allegedly even worse, are. The article doesn't name them.
Does anyone know what the deal is with Cybertrucks coming in different colors all of a sudden? I thought they were only sold as bare steel? But now I see matte black cybertrucks regularly.
Had same question so parked next to a black one. It was wrap. Since then I seen green, pink and blue cybertrucks; all wraps with companies advertising. All of sudden majority I see are small business owners wrap-advertising. Rarely see the steel one. This is for Miami FL.
Dude, the thing with these things is that the breathlessness has already exhausted belief. Supposedly Tesla Y was a terrible thing, supposedly everyone was going to die in the heat under the Tesla tent, supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.
Nothing happened. Everyone I know who owns a Tesla loves it. So I’m going to file this under “internet hates guy; tries to make it sound like he makes bad things” which people do a lot with Musk stuff.
None of the Tesla cars are one I’ll buy (need 3 rows comfortably - might even buy the new VW electric van) but I’m getting the feeling from the online techies like I did at the AirPod release and the iPad release: my instinct is that this is great stuff; then my friends who buy it love it; then everyone online hates it; then it sells billions of dollars worth.
> supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.
I agree people tend to overreact and overblow expected consequences, but I mean, twitter's valuation is down 80%[0] and they haven't released anything new in two years, after exhausting the backlog of already developed things.
There referring to the people who claimed that Twitter would break down following the large scale firings. Every time Twitter went done for a little bit after that, lots of comments here would pop up claiming that the Twitter site would get worse and worse and eventually break apart because of the firings (see the whole discussion here[1], for example). People said Musk didn't know what he was doing, and wouldn't be able to keep the site up long term after the layoffs.
Despite the fact that these predictions ended up being completely wrong, there seems to have been very little reflection from the people who were making them.
> they haven't released anything new in two years, after exhausting the backlog of already developed things.
I'm not a Twitter user, so I might miss the lack of some essential features, but it seems to me that the platform is mostly feature-complete. Just further bloating the software for the sake of it is not necessary a good strategy, yet it is one that a lot of startups follow, just because that VC R&D money has to go somewhere.
I wouldn't say that everyone who owns a Tesla loves it. As a matter of fact everyone I know who has bought a Tesla and loves it came from a car that was a lower quality and lower priced car than the Tesla that they bought. The people that I know that came from equally priced or higher priced cars are satisfied with their Tesla but they do not love it.
I think that is a lot of the bias with Tesla owners many of them have never owned a car in that price range before and they bought it because of the hype surrounding the Tesla. Prior to that they would have never thought of buying a car in that price range. Often times when you buy a car in that price range you're getting a better quality car because it's from a manufacturer who's been around longer.
> supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.
It’s true that the smaller team has succeeded with uptime on the core service. It’s also true, however, that the platform is in serious decline, and that’s partly due to the product becoming more and more shitty over time. It turns out skeleton crews can’t make things that are nice to use. Have you tried the X mac app lately? It’s just horrible. Broken modals, empty loading screens, janky layout with desperate upsell message slapped everywhere.
Keeping the platform online with a smaller team was a win, sure. But don’t pretend there’s been no impact.
I was actually referring to the financial institutions who backed the takeover writing off ~75% of the value of their investment in the platform during Musk’s leadership, which predates the recent Bluesky enthusiasm.
But since you mention it: yes, a vocal minority of leftists moving to a new platform is indeed a decline! Get your politics out of it and think about what it means for a business. Part of twitter’s value was that it was where news broke, people made statements, etc. It was cited on the news. There was no other platform like that (except perhaps Instagram, usually with pop culture figures). There is indeed a small group of people who, if you lose them, cause enormous damage to a platform like Twitter, because for many people using it they are using it because of the other people using it. Network effects cut both ways.
I have heard from three Tesla owners how uncomfortable they find the seats during very long drives, so not everyone "loves" it. Perhaps if you don't drive long distances in it, your experience will not reveal this.
I owned a Tesla. I sold it. Loved it for three years then hated it. It became a nightmare to own and the service dept was such a hassle. They refused to fix recall issues, things broke all the time. It was trash, and I was so blinded by speedy car that I didn't notice it was trash until years later.
Gosh I still laugh at all the "I'm and SRE and I can promise you Twitter is going to fail with all the people he cut" and it had what, 3 blips at most?
They're hard to find now, I assume because of how embarrassed the authors were for posting them.
Not an SRE but I admit to saying that I expected Twitter to have some serious outages in the coming months after firing all those people. Honestly, how did the remaining engineers at Twitter pull it off? I can't really imagine losing more than half of my coworkers and not having the wheels fall off pretty quickly.
Twitter was overstaffed, but much of the "extra" staff the elon fired weren't SREs keeping the systems running, they had to do with things like moderation. Elon doesn't believe in moderation, so out they went, and the skeleton crew was able to keep the site running, for the most part, but now the user experience has gone to hell unless you're a right-wing nutcase, so everyone who isn't is fleeing, as well as advertisers who Twitter even threatened to sue because they weren't buying advertising (!).
a lot of what made X worse since Musk is not easily quantifiable. fewer high-quality posts, much higher spam, next to zero moderation, more misinfo - while it's possible to get some data on this, it's subjective enough that the fans will wave it away.
the problem is that Twitter has been such an invaluable part of the daily doomscroll that i suspect even those who have 'left' it for BlueSky or Threads are still opening X a few times a day - keeping those MAU numbers up.
Twitter for what it is had too many engineers. I think part of the problem was the fad of more workers more hiring will generate more revenue but that was not true and just was a way to prop up the stock value.
Everyone’s giving their anecdotes of “no not every Tesla owner loves them” so I’ll give my own. I’ve owned a 3, a Y, and now a cybertruck. These cars are awesome.
We had a “bomb cyclone” last week in the PNW that took out power for half a million homes, and my cybertruck was a lifesaver. Powered my house for multiple days, allowing my family to stay at home. Our fridge and freezer stayed powered and I even ran my clothes dryer one day just because I could. I can’t sing its praises enough after this experience.
Small consolation for the pedestrian who gets run over. Massive cars and distracting screens are two of the main reasons traffic deaths are on the rise, and they're both two selling points people like about Teslas.
I have driven a model 3 and it is hands down the worst 45k (CAD) car I’ve ever driven. Horrible ride quality, uncomfortable seats, terrible (in my opinion - beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose) and slightly dangerous interior, not really all that fast compared to other cars in the price bracket. I’ve also ridden in one with 100k km and it was falling apart - even ignoring the interior, the suspension was horrid (you shouldn’t need new shocks and springs all around after less than 100k lm of driving), the paint was faded to crap, panel gaps were notably worse than when the same car was new.
They are a 15k car at best with 20k worth of batteries masquerading as a nice car. They’re not. They’re a reasonably cost-effective EV, compared to the rest of the market, but they’re not even close to gas cars in the same price range when it comes to anything other than cost per mile.
man, the internet is being so weird about this truck it's absurd.
Like its shape is weird and 'dangerous', but the F150, RAM truck etc etc are MORE dangerous shape wise, but because it has a 'conventional' shape and the change happened gradually, some how it's ok?
The strangest was the carrot test, they kept doing this test the Cyber truck frunk... but guess what, same happens if you put carrots across the opening of other EV truck with auto close... I saw a video of it same happening with an F150 EV...what even was the point of this whole hullabaloo
I am not American, I don't even have a car, I just hate that this nonsense is polluting my internet feeds.
It's a big car with a long truck, congrats, it's not the anti christ, shut up about it.
exactly, Pedestrian safety of all american trucks is terrible, yet we don't hear about the big speeding wall that are the 'conventional' american truck... but apparently the cyber truck is a pedestrian predator they 'suddenly' discovered.
Either do something about the terrible truck design... or shut up and tolerate the cyber truck like you tolerate the F150 EV or whatever.
Fluff like this just pollutes the EV news space without providing any new info.
Surely the fact that it's a three ton machine that can accelerate from 0-60 in 3 seconds is relevant too. As far as I'm aware the F150 can't match that.
> Surely the fact that it's a three ton machine that can accelerate from 0-60 in 3 seconds is relevant too. As far as I'm aware the F150 can't match that.
The F150 EV has similar weight and speed[1], not sure how it's relevant?
In fact it proves the point, no one talks about how the F150 EV or the Silverado EV etc etc having similar characteristic flaws as the cyber truck, because that doesn't generate clicks.
If anything should be generating articles, it should be the Hummer EV, that things in absurdly big, heavy and fast, even for american trucks... but that doesn't generate clicks.
Cybertruck gets undue attention, mostly negative because clickbait, and we should stop clicking such obvious baits.
Well, no, not exactly, you literally just wrote another reply, right below, explicitly saying no, you didn't mean weight, you meant people talking about the slicing edges of the cybertruck.
It's not the front shape or slicing people. It's the weight. I have no idea why you think anyone is hand-wringing about slicing people. No one thinks slicing people with hard edges is the problem.
It makes sense if you're A) mad about All Duh People Lying About Slicing Car or B) Actually All Heavy Cars Are Bad. You are stuck on saying A but wanting to make sense, as in B, which is at least internally coherent and reality-based, if purist.
> It's not the front shape or slicing people. It's the weight. I have no idea why you think anyone is hand-wringing about slicing people. No one thinks slicing people with hard edges is the problem.
I literally provided links the reply below you mentioned, please read them! they do talk about the weight, but they are much more worried about the shape and its effect on pedestrian collision.
Please read the links, I'll share them here again.
I talk about the front shape and its effect on pedestrian safety.
The article about the cyber truck always talk about how its wedge shape will slice people off or whatever... but the Standard American truck shape (big flat front nose) is just as dangerous, being hit by a speeding wall is not beneficial either.
If publications want to talk about bad truck shapes in good faith, talk about ALL truck shapes! Singling out the truck made by Tesla when the trucks made by other American automakers is just as dangerous is obvious click bait, and just pollutes the EV news scape.
> The F150, generously, is 2/3 the weight. (median F150 vs. lowest cybertruck)
I was comparing like with like, and acc to google the F150 EV is about the same weight as the Cybertruck. (around ~ 3,000 Kg)
Also I was referring to the line in this article where they talk about how it doesn't meet EU regulations, which leads to another article[1] of their, which talks a LOT about cybertruck's bad front shape... (which I must mention for clarity, IS bad)... but make no mention of the even WORSE shapes by other competing American trucks.
Because the fact is... Tesla sells clicks. They reference a letter [2] by the NGO protesting about the (private) import of this particular turck... but said NGO's website makes no mention of OTHER dangerous american trucks privately imported to europe and parading about. The story is not the shape or pedestrian safety... it's click.
Btw, I am not in Europe. I live in a 3rd world country, not sure where I gave that insinuation.
TL:DR; ALL american trucks are terribly shaped and designed or whatever. ALL american trucks have multiple other issues and recalls... as is routine with the damn things.
Yet this particular stupid truck gets posted because it's click bait, NOT because there is some actual information to be gained. We should downvote such clickbait pollution on our feeds.
I love how people who claim to not care dedicate so much time to telling everyone how much they don’t care. You could have just not posted. But clearly you do care a lot. Get help.
I care about EVs and climate change and emission reduction and all that.
What I don't care about is the Electric vehicle news feed being polluted with irrelevant nonsense when there are far more important news to be shared.
I don't care about the Cybertruck's oddities... because those oddities are common to other american EV trucks and therefore bring nothing new to the table.
I saw my first Cybertruck the other day. It looked less weird in person than I expected it.
It's a very different and new design. How many of the 91% we're comparing to are completely new designs. What's the correct benchmark?
Let's rewrite the headline. "A radical new EV design from Tesla, the Cybertruck, is already ahead of 9% of all 2024 vehicles in quality as it just ramps up production".
I'll likely never own this - not my style. But I can appreciate doing things differently and being successful at that. Getting those gas guzzling truck owners to go electric would be nice too.
In a vacuum I would agree with you, but it fails in lots of predictable ways, and doesnt really offer any utility as a new design. And where they tried to engineer around these issues they often over engineered instead of removing the problem.
I honestly like the way it looks, but I am happy I never preordered it or anything. The reviews are shocking. Even the positive reviews tend to hyperfocus on situations that can be capably dealt with by a standard hatchback. You can take a honda jazz across more terrain.
Its a failure, one that was likely very familiar to HN members. I am sure that internally engineers made every single one of these issues very apparent to management and they shipped anyway.
The word 'utility' in the comment you're replying to specifically means how the design functions, not how it looks. For example, it's a truck that's design makes it worse for carrying cargo in the tray than a standard truck.
> word 'utility' specifically means how it functions, not how it looks
Yes. Not offering utility in design is common in cars. Most people don’t buy a truck to haul. Most people don’t buy an off-roader to go off road. (Most people don’t buy a sports car to race.)
But if they do need to haul or tow something, they can.
> Most people don’t buy an off-roader to go off road.
But if they do need to go off-road, they can.
> Most people don’t buy a sports car to race.
Sports cars can be enjoyed (relatively) legally on the street. Quick acceleration combined with very good handling and a sense of connection to the road is a feeling you can enjoy at 55mph. Many people won’t drive their sports cars to the limit, but they are still a more enjoyable driving experience than a regular car for people who care about that.
A cybertruck can’t really haul things, it can’t really tow things, and it can’t be that fun to drive. I hope it’s at least comfortable, but based on my experience with their other vehicles, I doubt it.
> but it fails in lots of predictable ways, and doesnt really offer any utility as a new design
In what ways has it failed predictably? There are a number of things that could contribute to various failures/recalls that relate to utility provided by the (novel) design. For example the steer-by-wire system or the mid-voltage (48 V DC) electrical system.
The main example of "this is just dumb design for no reason" is the recall due to the pedal cover sliding up and jamming, but that was only 1 out of 6.
The only people I know who were genuinely impressed by cybertruck are 1. My father in law who was visiting USA and does not know how to drive, and 2. My 3yo son.
I'd hazard a guess that making it pointy, shiny and prone to rusting is not what many people would call "radical and new". DMC was what, 40 years ago? And that one didn't rust as far as I remember.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess. Personally I think they look hideous. That doesn't bother me. To each their own and all that. What does bother me are all the problems. Consumer Reports went into this. There are numerous videos about it.
For example, it has steel panels but... an aluminium frame. That's an odd choice. If you're towing something heavy then up and down motion makes the frame prone to snapping.
Big trucks (eg F150, F250, F350) exist because of a quirk in regulation where so-called "work vehicles" were exempted from emissions standards. This part is a real shame because the US doesn't have vehicles lik the Toyota Hilux, which actually have an equivalent tray size and would be much more economical to run.
An electric truck may allow a smaller truck because it's not affected by emissions (obviously). Perhaps battery weight makes this impractical. It would be nice. I mean some people import Japanese K trucks now.
Competition-wise the Ford F150 Lightning looks like a much better proposition. It looks like a truck. It's built on a proven frame. Still, sales seem to be weak. For work vehicles in particular (and, yes, a lot of trucks aren't work vehicles; they're essentially ornamental) could be quite limited by EV charging issues vs the convenience of filling up a tank of gas.
> "This part is a real shame because the US doesn't have vehicles like the Toyota Hilux"
Yes! That was the first and only truck (or any car) I've ever owned! It was just called the "Toyota Pickup" in the US but it's the same model that was named "Hilux" in many other countries.
I used it to drive ladder racks and paint around Denver while I was in the house painting business to pay my way through college. It had almost 200k miles on it when I gave it to my dad after I graduated and decided to move abroad. To the best of my knowledge, he's still driving it and when I last asked him about it several years ago, it had well over half a million miles on it.
At least for autos made in the 90s, Toyota's quality was unmatched. My dad is a former plane mechanic and has undoubtedly extended its life, but I had no idea what I was doing and that pickup seemed virtually impervious to normal wear and tear. It's a shame it was discontinued in the US.
> Getting those gas guzzling truck owners to go electric would be nice too.
Congratulations, you solved 1 issue related to car dependency and proliferation of huge vehicles, namely tailpipe emissions. Now the other 99 remain.
The solution to gas guzzling trucks is "boring", it's good trains, it's protected bike lanes in urban environments, it's smaller and safer cars in less dense environments, etc. But these things don't make Mr Musk money :)
Trains will not enter American suburbs, nor will most truck drivers consider biking as a valid alternative.
I'm all for better transit, but it doesn't change that the trucks/SUVs keep selling and getting more polluting, and will do so for decades as part of the fleet
Train stations are in many of the Chicago suburbs already and take on average 280,000[1] commuters to and from downtown Chicago on a daily basis (it's called the Metra system).
Hell, I just found out those same commuter lines extend all the way north to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and east to South Bend, Indiana, so into neighboring states. I did know people who commuted to Chicago from Indiana everyday so that's not too surprising.
No more a death machine than a Cadillac Escalade or a Dodge ram truck. There's lots of criticisms you can make about the cybertruck that are exclusive to the cybertruck but this isn't one. This complaint is about bad drivers. The rise of all the driver assist technology is enabling bad drivers to believe that they are better than they are. This is across vehicle brands.
Aren't all trucks? Wouldn't the sensor suite and auto-braking make it maybe somewhat safer? Is this something that gets tested for by car manufacturers?
Also, the hood + "grill" is significantly lower. A pedestrian would bounce (although uncomfortably) instead of hit by a wall and run over like most other trucks / SUVs.
I'll never buy one but I suspect a lot of the "AHA GOTCHA" attitude coming from more traditional car-oriented media is coming from a place of not liking an upstart.
There's just a lot of easy things to point at with the Cybertruck because of what was promised vs what was delivered. This happens with model cars from other manufacturers too though what changes there is often more looks than promised functionality.
There’s a pretty big difference between traditional auto markers’ “concept cars” and Tesla in 2019 showing off what was supposed to be very close to the final production car. It was also supposed to start at $40k, be bulletproof, have shatterproof glass (at least that one was discredited the minute it was announced), have a boat mode, have over 500mile range, and have a bed ramp. And it was supposed to have a “exoskeleton” design that, spoiler alert, isn’t possible. That was not “here’s this neat concept,” that was “this is the car we’re going to sell you.” Everyone (or at least, everyone in my bubble) knew that every single thing was BS (except maybe the ramp), but still nearly two million people with enough money for a pre-order gobbled it up.
The article notes that the most recent recall was a physical one, not a software update, and implies that that was unusual.
I wonder if you exclude "recalls" resolved by software updates, for all cars, where it would rank then?
>I wonder if you exclude "recalls" resolved by software updates, for all cars, where it would rank then?
Why have you put "recalls" in quotes? It gives the impression you think this makes it somehow lesser. The cybertruck, for example, was subject to a recall because the rearview camera wouldn't come up, but the mirrors are insufficient to back the vehicle up safely without the camera.
That's a safety issue, irrespective of whether or not the fix was in software.
The problem is that those issues shouldn't happen on a public road vehicle to begin with. Tesla's approach is shipping beta software to customers, and using them as testers. This is an insidious practice in modern software development, but is criminal when that software is running a 3-ton vehicle, regardless if it can be fixed with an OTA update or not. There are reasons why strict car safety regulations exist. You can't just sell early access cars and fix issues as customers experience them.
I wonder whether OTA updates being possible encourages manufacturers to be sloppy with software quality.
They know they can fix problems cheaply. If they had to physically update vehicles they would have a lot more incentive to make updates unnecessary.
Of course it does.
Think about how, even in software, knowing that a physical shipping of a product (CD / Blu-ray) can be updated from "day 1" has led to poor quality releases with last minute patches.
The cost of having to physically recall / resend CDs back in the day meant that what went out had to work. The cost of sloppy software has now been externalised.
It's not just Tesla. All the online services you depend on are run this way, and none of it's regulated. Governments don't know how to regulate software companies like Tesla. They know how to regulate people constructing homes, cooking food, and building bridges but most attempts at regulating software development have petered out. This is a good thing. Thanks to Tesla's modern approach to car manufacturing it is now possible for anyone in the middle class to purchase a self-driving bulletproof truck that's faster than a Lamborghini. You can't make this stuff up. I swear.
Most of the online services I use can't kill me if they have a bug.
I need to ask - is this a joke? No, Tesla is not particularly bulletproof compared to other cars. Its doors may stop a 9mm sure enough, but the windows won't manage even that, and anything above 9mm will go through the doors as well. And 9mm is not even that common among criminal shooters, they usually go for bigger calibers / higher penetration naturally already.
And which Lamborghini specifically?
It's a pretty simple fix.
In the old days, governments had departments which would inspect cars, verify they complied with legislation, and even examine build quality.
Quite easy, when everything was basically physical.
Now the ECU and modules are a black box, unknowable to such entities. Things can be caught (see VW scamming fuel/emissions tests), but it's by luck.
So solution? We pass laws that all code, every bit of it, all chip schematics too, all firmwares are open source.
Note I said open source, which in the old days just meant "readable". We're not talking GPL, all copyright would remain.
On top of that, all build scripts and methods to flash modules / etc would be provided to governement test environments.
Now we can test. Now, we can look for crappy code, hacky junk, fake emission cheats, bugs and more.
Don't like it? You don't sell cars. Tough.
The entire supply chain would be required to fall inline.
It's really not that hard.
In terms of security, that's what signing updates is for.
And (for example) you can already take hobby tools, such as forscan (for fords) amd flash updates to modules.
As long as it is signed.
I completely agree, but saying it's a 'recall' when your car sits in your driveway still feels entirely wrong.
I'm not sure I agree. From the perspective of a customer, not being able to drive the car due to it being unsafe is the part that matters, not where and how the manufacturer has to fix it.
If you're opposed to it based on the assumption that it wouldn't take as long, I agree that might be true, but by that logic we should be categorizing _all_ recalls based on length (regardless of whether it's a software update or otherwise), since I'm not convinced that the average length of time until a problem is fixed will always be perfectly split with the software ones being super quick and the ones that would need to happen in person being super slow. What if the mechanics are already aware of how to fix the issue and can do it the same day, or if the software issue turns out to take a long time due to the developers needing a lot of time to fix the bug?
If you're opposed to it purely from the perspective of linguistics and "recall" sounds like "return to the manufacturer", I think I'd disagree due to the word "recall" not being super commonly used for that in other circumstances. If anything, the other usage of the word that springs to mind most readily to me is recalling someone or something "from service", which I think fits perfectly here.
Recall is the industry-standard (and populace-understood) term for “this vehicle has a safety or reliability issue that must be resolved by the manufacturer.” It is all encompassing; anything from possibly loose lugnuts to faulty airbags to engine failures to yes, the reverse camera failing to appear. It doesn’t matter if the manufacturer ships an OTA update, shows up at your house with a loaner and a flatbed to take your car, or requires you to go into the dealership for service, it’s a recall.
It might be industry-standard term, but it’s certainly not understood that way by layman, including car customers. To the public, “recall” will always carry the implication that the vehicle needs to go back to the manufacturer for a fix.
"recall" is a legal term, it means the vehicle is not road-legal and requires immediate action.
Doesn't really matter if it hw, sw or maybe even the owners manual that needs to be changed ASAP.
If I have a flat tyre it's not a recall. Not everything about not being road-legal and requiring immediate action is a recall. That's a bad definition.
Sure it's wrong, but it's actually to Tesla's benefit IMO
Which of these would you, a Tesla stakeholder, prefer the news to report:
- Tesla Cybertruck has recall
- Tesla Cybertruck receives software update that resolves issue that put public safety at risk
This is a point which comes up regularly when discussing right to privacy laws (hello EU). Startup culture wants to move fast and break things - including my bones in this case - while evil regulations only come in the way of progress.
> Startup culture wants to move fast and break things - including my bones in this case - while evil regulations only come in the way of progress.
All car companies comply with thousands of regulations, and it's fine. If you have a simple view of the world, I don't think inverting it and claiming the people you think are the baddies hold that inverted view is going to get anyone closer to understanding anything.
> You can't just sell early access cars and fix issues as customers experience them.
But then how will you know what you HAVE to fix. /s
To be frank I find the whole Tesla cult to be mind blowing. Seems to be the realization of believing in something that seems so good to be true alwith a company who promises to do so many great things, delivers non road worthy vehicles and people still dedicate their time and money defending them.
Is it sunk cost fallocy? Or just people who just wish Tesla was what they promised they would be?
Well, the OED definition of 'recall' is "official order to return to a place" and a software update or fix requires no return to the place of purchase. I wonder how may legally defined 'recalls' Microsoft Windows has experienced with each new version.
I think the gist is "recall" is the same saying "safety issue that needs to be fixed in the software or hardware" since we don't have a word for software issues, which carry a bit more weight on a fly-by-wire vehicle like the Cybertruck.
Interesting to note that this thread seems to be full of a lot of people choosing to be pedantic over the word "recall" rather than taking a critical look at the Cybertruck and it's issues. While I agree that language is important (and dynamic), I suspect that discussion around this vehicle is also charged by politics and sycophantic thinking.
If I remove my personal opinions about Musk, I find that I actually do not hate the Cybertruck. Sure, I think it looks absolutely stupid and it bothers me that the flat paneling does not line up perfectly, but I am also cheering on it's attempts to break some rules, try something different and possibly spark some future innovation. With that in mind, it's easy for me to expect that it will have problems since anything new that breaks the mold tends to, so with that reframing, a lot of recalls make sense and could even be looked at as good since solutions are being developed.
> Why have you put "recalls" in quotes?
Maybe because an over-the-air update is hard to seriously consider a "recall"?
They are called recalls because that’s what the term for legalisation mandates. They are issued when a vehicle is unsafe to drive and they are mandated because a manufacturer is required to take a lot of steps to remedy their failure. If they fail to repair the issue they are forced to issue full refunds as an example.
So no, the word recall is used because is the official terminology used for these issues regardless of the solution required to fix them.
The word does have its origin in a world where solutions were rarely software updates. That they are software issues make them no less serious though. I suspect that in some cases the software issues might indeed be far more dangerous than errors which mandate physical recalls.
At the very least, it puts the quality control of Tesla in question, as those are failures which should have been caught PRIOR to a commercial launch.
Tesla is treating its product-launches like it's just some browser-game in the cloud, instead of treating it as what it is: The handover of a 6000 pound bullet into the hand of a customer who will fire it into a crowd in expectation to not hit anyone...
Why? Are safety issues not "serious"?
The word recall sort of implies that the vehicle is recalled to the manufacturer. Calling a software update that happens in your garage at night and takes 20 minutes a “recall” definitely is worthy of quotes.
The word bug sort of implies that the device was struck by a terrestrial arthropod animal. Calling a software defect that happens due to a programming error a "bug" definitely is worthy of quotes.
(The etymology of a word can be quite different from its current meaning today.)
Unless of course that patch can't be delivered because the truck was totalled in an accident that the patch was too late to prevent
Getting an OTA software update to your vehicle is far less disruptive to your life than having to take it in to the dealer. Obviously safety issues shouldn't happen, but how easy they are to fix also matters.
If you think about the financial implications then probably yes. Software issues, safety related or not, can probably easily be fixed OTA and thus don’t even cause a fraction of the costs a (let’s call it "real") recall costs.
Also, in the head of most people, I think, a recall is something where the car needs to be returned physically. But still, obviously, the issues can be as serious as physical issues. It’s just that we’re used to physical recalls.
Maybe, to eliminate ambiguity (and make it sound cooler), they should call it a "roadworthiness directive", similar to "airworthiness directive" for aircraft. Of course airworthiness directives are issued by the authorities (the FAA in the US), while "recalls" are from the manufacturers, but still...
A recall is about the issue, not how it's resolved. A recall means there are some serious security flaws that needs fixing. Even if they can be fixed OTA, they're still a flaw, and Tesla has had many of those.
Couldn't agree more. Recall means "sufficiently dangerous to need to recall the vehicle to the manufacturer" - yes, in the modern world it can be fixed OTA, but it's still dangerous enough to require a mass fix to a fast-moving death machine.
Yeah, software recalls are recalls. The car has steer by wire, so even steering wheel issues could be ”just” a software recall.
Usually your steer by wire isn't fixable over the air
Very few others have recalls that can be done OTA. Even if it is just software, expect an hour to days at a service center to do the update, if the techs can figure it out.
For Tesla, the software recalls are nearly automatic (one click install, just like other update), such that few owners even know that their car ever had a recall.
My Model 3 has had:
- charge port needing replaced shortly after I bought: mobile service
- front and rear suspension forks replaced: 2 trips to service center (common according to them)
- rear light needed replacing (mobile service)
4 years old.
Still not as bad as our last car (diesel VW Sharan), but Teslas have plenty of defects that can’t be fixed OTA.
Sure, but "recall" in the automotive market has a very precise meaning, and refers to safety issues (at production line level, so impacting many VINs)that needs to be fixed. In Tesla's case, unlike most of other vendors, generally these recalls can be fixed with an OTA update.
The CT OTOH had many "classical" physical recalls due to hardware issues.
This is kind of true. Say what you want about Tesla, but they have the best software experience out of the other car manufacturers. I love my BMW i4, but had to take into the shop just to fix a botched softwares update. Well, at least the cabin is silent.
I'd say my 2006MY car has the best software experience. The less, the better.
I've bought several new cars in the past few years and zero of them have had a recall I'm aware of, software or otherwise. My old car went almost 20 years with just two recalls that I can remember.
Even ignoring software recalls, then, the Cybertruck has a significantly higher recall rate (per unit time) than anything I've owned, so the fact that it has had even more recalls that could be serviced OTA is really neither here nor there. The user-facing software systems in these modern luxury cars really do seem to cause a lot of issues.
If that's indeed it, I would rank the article as worse than 91 percent of ordinary boring Elon and Tesla bashing in 2024.
I guess on a positive note they stopped posting that Tesla is almost bankrupt for the 1000th time because Elon.
Elon continues to baffle by avoiding bankruptcy.
Elon is out for Elon always ..a slimey used car salesman I.e. bring out the AI Optimus robots all controlled by AI. Not!
Elon is Trump's next Omarosa...
Recalls come in two types, soft recalls that can be fixed by a software update, and hard recalls that cannot. Many people are still not used to regarding the former as recalls, as they associate the word not with the safety issue itself but the way it gets resolved. It would be nice for articles discussing recalls to point out what type it entails, both for being more immediately informative, and to get people used to software updates being able to qualify as recalls.
> I wonder if you exclude "recalls" resolved by software updates, for all cars, where it would rank then?
While I agree that the term "recall" is overloaded, the Cybertruck has had some pretty spicy safety related "recalls". Issues that, frankly, it should not have been allowed onto public roads with.
Are these "recalls" just simple over the air software updates? Just because car people are not used to this doesn't make it necessarily bad. Obviously no bugs are better than some bugs. But people here tend to know how software development works.
This always comes up. A “recall” is not a description of the remediation, it is a description of the problem.
A recall is a public dangerous defect notice. The dangerous product version can no longer be deployed, existing systems suffering from the dangerous defect are identified, and then the version with those dangerous defects is removed from the market with all due speed by either refunding, replacing, or remediating at the manufacturer’s expense. The defective version is thus no longer present, i.e “recalled”.
The term has a precise meaning as I laid out. Unfortunately, it has been so thoroughly intentionally poisoned by bad actors in recent years that the term should be retired. We should use the descriptive term: “Public Dangerous Defect Notice” to avoid such bad faith misrepresentation going forward.
> A recall is a public dangerous defect notice.
Yes that's a much better term. In peoples minds "recall" means MY vehicle has to be transported somewhere to be fixed.
For the individual customer, a recall can be a massive frustrating hassle, which an OTA isn't. That doesn't change the severity of the issue, but a model that has 9 physical recalls to fix some brake issue, and 1 OTA update is going to be seen as a disaster, while a model that has 0 physical recalls and 10 OTA updates will be seen as a pleasure to own.
Recalls in consumers' minds are a frustration measurement more than a safety record. Most recalls are about very small/hypothetical risks, so the risk I want to avoid when I look at manufacturers recall history is the risk of having to fix my vehicle physically. Because that's a real/large risk, while the risk of it catching fire spontaneously could be catastrophic but is usually tiny.
To your point, both things can be true. The CyberTruck can have recalls worse than 91% of all 2024 cars, but many of its recalls can be cheap to for Tesla to fix.
I think that is where the two clusters of people that I see commenting here are converging / possibly arguing past each other.
One popular form of headline that comes to my mind from business new channels of which I remember no specific instance basically goes like this: “Car manufacturer recalls X many cars costing over them Y dollars because of some fault”. X is usually in the tens of thousands or more and Y is usually in the millions of dollars (now maybe tens of millions of dollars).
> The term has a precise meaning as I laid out. Unfortunately, it has been so thoroughly intentionally poisoned by bad actors in recent years that the term should be retired.
Nah, that's a sleigh of hand. Recall literally means recall. Whatever the actual technical definition, the common-man understanding has always been "manufacturer asking you to give your car back, because they screwed up badly enough to be legally forced to fix it". The focus is, and always has been, on the physically give your car back to manufacturer part.
The precise meaning you laid out? That's arguably a typical case of using ancillary aspects of a thing as a proxy, because they're much easier to precisely pin down than the thing you actually want. Think every other term explicitly defined in any contract - the definition tends to not be what's intended, but something that mostly overlaps with intent and is easier to spell out concisely.
The overall point being: regardless of what the technical meaning of "recall" is, if you put Tesla's OTA fixes together with everyone's repairs that require shipping the car itself to the manufacturer, and then treat them all as equal, that's just blatant, bald-faced lie, a clear indication of purposeful dishonesty.
On https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls#recalls-7746 it says:
> A recall is issued when a manufacturer or NHTSA determines that a vehicle, equipment, car seat, or tire creates an unreasonable safety risk or fails to meet minimum safety standards. Most decisions to conduct a recall and remedy a safety defect are made voluntarily by manufacturers prior to any involvement by NHTSA.
> Manufacturers are required to fix the problem by repairing it, replacing it, offering a refund, or in rare cases repurchasing the vehicle.
So the person you're replying to seems to be correct, or is there another source that shares your claim that "the focus is, and always has been, on the physically give your car back to manufacturer part"?
It's not the only one.
There's been been a number of physical recalls for the Cybertruck, including:
- Accelerator pedal sticking[1]
- Trunk bed trim detaching[2]
- Front windshield wiper failures[3]
- This latest drive problem[4]
From what I could find via the NHTSA there's only been six this year for Cybertrucks, so it seems like the majority are physical problems.
Edit: Forgot HN's formatting for lists.
[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=24V276000
[2]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=24V457000
[3]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=24V456000
[4]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=24V832000
Just because we tolerate it doesn't mean others should too.
Legacy industries view software projects as a 1-and-done deal. The "we'll fix it live" approach in tech is a short-coming of our discipline. We can ignore it when failure means a mild inconvenience. But, hard engineering isn't as forgiving.
Even if the fix is 'just' a software update, the bug can put lives at risk. [1]
Each industry and its regulators come with certain norms. Cars are expected to be delivered as 'complete' products. If Tesla can't abide by that expectation, then that's their problem. Don't drag the entire software industry into this.
[1] https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-cybertruck/recalls/
>But people here tend to know how software development works.
Yes and the way software development tends to work is absolutely unacceptable in safety-critical systems in a 7000 lb vehicle.
> Just because car people are not used to this doesn't make it necessarily bad.
Of course it's bad. If this were a purely software discussion, would anybody be saying "It's OK they have a bazillion zero-days every year because they're quick to fix them when they learn about them"?
Also, remember that the flipside is also true: with aggressive OTA updates, they have the ability to create new issues that weren't there to begin with. I wouldn't trust somebody with that bad a QA track record to not introduce new issues.
Mine has two physical recalls active, but they’re not serious so I haven’t scheduled any maintenance yet. Unlike my Honda civic a couple of decades ago which had an airbag that was killing people. That one I got taken care of quickly.
Except that this is car development with clear guidelines and if you don't adhere to them you have to live with your bugs being labeled as recalls. People should be made aware of when players don't adhere to industry standards with safety implications and you don't get that by just sweeping them under the carpet as "bugs".
From the first paragraph of TFA:
> The latest recall—the wedge wagon’s sixth this year—requires shop time, not an over-the-air (OTA) update.
That's the point... It is the only one and affects less than 3000 vehicles. A prior physical recall affected a few hundred.
For most automakers, a recall involves hundreds of thousands to millions and is almost never an OTA software update.
It is not the only one. While it's true this affects roughly 1/5 to 1/3 of all Cybertrucks sold so far this year (depending on which random sales numbers online you believe), some of the others have affected every Cybertruck sold, such as the wiper motor burning out or the pieces of bed trim falling off while driving.
I cannot find any evidence that previous physical recalls this year only affected a few hundred units. Two are 2000+ units and the others seem to be however many had sold by the date of the recall (10k+ in both instances).
That doesn’t answer which one they are considering to determine this ranking,
This implies some of the recalls were just OTAs
So...one?
This article is a hack job. I didn't see any positive commentary. Wired is cooked.
Is it their job to write positive commentary about Tesla? Because I'm not sure it is. I'd argue the opposite, since that'd just be an advertisement.
Recall means safety issue, which is necessarily bad. It's nice that they can fix these things over the air, but there was still some elevated risk before they caught it.
Despite this, seems like at least the regular Teslas are among the safest vehicles on the road all things considered.
Completely unrelated to safety, these vehicles don't look like they are aging well. They are all completely new but the ones I am seeing on the road already look a bit beat up. That finish on them and their general styling emphasize every minor blemish.
Car panels are convex on nearly all other cars for very good reason. Flat panels are structurally susceptible to damages which wouldn’t mark a standard panel. Adding a highly reflective surface was another great move.
Not only that, but the finish looks like trash, too. I'm seeing 10-20 Cybertrucks a day and almost all of them are weirdly splotchy and dull.
Curious what city that's in... I rarely see them.
There are TONS of them in Los Angeles.
There is a whole section in James May's review where he is confirming with a steel ruler that the surfaces are slightly convex :-)
https://youtu.be/CQzYhMDNLPA?t=216
I wonder what tests car companies generally do to predict how durable a style choice is (how scratches, corrosion, etc will impact the look). Protecting your brand is also about what people will see in the future, not just what is on the showroom now. If 5 years from now all of these vehicles look terrible that won't help sales for any of their models.
I know in the past they've looked at data from used cars, and they also have HALT/HASS (highly accelerated life/stress) testing which does things like e.g. spray the car with concentrated salt solution in a wind tunnel, things like that.
I believe many manufacturers also look at data from people like Munro & Associates who tear down cars, figure out what they're made from, and how they were made.
Not sure if it's age, but whenever I see one now, it looks dirty. Maybe it picks up dirt a lot, or owners are afraid to wash them, I dunno.
Every one I’ve seen has a wrap for this reason
Could not disagree more. They are the freshest looking vehicles on the road.
To each their own on this matter because styling is a matter of taste. I remember the shift from the '70s style boxy cars to the mid to late '80s rounded style cars. I wasn't a fan of that new style when it came out but it did eventually grow on me.
For me the cybertruck looks like something out of a low budget'70s Sci-Fi movie. Who knows in 10 years maybe it will start to appeal to me but for right now it doesn't.
Nah, it's objectively not good-looking, and in a few years it'll be more obvious. There are probably more than 0 people who still genuinely think the Pontiac Aztek looks good, and they're wrong.
'Good looking' is a subjective term by definition.
Stop trying to tell people what they should think.
Looks like a "Death Race 2000" El Camino...
Looks like the DeLorean from the latest Back to the Future video game... with a buggy level-of-detail algorithm.
It looks like 3D on 16 bit / 4th gen consoles. Straight out of StarFox.
I think it looks ok from a distance. But up close it looks like a prop from the set of a Back to the Future remake.
The panels will not rust, which is the reason to avoiding scratches on other vehicles. You can beat the hell out of it and not have to care.
Stainless steel can definitely rust. Leave your favorite knife in the sink for a few weeks and watch what happens, especially if it has any scratches on it.
Oh did they fix the rusting issue from the beginning of the year?
I think that story turned out to be media sensationalism. I’ve owned one for over half a year, in the distinctly not dry PNW. No rust at all.
I have no dog in this fight, but its worth nothing that its an odd experience to hear your anecdote wipes out numerous others because waves magic wand media sensationalism. Then, this sort of makes me think again and realize that unless you think metal will never ever rust, it seems odd to say it was "sensationalism" thats implied to be "fixed"
Ah, I should've known I'd get "anecdote"d.
Here's some more sources: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+cybertrucks+actually+rus...
It wasn't fixed because it didn't need to be fixed, it just wasn't actually the truck itself rusting.
So is the media sensationalist, or what I need to read to understand the media was sensationalist? :)
(sorry, I'm just cranky about Duh Media characterization in general. there's a wide set of experiences in this world, and its not nefarious to describe some of them!)
most people care about scratches because they look like shit.
paint is a bit more than just corrosion protection at this point, otherwise mfgs would just slap on the thickest toughest machine-tool grade enamel and call it a day.
why don't they? because it looks terrible.
And most cars end up scratched anyway, and most owners do not take their car in for detailing every time this happens (if at all).
Most cars don't end up scratched. They definitely don't end up scratched after 1 year.
Most brand new cars I see on the road have at least 1 scratch on.
We are not seeing the same cars or not have the same definition of what a scratch is, lol.
The article has about equal time about what Cybertruck owners dont care about, safety, reliability, etc.
> Similar to other critics (earlier this year, a CNN reviewer called the pickup a “disturbing level of individual arrogance in hard, unforgiving steel”)—Drury believes Cybertruck buyers are people “who think ‘I don’t care if I kill people when I drive this thing down the street,’” he says. “There aren’t many of those people out there, so there’s a relatively small market for the Cybertruck.”
The Josh Johnson on this one is gonna be good.
What's the term right wing folks use? Virtue Signaling? The cyber truck is that.
People buy them because they are politically charged, and you can be seen as a tribe member.
But I kinda think it's sad, because I think most tribes make fun of the cyber truck buyer, so they've bought a very expensive, very shoddy ticket into an in group, only to mark themselves as an outsider who bought their way in.
Like nearly all gigantic trucks driven in cities (and almost never off road), though the cybertruck is a new low in likelyhood to kill innocent pedestrians. The most accurate term for this phenomenon is either Emotional Support Vehicle or Gender Affirming Vehicle.
I'm a leftist and would definitely buy a cyber truck if I could park it easily
The article is a smear piece. As it was expected coming from Wired.
https://archive.is/SNGSo
Why there is always so much fuss about labels? Across so many different domains. Cars needed OTA update to be driven safely. Why is it important whether we call it a recall or not?
I am not trying to make a point here. Clearly some people care about that. I'm legitimately curious why.
I don't know about you but there are some kind of car brand and models that if I see on the road i know i must be very carefull of its driver. For instance, brand new Peugeot you know the driver might mistake at some point the brake for the accelerator.
I have yet to see a cybertruck in Europe but god knows i will be careful of them. No sane people could ever buy them.
I consider this as a feature for other drivers, it's like a big red sign pointing 'i put crayon up my nose'.
You seem to be really derogatory and dismissive of people whos opinion you dont agre with.
Ah, another frog with the same system! Same when I see Korean SUVs, personally. To be honest, I at least respect the Cybertruck for trying to look truly different in a sea of homogeneous bland, but I would never buy one.
AFAIK these monstrosities are not road-legal in Europe, so you're unlikely to see them.
Sadly there are already multiple. I think there’s one in Poland because their standards are low and negotiable, iirc there was one in or near Austria as well?
Saying that I’m not up to snuff with type approval is an understatement but I think for imports there‘a probably ways to play silly buggers with temp plates if you have the money. But if you’re the sort of persons who decides to import a cybertruck to the eu I don’t think that’s going to stop you.
Hell, I think you can drive for up to a year on non-eu plates before the car has to be locally registered as an import.
…And it’s horribly ugly to boot.
How long til the us army announces its new contract with Tesla to outfit the whole service with cybertrucks?
That's easy to find out with a formula:
= (Date("Jan-20-2025")-Now()).convertToWholeDays;
Surely all the peanut farms are sold before people take official government positions?
At least then, us Europeans won't care anymore if they pull out of NATO.
Don‘t give him ideas
No-paywall version
https://archive.ph/SNGSo
If this piece of crap is worse than only 91% of all 2024 vehicles, I really wonder what the other 9%, vehicles that are allegedly even worse, are. The article doesn't name them.
Vinfast, just a guess
In other news, my phone has a recall every month
Does anyone know what the deal is with Cybertrucks coming in different colors all of a sudden? I thought they were only sold as bare steel? But now I see matte black cybertrucks regularly.
You're seeing vinyl wraps, most likely.
Had same question so parked next to a black one. It was wrap. Since then I seen green, pink and blue cybertrucks; all wraps with companies advertising. All of sudden majority I see are small business owners wrap-advertising. Rarely see the steel one. This is for Miami FL.
Tesla now offers wraps.
Are those from Tesla itself or a third party? Can you get any color?
Dude, the thing with these things is that the breathlessness has already exhausted belief. Supposedly Tesla Y was a terrible thing, supposedly everyone was going to die in the heat under the Tesla tent, supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.
Nothing happened. Everyone I know who owns a Tesla loves it. So I’m going to file this under “internet hates guy; tries to make it sound like he makes bad things” which people do a lot with Musk stuff.
None of the Tesla cars are one I’ll buy (need 3 rows comfortably - might even buy the new VW electric van) but I’m getting the feeling from the online techies like I did at the AirPod release and the iPad release: my instinct is that this is great stuff; then my friends who buy it love it; then everyone online hates it; then it sells billions of dollars worth.
> supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.
I agree people tend to overreact and overblow expected consequences, but I mean, twitter's valuation is down 80%[0] and they haven't released anything new in two years, after exhausting the backlog of already developed things.
It's not going great.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-musk...
There referring to the people who claimed that Twitter would break down following the large scale firings. Every time Twitter went done for a little bit after that, lots of comments here would pop up claiming that the Twitter site would get worse and worse and eventually break apart because of the firings (see the whole discussion here[1], for example). People said Musk didn't know what he was doing, and wouldn't be able to keep the site up long term after the layoffs.
Despite the fact that these predictions ended up being completely wrong, there seems to have been very little reflection from the people who were making them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35043433
> they haven't released anything new in two years, after exhausting the backlog of already developed things.
I'm not a Twitter user, so I might miss the lack of some essential features, but it seems to me that the platform is mostly feature-complete. Just further bloating the software for the sake of it is not necessary a good strategy, yet it is one that a lot of startups follow, just because that VC R&D money has to go somewhere.
Valuation has no relevance to the layoffs. The valuation is down because brands left due to Elon's politics.
Por que no los dos?
I wouldn't say that everyone who owns a Tesla loves it. As a matter of fact everyone I know who has bought a Tesla and loves it came from a car that was a lower quality and lower priced car than the Tesla that they bought. The people that I know that came from equally priced or higher priced cars are satisfied with their Tesla but they do not love it.
I think that is a lot of the bias with Tesla owners many of them have never owned a car in that price range before and they bought it because of the hype surrounding the Tesla. Prior to that they would have never thought of buying a car in that price range. Often times when you buy a car in that price range you're getting a better quality car because it's from a manufacturer who's been around longer.
> which people do a lot with Musk stuff.
Rightfully so? I mean you can't build up a personality cult and then separate the guy from the product.
But regardless of musk, you have to agree that the cybertruck has issues and underdelivered.
> supposedly Twitter would die in 3 days without their staff.
It’s true that the smaller team has succeeded with uptime on the core service. It’s also true, however, that the platform is in serious decline, and that’s partly due to the product becoming more and more shitty over time. It turns out skeleton crews can’t make things that are nice to use. Have you tried the X mac app lately? It’s just horrible. Broken modals, empty loading screens, janky layout with desperate upsell message slapped everywhere.
Keeping the platform online with a smaller team was a win, sure. But don’t pretend there’s been no impact.
>It’s also true, however, that the platform is in serious decline, and that’s partly due to the product becoming more and more shitty over time.
A vocal minority of leftists moving to Bluesky isn't a decline.
I was actually referring to the financial institutions who backed the takeover writing off ~75% of the value of their investment in the platform during Musk’s leadership, which predates the recent Bluesky enthusiasm.
But since you mention it: yes, a vocal minority of leftists moving to a new platform is indeed a decline! Get your politics out of it and think about what it means for a business. Part of twitter’s value was that it was where news broke, people made statements, etc. It was cited on the news. There was no other platform like that (except perhaps Instagram, usually with pop culture figures). There is indeed a small group of people who, if you lose them, cause enormous damage to a platform like Twitter, because for many people using it they are using it because of the other people using it. Network effects cut both ways.
I have heard from three Tesla owners how uncomfortable they find the seats during very long drives, so not everyone "loves" it. Perhaps if you don't drive long distances in it, your experience will not reveal this.
Seats are extremely uncomfortable for people of certain heights. The main issue seems to be the headrests aren't adjustable without tools.
We need a special #RocketManBad for these stories.
I owned a Tesla. I sold it. Loved it for three years then hated it. It became a nightmare to own and the service dept was such a hassle. They refused to fix recall issues, things broke all the time. It was trash, and I was so blinded by speedy car that I didn't notice it was trash until years later.
Gosh I still laugh at all the "I'm and SRE and I can promise you Twitter is going to fail with all the people he cut" and it had what, 3 blips at most?
They're hard to find now, I assume because of how embarrassed the authors were for posting them.
Hilarious.
Not an SRE but I admit to saying that I expected Twitter to have some serious outages in the coming months after firing all those people. Honestly, how did the remaining engineers at Twitter pull it off? I can't really imagine losing more than half of my coworkers and not having the wheels fall off pretty quickly.
Twitter was overstaffed, but much of the "extra" staff the elon fired weren't SREs keeping the systems running, they had to do with things like moderation. Elon doesn't believe in moderation, so out they went, and the skeleton crew was able to keep the site running, for the most part, but now the user experience has gone to hell unless you're a right-wing nutcase, so everyone who isn't is fleeing, as well as advertisers who Twitter even threatened to sue because they weren't buying advertising (!).
a lot of what made X worse since Musk is not easily quantifiable. fewer high-quality posts, much higher spam, next to zero moderation, more misinfo - while it's possible to get some data on this, it's subjective enough that the fans will wave it away.
the problem is that Twitter has been such an invaluable part of the daily doomscroll that i suspect even those who have 'left' it for BlueSky or Threads are still opening X a few times a day - keeping those MAU numbers up.
Twitter for what it is had too many engineers. I think part of the problem was the fad of more workers more hiring will generate more revenue but that was not true and just was a way to prop up the stock value.
Everyone’s giving their anecdotes of “no not every Tesla owner loves them” so I’ll give my own. I’ve owned a 3, a Y, and now a cybertruck. These cars are awesome.
We had a “bomb cyclone” last week in the PNW that took out power for half a million homes, and my cybertruck was a lifesaver. Powered my house for multiple days, allowing my family to stay at home. Our fridge and freezer stayed powered and I even ran my clothes dryer one day just because I could. I can’t sing its praises enough after this experience.
>Everyone I know who owns a Tesla loves it.
Small consolation for the pedestrian who gets run over. Massive cars and distracting screens are two of the main reasons traffic deaths are on the rise, and they're both two selling points people like about Teslas.
All the hate comes from deranged people who have never driven a Tesla, let alone had one. They take any negative story and spin it forever.
I have driven a model 3 and it is hands down the worst 45k (CAD) car I’ve ever driven. Horrible ride quality, uncomfortable seats, terrible (in my opinion - beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose) and slightly dangerous interior, not really all that fast compared to other cars in the price bracket. I’ve also ridden in one with 100k km and it was falling apart - even ignoring the interior, the suspension was horrid (you shouldn’t need new shocks and springs all around after less than 100k lm of driving), the paint was faded to crap, panel gaps were notably worse than when the same car was new.
They are a 15k car at best with 20k worth of batteries masquerading as a nice car. They’re not. They’re a reasonably cost-effective EV, compared to the rest of the market, but they’re not even close to gas cars in the same price range when it comes to anything other than cost per mile.
man, the internet is being so weird about this truck it's absurd.
Like its shape is weird and 'dangerous', but the F150, RAM truck etc etc are MORE dangerous shape wise, but because it has a 'conventional' shape and the change happened gradually, some how it's ok?
The strangest was the carrot test, they kept doing this test the Cyber truck frunk... but guess what, same happens if you put carrots across the opening of other EV truck with auto close... I saw a video of it same happening with an F150 EV...what even was the point of this whole hullabaloo
I am not American, I don't even have a car, I just hate that this nonsense is polluting my internet feeds.
It's a big car with a long truck, congrats, it's not the anti christ, shut up about it.
I have a fatal attraction to a good overwrought get off my lawn, but I can't get over that there's a jump in paragraph 2 I can't follow.
What do you mean by shape?
Generally, safety is proportional to the relative weight of your car in the collision.
The F150, generously, is 2/3 the weight. (median F150 vs. lowest cybertruck)
Generally, when people discuss car safety in the context of SUVs, they're discussing this weight.
Rest of the stuff seems irrelevant or strawmen I've never seen (truck is antichrist!?; you're in Europe)
I think the parent comment classifies the F150 as dangerous not to the driver but to everyone around it.
exactly, Pedestrian safety of all american trucks is terrible, yet we don't hear about the big speeding wall that are the 'conventional' american truck... but apparently the cyber truck is a pedestrian predator they 'suddenly' discovered.
Either do something about the terrible truck design... or shut up and tolerate the cyber truck like you tolerate the F150 EV or whatever.
Fluff like this just pollutes the EV news space without providing any new info.
Surely the fact that it's a three ton machine that can accelerate from 0-60 in 3 seconds is relevant too. As far as I'm aware the F150 can't match that.
> Surely the fact that it's a three ton machine that can accelerate from 0-60 in 3 seconds is relevant too. As far as I'm aware the F150 can't match that.
The F150 EV has similar weight and speed[1], not sure how it's relevant?
In fact it proves the point, no one talks about how the F150 EV or the Silverado EV etc etc having similar characteristic flaws as the cyber truck, because that doesn't generate clicks.
If anything should be generating articles, it should be the Hummer EV, that things in absurdly big, heavy and fast, even for american trucks... but that doesn't generate clicks.
Cybertruck gets undue attention, mostly negative because clickbait, and we should stop clicking such obvious baits.
[1]: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40120063/2022-ford-f-150-...
Well, no, not exactly, you literally just wrote another reply, right below, explicitly saying no, you didn't mean weight, you meant people talking about the slicing edges of the cybertruck.
It's not the front shape or slicing people. It's the weight. I have no idea why you think anyone is hand-wringing about slicing people. No one thinks slicing people with hard edges is the problem.
It makes sense if you're A) mad about All Duh People Lying About Slicing Car or B) Actually All Heavy Cars Are Bad. You are stuck on saying A but wanting to make sense, as in B, which is at least internally coherent and reality-based, if purist.
Please read the links, I'll share them here again.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-rubberized-cybertruck-is-ploug...
https://www.transportenvironment.org/uploads/files/2024-10-0...
If publications want to talk about bad truck shapes in good faith, talk about ALL truck shapes! Singling out the truck made by Tesla when the trucks made by other American automakers is just as dangerous is obvious click bait, and just pollutes the EV news scape.
I was comparing like with like, and acc to google the F150 EV is about the same weight as the Cybertruck. (around ~ 3,000 Kg)Also I was referring to the line in this article where they talk about how it doesn't meet EU regulations, which leads to another article[1] of their, which talks a LOT about cybertruck's bad front shape... (which I must mention for clarity, IS bad)... but make no mention of the even WORSE shapes by other competing American trucks.
Because the fact is... Tesla sells clicks. They reference a letter [2] by the NGO protesting about the (private) import of this particular turck... but said NGO's website makes no mention of OTHER dangerous american trucks privately imported to europe and parading about. The story is not the shape or pedestrian safety... it's click.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/a-rubberized-cybertruck-is-ploug...
[2]: https://www.transportenvironment.org/uploads/files/2024-10-0...
____
Btw, I am not in Europe. I live in a 3rd world country, not sure where I gave that insinuation.
TL:DR; ALL american trucks are terribly shaped and designed or whatever. ALL american trucks have multiple other issues and recalls... as is routine with the damn things.
Yet this particular stupid truck gets posted because it's click bait, NOT because there is some actual information to be gained. We should downvote such clickbait pollution on our feeds.
I love how people who claim to not care dedicate so much time to telling everyone how much they don’t care. You could have just not posted. But clearly you do care a lot. Get help.
But I do care!
I care about EVs and climate change and emission reduction and all that.
What I don't care about is the Electric vehicle news feed being polluted with irrelevant nonsense when there are far more important news to be shared.
I don't care about the Cybertruck's oddities... because those oddities are common to other american EV trucks and therefore bring nothing new to the table.
I imagine they know V1 is for the die hard early adopters. V2 will be the mass market push.
I saw my first Cybertruck the other day. It looked less weird in person than I expected it.
It's a very different and new design. How many of the 91% we're comparing to are completely new designs. What's the correct benchmark?
Let's rewrite the headline. "A radical new EV design from Tesla, the Cybertruck, is already ahead of 9% of all 2024 vehicles in quality as it just ramps up production".
I'll likely never own this - not my style. But I can appreciate doing things differently and being successful at that. Getting those gas guzzling truck owners to go electric would be nice too.
In a vacuum I would agree with you, but it fails in lots of predictable ways, and doesnt really offer any utility as a new design. And where they tried to engineer around these issues they often over engineered instead of removing the problem.
I honestly like the way it looks, but I am happy I never preordered it or anything. The reviews are shocking. Even the positive reviews tend to hyperfocus on situations that can be capably dealt with by a standard hatchback. You can take a honda jazz across more terrain.
Its a failure, one that was likely very familiar to HN members. I am sure that internally engineers made every single one of these issues very apparent to management and they shipped anyway.
> doesnt really offer any utility as a new design
This is true of most automobile design.
There are legitimate criticisms of Musk and Tesla. "I don't like how someone else's car looks" is not one of them.
The word 'utility' in the comment you're replying to specifically means how the design functions, not how it looks. For example, it's a truck that's design makes it worse for carrying cargo in the tray than a standard truck.
> word 'utility' specifically means how it functions, not how it looks
Yes. Not offering utility in design is common in cars. Most people don’t buy a truck to haul. Most people don’t buy an off-roader to go off road. (Most people don’t buy a sports car to race.)
Even taken at face value:
> Most people don’t buy a truck to haul.
But if they do need to haul or tow something, they can.
> Most people don’t buy an off-roader to go off road.
But if they do need to go off-road, they can.
> Most people don’t buy a sports car to race.
Sports cars can be enjoyed (relatively) legally on the street. Quick acceleration combined with very good handling and a sense of connection to the road is a feeling you can enjoy at 55mph. Many people won’t drive their sports cars to the limit, but they are still a more enjoyable driving experience than a regular car for people who care about that.
A cybertruck can’t really haul things, it can’t really tow things, and it can’t be that fun to drive. I hope it’s at least comfortable, but based on my experience with their other vehicles, I doubt it.
It is tho. Car are symbols for most people, not just a tool that has 4 wheel.
Cybertruck are the equivalent of a pair of thick nerdy glasses.
> but it fails in lots of predictable ways, and doesnt really offer any utility as a new design
In what ways has it failed predictably? There are a number of things that could contribute to various failures/recalls that relate to utility provided by the (novel) design. For example the steer-by-wire system or the mid-voltage (48 V DC) electrical system.
The main example of "this is just dumb design for no reason" is the recall due to the pedal cover sliding up and jamming, but that was only 1 out of 6.
The only people I know who were genuinely impressed by cybertruck are 1. My father in law who was visiting USA and does not know how to drive, and 2. My 3yo son.
> is already ahead of 9% of all 2024 vehicles in quality
but 90% of those 2024 vehicles are much cheaper, so you would expect a lower quality. Also remember the cybertruck was presented five years ago.
I'd hazard a guess that making it pointy, shiny and prone to rusting is not what many people would call "radical and new". DMC was what, 40 years ago? And that one didn't rust as far as I remember.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess. Personally I think they look hideous. That doesn't bother me. To each their own and all that. What does bother me are all the problems. Consumer Reports went into this. There are numerous videos about it.
For example, it has steel panels but... an aluminium frame. That's an odd choice. If you're towing something heavy then up and down motion makes the frame prone to snapping.
Big trucks (eg F150, F250, F350) exist because of a quirk in regulation where so-called "work vehicles" were exempted from emissions standards. This part is a real shame because the US doesn't have vehicles lik the Toyota Hilux, which actually have an equivalent tray size and would be much more economical to run.
An electric truck may allow a smaller truck because it's not affected by emissions (obviously). Perhaps battery weight makes this impractical. It would be nice. I mean some people import Japanese K trucks now.
Competition-wise the Ford F150 Lightning looks like a much better proposition. It looks like a truck. It's built on a proven frame. Still, sales seem to be weak. For work vehicles in particular (and, yes, a lot of trucks aren't work vehicles; they're essentially ornamental) could be quite limited by EV charging issues vs the convenience of filling up a tank of gas.
> "This part is a real shame because the US doesn't have vehicles like the Toyota Hilux"
Yes! That was the first and only truck (or any car) I've ever owned! It was just called the "Toyota Pickup" in the US but it's the same model that was named "Hilux" in many other countries.
I used it to drive ladder racks and paint around Denver while I was in the house painting business to pay my way through college. It had almost 200k miles on it when I gave it to my dad after I graduated and decided to move abroad. To the best of my knowledge, he's still driving it and when I last asked him about it several years ago, it had well over half a million miles on it.
At least for autos made in the 90s, Toyota's quality was unmatched. My dad is a former plane mechanic and has undoubtedly extended its life, but I had no idea what I was doing and that pickup seemed virtually impervious to normal wear and tear. It's a shame it was discontinued in the US.
> Getting those gas guzzling truck owners to go electric would be nice too.
Congratulations, you solved 1 issue related to car dependency and proliferation of huge vehicles, namely tailpipe emissions. Now the other 99 remain.
The solution to gas guzzling trucks is "boring", it's good trains, it's protected bike lanes in urban environments, it's smaller and safer cars in less dense environments, etc. But these things don't make Mr Musk money :)
Trains will not enter American suburbs, nor will most truck drivers consider biking as a valid alternative.
I'm all for better transit, but it doesn't change that the trucks/SUVs keep selling and getting more polluting, and will do so for decades as part of the fleet
Train stations are in many of the Chicago suburbs already and take on average 280,000[1] commuters to and from downtown Chicago on a daily basis (it's called the Metra system).
Hell, I just found out those same commuter lines extend all the way north to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and east to South Bend, Indiana, so into neighboring states. I did know people who commuted to Chicago from Indiana everyday so that's not too surprising.
[1]: https://metra.com/ridership-data
They exist, but new ones aren't being regularly added...
Radically new and stupid and should be illegal design. It’s a death machine for pedestrians.
No more a death machine than a Cadillac Escalade or a Dodge ram truck. There's lots of criticisms you can make about the cybertruck that are exclusive to the cybertruck but this isn't one. This complaint is about bad drivers. The rise of all the driver assist technology is enabling bad drivers to believe that they are better than they are. This is across vehicle brands.
The existence of other death machines that should not be legal does not undermine the parent's point that this death machine should be illegal.
I don't think they said only the cyber truck should be illegal.
You're trying to say the machine itself is the problem, when it's not the machine it's the operator. You're trying to shift blame here.
Aren't all trucks? Wouldn't the sensor suite and auto-braking make it maybe somewhat safer? Is this something that gets tested for by car manufacturers?
Also, the hood + "grill" is significantly lower. A pedestrian would bounce (although uncomfortably) instead of hit by a wall and run over like most other trucks / SUVs.
As long as you aren’t sliced in half by the sharp corners.
In Europe for one that are regulations that make sure that cars are as safe for pedestrians as possible.
I'll never buy one but I suspect a lot of the "AHA GOTCHA" attitude coming from more traditional car-oriented media is coming from a place of not liking an upstart.
There's just a lot of easy things to point at with the Cybertruck because of what was promised vs what was delivered. This happens with model cars from other manufacturers too though what changes there is often more looks than promised functionality.
There’s a pretty big difference between traditional auto markers’ “concept cars” and Tesla in 2019 showing off what was supposed to be very close to the final production car. It was also supposed to start at $40k, be bulletproof, have shatterproof glass (at least that one was discredited the minute it was announced), have a boat mode, have over 500mile range, and have a bed ramp. And it was supposed to have a “exoskeleton” design that, spoiler alert, isn’t possible. That was not “here’s this neat concept,” that was “this is the car we’re going to sell you.” Everyone (or at least, everyone in my bubble) knew that every single thing was BS (except maybe the ramp), but still nearly two million people with enough money for a pre-order gobbled it up.