Tesla Cybertruck deliveries on hold as trims are flying off 'bulletproof' truck

Tesla’s build quality was always in doubt but people were willing to overlook this fact. Now only the most ardent fanatics who live in Elon’s reality distortion field, of which I doubt there are many due to his deeply flawed personality, will buy his car.

We are witnessing Elon’s house of cards coming down. Remember Elon Musk has massive loans with Tesla as collateral and a collapse of Tesla’s share price will absolutely affect his other ventures.

Unfortunately probably SoaceX as well. But think medium term this could be a good thing - new space is thriving and do we really need a gorilla in the room?

Perhaps Musk sees Tesla’s primary (only?) competitive advantage as essentially being the Gazprom of cars and/or electric energy in the MAGA USA. The president of the country already did a Tesla ad read on the White House lawn a few days ago.

whistlindiesel is one of the most annoying car-centered youtube creators. Dude constantly baits people into saying stuff and then he claims to be a victim to drum up support from his conservative followers. His script is so tired and predictable at this point.

i'm not saying dont post his links or anything, just giving some perspective for HN folks who might not be familiar with his shtick.

There was a follow up to see how much down force on the tow hook was needed to break the frame https://youtu.be/ubUXNSWGth0?t=419

was 10,500 lbs, done by JerryRigEverything

Tesla was the only EV that was somewhat affordable and the supercharger network was really good.

In 2025 in my own country the Netherlands several Chinese companies have entered the market and there are non Tesla supercharger stations. We are now in the "tough competition" stage.

Not quite the same, but in the UK there was a chain of high street jewellers called Ratners. In the early ‘90s Gerald Ratner, the founder, made some jokes about the low quality of the products at a talk for the Institute of Directors, including famously comparing them negatively to a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer. Unfortunately the talk was videotaped, and was all over the news shortly after. It killed the brand, and lost Ratner his job, although it didn’t kill the company as they owned other brands like H Samuel that they pivoted to.

Tesla car’s don’t have a great reputation for quality or service.

They were among the first and the cars were good enough to persuade people, but there are many alternatives now. People are less likely to pay a premium for Tesla.

And the brand is irremediably damaged by Elon’s polarising politics.

Being off-putting to a large part of your market is bound to have negative effects on your sales.

Tesla is in a very peculiar position as an automaker, P/E ratio (price of the stock compared to earnings) is extremely optimist regarding the potential, with self-driving, robots and overall market dominance.

But all of that is not real, it is, at best speculative, and the cars themselves are not great, especially when compared to other EVs.

The huge valuation of Tesla will crumble dramatically as soon as investors stop believing the promises. And having poor/declining or even stagnating sales is very likely to trigger some close scrutiny and doubts.

It's banned in some places for vehicle safety issues.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2025/02/20/tesla-cybe...

There's size and weight.

Rounded edges for any protruding parts.

Crumple zones.

Light bar has visibility and illumination issues.

The 0-60 mph speed of 2.6 seconds combined with a weight of 6000 lbs puts its torque in super car territory.

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I doubt you'll see one outside people playing with the rules at the edge of legality. https://www.jalopnik.com/a-barely-modified-tesla-cybertruck-...

Its primarily the size which is a problem. Cybertruck fits only European highway basically

Minor build issues? They had a total recall. Fixed for free? Yes, if you can wait weeks for the fix.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91109879/a-timeline-of-tesla-cyb...

https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/waiting-o...

Also while I’m getting down voted by a bunch of folks that have never driven one… Supervised FSD is getting very very good. I use it most days to drive and very rarely have to disengage. It is significantly better than the other driver assistance systems that I’ve driven. It’s come a long way

Insert catastrophic failure

> Still love the truck, thanks Elon!

Serious question: are you bothered by Elon's behavior?

It's certainly unique in that it gets less towing capacity than an F-350 for double the price.

The sad part is that his nazi salutes don’t even top the list...

It would sell great in Hungary...if they could afford it...

Absolutely, people in Europe want nothing to do with the Nazis. That's why they drive Volkswagen.

> Tesla has promised a new Tesla Roadster for 5+ years now

It’s actually been 7+ years. And it didn’t stop Tesla from taking $50k deposits on it and holding that money the entire time. Nothing like vaporware covering up an interest free loan.

https://autos.yahoo.com/people-paid-50-000-teslas-112401833....

> So it seems Musk thinks the future for Tesla is in the field of biped robots rather than vehicles.

Really insightful there are still people who believe a word he says. Genuinely.

> There has been some mention of a low cost EV, but I don't think we've seen sign of that yet. Last I heard was that it was cancelled.

From that same earnings call "We are still on track to launch a more affordable model in the first half of 2025 and will continue to expand our lineup from there."

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2025/01/29/te...

Why would it be any more collectible than, say, a Pontiac Aztek?

I used to shout from the rooftops how the EV revolution was here, all because of the visionary Elon Musk. Needless to say, something I deeply regret.

And now all these tesla folks will buy the next cool thing and continue the cycle.. We got them again!

God, yes. Every time I see a Cybertruck in NC they all look, well, just dirty. And not like a normal dirty. It is hard to explain, but the aesthetics just do not sit right in my artists eye.

And fire-proof.

And fireworks-proof.

And road-legal in the EU and China.

And rust-proof.

Looking at PE in isolation doesn’t make much sense. For starters Tesla has very little debt compared to Ford and other major car companies.

Of course it’s still massively overvalued especially if their sales collapse across most of the world this year (which seems to be the case).

I think they have some interesting innovation, like the gigapress, which greatly reduces complexity of the manufacturing system and the time of a car through the assembly line. Which reduces cost drastically. But Cybertruck is just a brainfart.

Whenever I talked about this with Tesla fans they kept parroting this line about Tesla being "a battery company that also makes cars" or similar. I can understand that this (having some non-car products and a charging network) grants them an advantage of sorts, but they're by far and away the most valuable company by market cap, while having a fraction of the sales of companies like Toyota, GM, Honda etc. It's like the market is expecting Tesla to explode in sales in the coming years and I can't see it, not just because people are turning on Elon Musk but because I don't know if they can even build enough cars to meet that expected valuation if that demand was actually there.

How many Chinese phone brands do you see sold in the US (Apple stronghold)?

Go in the rest of the world in a phone shop and check out what they have in display (Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, etc).

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/smartphone-market-share

And this with none of those companies selling in the US (I imagine due to legal reasons such as tariffs or related).

Tesla would be dead in the water actually because its products are shit compared to what’s available today.

They had a massive lead where a sub-Corolla quality build could sell for $60k+ because EV, and squandered it.

> How is the US protecting its market against other smartphone manufacturers?

Huawei embargo?

Beats me but Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, etc, etc are very popular worldwide, and they don't sell in the US. The EU is very stringent in technical requirements so that's not the key factor.

Similar story with Chinese EVs.

I don't know which exact protectionist measure is used, but it's there all right.

If out in the open sea there are 100 sharks and none of them ever enter a 100x100 square, I don't really need to see the barrier to know something <<is>> keeping them out.

Check how many people have iphones in europe compared to usa

Later than it was supposed to be. More expensive than it was supposed to be. Not as much range as it was supposed to have. Not the exoskeleton design it was said to be. Not bulletproof like it was claimed to be.

The whole thing is a pile of engineering WTF. The enormous wiper that leaves a huge amount of the windshield untouched, when it manages to work at all. The wheel support structures from other Tesla models being reused in a much heavier vehicle, leading to all those photos we've seen of Cybertrucks with snapped off wheels. The headlight "shelf" that collects snow and blocks the headlights. The air suspension system that takes forever to adjust when it's not failing altogether. The glue, oh the glue, so much glue.

It's just so uniquely bad!

Wrong. The first Tesla, the Roadster, was an existing design by Lotus [1]. All Tesla designs since, including the Cybertruck, have been led by Franz von Holzhausen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generati... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_von_Holzhausen

Simpsons already did it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHGczDHTDpo

Musk didn't "buy" Tesla, he was its first investor, at a time when the company had only 3 employees, and he was chairman of the board since then (and he's its biggest shareholder to this day). Anyway, he was always involved in the design decisions (IIRC Model X falcon doors were his idea).