Tesla to recall more than 46,000 Cybertrucks due to exterior panel issue
95 comments
·March 20, 2025yabones
ZeroGravitas
It was originally supposed to be an exoskeleton of folded metal.
This informed the whole design, it would lead to a lightweight, low cost truck that could be delivered with the battery tech available at the time. They highlighted not painting it as a cost saving move at the reveal.
Then they gave up on that idea as unworkable, but kept the look, so it's like designing a bit of furniture around some fancy solid wood steam bending technique then trying to fake it with wood laminate.
It was also delayed so long that other truck manufacturers just used the cheaper batteries available by then to make competitive trucks based don standard truck bodies.
disqard
I have never heard this until just now, and it explains so much!
(from 2019)
> The terminology Rickard used for this process was "to score" the sheet. Musk talked about how deep a score the Cybertruck needed for bends via Twitter. He said, “Even bending it requires a deep score on inside of bend, which is how the prototype was made.”
After the design is drawn out, the corners and edges are cut out with either a laser cutter or a water jet, while the sheet lays flat. Next, the stainless steel sheet is folded, like origami, and welded into shape.
“You basically take one or two sheets and fold them up into a truck, which is a huge cost-saving,” said Rickard. According to him, the whole process makes stamping machines unnecessary and lends itself well to robot laser assembly.
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/elon-musk-exp...
priced_in
https://www.legaldive.com/news/tesla-twitter-mass-arbitratio...
Tesla is using customer as guinea pigs. They don't care if you die, the paperwork says they are not liable for whatever happens. Rest assured they'll learn from your demise and they'll update their software with another experiment that might be less lethal this time, who knows!
cgannett
That implies they are actually trying to learn anything from their failed rollouts.
tiahura
Linux and my tv both have paperwork that says they aren’t responsible. Nobody cares.
priced_in
Point is Tesla doesn't sell cars, they sell an experiment.
Your TV doesn't propel you at 70mph with brakes not responding (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tesla-cybertruck-malfunction-drive...), or brakeing whenever it feels like it (https://www.cdr-news.com/categories/litigation/tesla-hit-wit...) or runs you into a wall (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/26/tesla-aut...), the list goes on.
When my TV glitches, nobody dies... ever...
rich_sasha
Meta; as a non-engineer I'm always fascinated by all the seemingly arbitrary, though surely well thought through design choices that go into anything mechanical.
For example, panels can be screwed in, welded, glued, riveted, snugly fitted, attached with some kind of retaining bolt... And so on. When assembling IKEA furniture, someone clearly though some bits require dowels, other screws or nails, other still those weird round spirally things that, when twisted, pull the metal bit in.
I guess car panels obviously (???) need to be removable for repairs, but still. In an alternative universe, I'd love to be an engineer and understand some of those things.
jerlam
IKEA is regularly mocked for selling junk made of newspaper clippings and chewing gum; but no one would question their ability to design passable furniture made out of the cheapest materials possible, transportable in an average car, assemble-able by an illiterate, with prices that are below their competitors and often get reduced as they find new efficiencies.
Tesla probably takes a lot of inspiration from IKEA; but consumers expect a lot more from a 80K USD car expected to last hundreds of thousands of miles, than wobbly furniture that will be trashed at the first move.
pjc50
> other still those weird round spirally things that, when twisted, pull the metal bit in.
Those https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/284791145273 (sorry can't seem to find them as an official IKEA part)?
They're quite clever. They achieve at least these things:
- assembly happens from the inside rather than the outside, which looks better and may be easier to assemble in place
- the cam pulls the fixing to a particular depth, and no further. Overtightening a screw would be easily done but completely destroys the chipboard from which IKEA products are made
- load spreading in the chipboard. Again a screw into the end of chipboard would be very prone to splitting it
- very resistant to self-loosening
digdugdirk
Think of different manufacturing techniques as software frameworks - different frameworks (manufacturing techniques) have a niche that they can do well, but they all have their impacts on development (manufacturing/assembly/shipping) and operational costs (long term reliability in the field). Sometimes developers swear by a framework and know it inside and out, but ask them to work in a different framework and they'll be slow to get up to speed and potentially make mistakes that experienced developers wouldn't.
The main breakdown in this analogy is that the differences between manufacturing techniques can be immense, so the range of "good" techniques for any specific application is much narrower. Using one manufacturing technique vs another might result in not being able to ship your product in separate parts, making your shipping costs 20% higher and reducing your profit margin into the "bankruptcy" range.
rich_sasha
This seems like a decent analogy. Still, one product might use lots of different processes in different places. It's a bit like mixing many different web frameworks within one web app, for example.
alistairSH
Probably cost savings. Or being different for the sake of being different. Who know.
I still can't believe people continue to pay a premium to a brand that has (one of?) the highest recall rates in the industry.
latentcall
It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
Teslas marketing is genius though, preventing them from being known as death traps by regular people.
enoch_r
> It’s funny because the Ford Pinto is thought of as an example of an unreliable death trap but the deaths from Tesla’s poor craftsmanship and design heavily outweigh the Pinto by a wide margin.
What are the stats you're referencing here? I find this difficult to believe, as modern cars are generally much safer than cars from the 1970s and Teslas seem to perform well in crash tests. They'd need to be incredibly dangerous relative to other modern cars to be as dangerous as a typical car from the 1970s.
slashdev
Model Y has a fantastic safety record. I find this hard to believe. Do you have a source for your claim?
NHTSA gives a 1-5 star rating for vehicle safety and both the Model 3 and Model Y score 5 stars in all 3 categories:
Frontal Crash: 5 stars
Side Crash: 5 stars
Rollover: 5 stars
Frontal Crash: 4 stars
Side Crash: 5 stars
Rollover: 4 stars
Frontal Crash: 5 stars
Side Crash: 5 stars
Rollover: 4 stars
Frontal Crash: 5 stars
Side Crash: 5 stars
Rollover: 4 starsdaghamm
Do you know where to find statistics on accidents and fatalities per vehicle or brand?
Do for example insurance companies provide such data?
lesuorac
Ford Pino is just thought of that because it had a very famous book written singling it out.
The unsafe practices were just common for the time and it wasn't Ford being uniquely dumb.
lotsofpulp
Because the recalls on 95% of the cars Tesla has sold (Model 3 and Y) are basically all software updates that users never notice, and evidently don’t cause tons of car crashes.
When millions of people use a car day in and day out and don’t even notice a recall, I wouldn’t expect them to care.
As an example of why recalls are not the end all-be all either, Subaru lost a phantom power draw class action lawsuit due to faulty design of their Starlink head unit, and they didn’t even have to do a recall, even though it cost me thousands to fix.
And because I fixed it myself before the lawsuit, I’m not eligible for any compensation, even though Subaru knows every VIN with the faulty design.
jejeyyy77
they are mostly "software recalls"
brk
Not an entirely new concept really. Many cars over the years have had what are basically adhesive attached panels and components. Saturn had vehicles with composite panels attached similarly iirc. And I believe the weird GM minivan of the early 90’s did as well.
ceejayoz
I'd presume most of those weren't marketed as bulletproof, though.
sidewndr46
The Saturn product line was made this way for a long time, it worked really well. You could go buy a new "skin" and just glue it on.
mdshw5
Saturn had polyurethane body panels that were mounted using bolts and washers similarly to steel bodywork.
parsimo2010
I used to own a plane that had metal wings glued together. The Grumman Tiger literally had aluminum wing skins bonded onto the plane. No rivets or screws. They had some early issues with the glue they picked, but after picking a different glue it was a really reliable method. There are some of these planes flying still and are getting almost 50 years old.
Many modern cars use the body panels as structural members because it is weight efficient, but trucks were probably the last category of automobile to adopt this trend. It is not necessarily bad design to have a separate frame, you just pay a weight penalty. Engineers may choose to do this because they have other design priorities than weight.
Tl;dr: Glue is an okay design choice. Non-structural panels are an okay design choice. The Tesla engineers just didn’t get the details right.
Suppafly
>Tl;dr: Glue is an okay design choice. Non-structural panels are an okay design choice. The Tesla engineers just didn’t get the details right.
I think a lot of people commenting on this have no idea how much of their car is held together with glue. The interesting thing here is that the glue failed, not that glue was used in the first place.
klysm
I don’t think it’s inherently a bad idea. Industrial adhesives can be incredibly strong and perform better than fasteners in many use cases. They are tricky though and there’s many ways things can go wrong.
ChoGGi
It's a bit worse than that article makes it out to be. Other panels are falling off as well.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5...
criddell
The guy in this video pulled it a bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_EJ3DyiiA&t=1110s
But still it came off a lot easier than I would have expected.
I kind of hate linking to this channel because in some ways I think it's the worst of YouTube.
bearjaws
Just remember, your Model 3, Y and X could have been significantly better for the same price had Tesla not built this piece of trash due to a ketamine addicted CEO, that streams playing video games for hours at a time.
Also lol @ this post instantly being forced off the front page.
spwa4
... on a "boosted" account. Which means you pay a good player to play on your account to it gets better stats, and then he pulled an Elon ... in other words, he lied about someone else's performance really being his own.
He does that a lot.
rsynnott
That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
magicalhippo
Reference for those who haven't seen it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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myrmidon
[flagged]
pc86
> In Comments
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
myrmidon
I know the guidelines.
But downvoting without comment would not have helped get my point across in any way. I also hope of making other people scrutinise their own voting behavior, and be more mindful/conscious in those interactions and their outcome.
I personally love HN for the fact that you often have interesting insights in comments from the people actually involved; meme-like comments like the above drown those out, and I would rather try and prevent that.
1vuio0pswjnm7
The flaggings will continue until morale improves.
meristohm
Those are actual functioning vehicles, and not just props from Bladerunner?
A bicycle is by far more attractive that these oddities.
cbm-vic-20
Ignoring its engineering faults (and those of its current CEO), I appreciate that a car company went way off script and designed something that's really out there, design-wise.
latentcall
I agree with this. It definitely is out there, and futuristic looking. It’s also totally in cyberpunk standards that it’s just a giant hunk of crap.
qwerpy
It’s very functional! Where else can you get a self driving truck that protects its occupants extremely well and automatically powers the house during an outage? It has been a great vehicle for family ski trips and camping.
Don’t just listen to the haters, there are a bunch of us that actually enjoy our cybertrucks :)
croes
What about pedestrians?
There is a reason why modern cars aren’t that stiff.
tencentshill
You can use those detached steel panels as skis, or as a tent frame! Elon truly is the smartest man on earth.
aredox
Tesla managed to fumble attaching flat metallic panels to a frame.
What a joke of a company. They survive on battery tech, and software, but the rest of their engineering is dismal.
albertgoeswoof
Luckily I paid 8k extra for Full Self Driving, so my car can just drive itself to the dealership for the fix while I'm at work.
right?
qwertytyyuu
I’m surprised they managed to sell that many
solfox
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many were given away at deep discounts or for free to help grow "awareness" and make it look more popular than it is.
alamortsubite
I'm very curious as to what the remedy will be. Other panels seem to be detaching, as well. Will they have to remove and reattach all panels from every vehicle? Also, does the 46000 include every Cybertruck sold to-date?
Suppafly
>Also, does the 46000 include every Cybertruck sold to-date?
I suspect it includes all the unsold ones sitting in storage lots, but who knows.
techpineapple
I hate when they used the word “recall” on issues that can be fixed with an OTA update!
xyst
TSLA honestly feels like the next Enron.
Stock is overvalued to hell. Leadership continues to sell (AI, self driving vehicles, tesla pays for itself via taxi service, …) investors on new projects but ultimately failing to deliver to market.
The “Cybertruck” flop is just the most recent example.
Did you also catch the gaudy sales pitch Elon and Orange Man had on the _White House_ lawn? This company is a failure. Its leadership is clueless. It’s all built on a house of cards.
techpineapple
Won't be the next Enron until we get an administration that isn't owned by Elon.
It boggles my mind that anybody thought gluing exterior panels to the car was a good idea. Not just trim, entire body panels. Any other vehicle has the body as part of the actual structure, but for some reason on this one they're just decorative cladding. Is there any good reason for this?