Tesla's Cybertruck flop is historic. The brand collapse is even worse
48 comments
·July 4, 2025leakycap
jazzyjackson
I remember an old twitter thread that purported to be stories from a programmer just out of their NDA, lots of juicy tidbits about just SSHing into cars to fix bugs.
leakycap
Horrifying - wow. The amount of photos I've seen purported as leaks from Tesla getting camera access or access to saved images makes it easy for me to believe.
I seem to remember one of the leaked images was rumored to be from Elon's own garage showing an odd item he owned at the time.
gruez
>I remember when the "Tesla source code" leaked and I was a decent programmer, so I was curious and looked through some of the posted code... I have never sat in a moving Tesla vehicle since that day. Even if that code never drove a mile, the fact someone writing code for them saved it somewhere as progress scared me.
Have you looked at other car manufacturers' source code? AFAIK Toyota's source code got scrutinized as a result of the unintended acceleration lawsuits, and it was also criticized for sloppy coding.
edit: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
laweijfmvo
probably the same can be said for any car company, any tech company, any company of sufficient size and most small companies too. looking at you Boeing!
leakycap
What other examples could we look at? Boeing seems like low hanging fruit but as I try to think of other examples it is hard.
I can't think of another transport/medical/safety related software leak that left the same kind of impression on me. I was somewhat considering a Tesla back then, but the source code stopped me from that idea.
bastawhiz
> Then LIDAR was disabled/removed.
Radar, not lidar. Tesla cars never had lidar.
leakycap
Thank you for correcting this, I've edited it in an obvious way so I don't misinform. There's enough of that on Tesla already.
I recall Tesla having vehicles in their testing with Lidar and had no idea they never shipped it.
My 2015 towing VW has two radar sensors on the front for adaptive cruise and 5 cameras for lanekeeping. The cameras constantly come on and offline depending on visibility, cleanliness, and even weather. The radars have never once misperformed.
I can't imagine even trusting automatic cruise control to "vision only", much less what they are calling self-driving features.
Having driven plenty of cars with adaptive cruise using only one front radar, I can't really even suggest that - false positives are likely to happen to any driver that racks up mileage when the brakes can be fully applied based on single forward radar sensor covered in bug guts.
user20202
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cyberax
Putting aside Musk hate, Cybertruck is just not a good car.
When conceived initially, it had some pretty interesting ideas. The thought process was probably like:
Hmm... What if we use stainless steel instead of regular steel and avoid all the expenses of the paint shop? But then we need to use thicker panels because stainless steel is not great mechanically. So let's double down on thickness and make the panels a load-bearing "exoskeleton", this will also help us to avoid the weight penalty of the frame! But we can't stamp panels that are this thick, we just don't have big enough presses. So let's try to do this "flat" design.
But they failed to achieve that. And now they have a regular boring body-on-the-frame car, with thick panels just adding useless weight and cutting down the battery range. And then there's this steer-by-wire gimmick because Elon really wanted the yoke to happen.
The only remaining true improvement is the 48V power-over-Ethernet architecture.
anonymousiam
I agree with everything you've written. The required engineering was just too ambitious.
I ordered one on announcement day (11/21/2019). Yeah, I thought it was ugly, but the main selling point for me was its promised ability to go 500 miles on a single charge. (Apparently Musk has a habit of making promises he cannot keep.)
I really wanted that 500 mile range. My two homes are 300 miles apart, and I don't want to waste my time at a charging station while traveling between them. I also liked the idea of using the truck as a power-wall for my (4kW) solar plant.
I cancelled my order and got my $100 back (after inflation ate about 20% of it).
The Lucid Air (GT) offers similar range (512 miles), but it's not a truck, which I also really wanted. (I have enough cars already.) Also, the price of the Lucid Air was more than double that of the promised CT price. In the end, the CT price went up and the Lucid Air price went down, so they're now within about 10% of each other.
ineedasername
>My two homes are 300 miles apart
That sounds like a problem solvable by a 3rd home.
sjsdaiuasgdia
It's just a bundle of bad decisions and unfortunate compromises.
The uniwiper. The wheel-supporting bolts made for a much lighter vehicle. The glued on cantrails. The glue-installed light bar. The snow-collecting headlight shelf. The frequently jamming tonneau cover. The panel gaps. The sharp edges. The gear selector that likes to fall down from the ceiling. The weird discolorations and scuff marks the bed often has on delivery. The shitty cupholders.
People paid $100k for this. It's criminally bad at that price.
bastawhiz
> So who’s left to buy Teslas? Crypto grifters? Joe Rogan stans? That’s not a customer base; it’s a comment section. And Tesla’s sales numbers reflect that.
Scathing!
bn-l
> By the time that launched, everyone knew who Musk really is. No one driving one of those is innocent
I really don’t understand the hate. Is it because he’s not part of your tribe now?
sjsdaiuasgdia
It's been pretty easy to hate him since that whole bit with the kids stuck in a cave and him calling the hero "pedo guy".
Then there's the long list of lies, like the predictions around self driving [0] and going to Mars [1].
And then you get to his decision to enter the political realm, take a chainsaw to government agencies without care or reason as to how they operate or what they actually do, and use his influence to self-deal.
He's a corrupt asshole. If he did these same things under a different party affiliation, he'd still be a corrupt asshole.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/dhi6l6/spacex...
kenjackson
Sort of. I think more specifically he is pushing candidates and actions that directly attack groups of people and using his wealth to do so. So why continue to fund someone who is using that money to attack you?
al_borland
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acdha
If he wanted fiscal stability, he would have been lobbying Congress rather than incurring massive costs for the government. DOGE’s reckless violations of law and policy have guaranteed many large lawsuits, sloppy staff cuts regardless of merit have decreased efficiency across the board, and cuts to things like the IRS reduce revenue. This is the opposite of a serious effort to improve efficiency, in large part because they started from the belief that there was a massive fraud and waste problem based on ideology rather than sober analysis.
AndrewDucker
The government already had an office of budgetary responsibility and oversight.
His approach was not one of someone who had carefully investigated the situation, found real issues, and was sensibly trying to fix them.
It was an idiot with a chainsaw, chopping wildly at things, so that he could say that he'd made them smaller.
sorcerer-mar
A lot of Americans think there were better ways to save money than to kill millions of people, turn the American flag into a global symbol of inhumanity and betrayal, hobble critical services, make government an even less appealing place for competent people to work, and then balloon the deficit anyway.
Curious, ain't it.
https://time.com/7298994/usaid-deaths-studies-estimates-fore...
NewJazz
What did the Wisconsin supreme court election have to do with the government budget?
Musk's political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the presidential election last year, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-cou...
AnimalMuppet
I don't have a problem with wanting the government to be fiscally responsible. I don't even have a problem with thoroughly auditing exactly what the government is spending money on.
I have a problem with the way DOGE went about it. Several problems, in fact. "Move fast and break things" is perhaps a reasonable startup strategy. It's entertaining with rockets. But when what's being broken is not just the government but the rule of law, I am no longer entertained.
ben_w
"Just" is the error leading to your confusion.
He also supported the AfD in Germany; he also offered a million dollars to people before the election in a way that looked like a bribe even if it technically wasn't.
Also Musk's actions in support of Trump may have hastened the failure of the US government, because Trump is purging disagreement rather than incompetence, also the operation of DOGE was classic Muntzing strategy of remove everything and only put it back when something breaks which resulted in at least e.g. people involved with maintaining the USA's nuclear deterrant needing to be un-fired.
jmye
> It seems he just wanted to try and get the government financially healthy again.
Demonstrable bullshit, given his actual actions. Doge was an idiotic waste of time that saved next to nothing, and cost the government significantly more via the IRS cuts. Come on, now.
okbuuuut
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jazzyjackson
For me it was that time he paid a quarter million dollars to have a woman shut up about being offered a horse in exchange for sex while exposing himself
sorcerer-mar
Remember too that this is when he had to make a hard turn towards the American right wing, since it's a well-known safe haven for the morally bankrupt, so long as you say the magic incantations about DEI and wokeism being evil etc.
He tried to frontrun the sexual harassment allegations by framing it as a red vs blue issue, making his own sexual impropriety somehow everyone else's political problem.
jazzyjackson
Yes that's right, he immediately came out as republican so he could conveniently say "they're just out to get me!"
bastawhiz
Why in the world would I buy an electric car from the guy who spent more money than I'll ever make in my life to fund the candidate most vocal about killing off electric cars? If Ben and Jerry started stumping for a candidate trying to ban ice cream I also wouldn't buy Ben & Jerry's. Seems like common sense to me.
DHPersonal
What an odd way to form a question. You seem to already be doubting the answer before it’s been sent to you.
eddythompson80
You don't understand polarized political tension/fighting? What kind of answer are you expecting? Yes, people with polarized political beliefs don't like each other. is this something you learned today?
null
mikequinlan
The hate is because Elon is literally a Nazi. And no, Nazi's are not part of my "tribe".
I remember when the "Tesla source code" leaked and I was a decent programmer, so I was curious and looked through some of the posted code... I have never sat in a moving Tesla vehicle since that day. Even if that code never drove a mile, the fact someone writing code for them saved it somewhere as progress scared me.
[Edit to delete references to LIDAR]: Then front radar was disabled/disconnected https://www.carscoops.com/2023/05/tesla-is-disabling-radar-s...
Then he stepped into his problematic political role.
It is hard to imagine any technically competent buyer getting past either of the first two, given they trust the vehicle with their mortal shell.