It invites people who don't care much for Tesla or the vehicle itself to share the video, it softens the seriousness and tension of a launch, and it helps to humanise the brand and the presenter.
Very likely since now everyone knows about Tesla's new truck and I doubt anyone in the market for such a thing really cares about indestructible side windows?
It's slapstick comedy applied to PR.
It's either clever marketing or a happy accident.
SpaceX failed launches are marketing too, but they're not stunts. They are live tests that are filmed anyway. The fact they share the video is secondary to the main goal of the tests.
But this? It's a staged marketing event. It's not a test procedure. The point is to get as many people to see it as possible. Smashing the windows doesn't cost much or stop a potential buyer in their tracks.
The windows break easily in a highly visible but safe way (no broken glass fragments spilling onto the stage, no projectiles bouncing back into the audience). They repeat the “demonstration” with the same “accidental” result instead of just moving on. Musk knows it's fun to watch things go wrong, and it boosts the already high newsworthiness of the event.
It would have been fun to watch anyway because company founders don't tend to let people throw things at their latest vehicle on stage, but that alone wouldn't make as many headlines as an accident.
"Armor glass" that completely shatters when you throw something at it by hand? Come on...
Also, why would it need armor glass in the first place? They picked a gimmick that is irrelevant to the product so that this "failure" does not hurt at all.
I mean, as long as we're rejecting Hanlon's razor, we might as well consider that someone could exploit the way TSLA fluctuates wildly every time Elon so much as tweets.
(No, I don't believe this.)
He is criticizing a part of Tesla not Tesla as a whole. A company can do many great things and can still be crap in some others.
So there's absolutely no room for improvement? Should we just move on from everything that we've deemed "a solved problem and commodity"?
Another possibility: they want to foster an image of a product designed to last, with very little maintenance cost. I'm not suggesting car windows are a maintenance cost, by the way - just that it adds to the overall image of reliability.
Additionally, I'm not sure where you draw the line at what are "non-problems" and what exactly is and is not "wasting tons of r&d dollars". Or, as others have suggested, what constitutes a "PR stunt". Is it wasting time and resource to select Tesla-specific paints, interior designs, wheel designs? After all, every other car has those. They are "solved problems" - just do whatever the other guys are doing!
This is not really very new tech (bullet proof glass for VIPs, bank transporters etc.) but also not a commodity.
> I don't really understand the point
Congrats, you are not the target market. It is a demonstration of a feature some people want (though these peoples are wrong to want this according to your authoritative judgement).
What I'm wondering about is personal safety in case of an accident (water, fire, etc). How do you get out? In some EU countries a safety hammer to break the glass in case you are trapped is actually mandatory on new cars, how does unbreakable glass deal with that?
Same goes for the sharp angles by the way, as demonstrated, this design will never be road-legal in the EU because new cars are not allowed to have sharp features for pedestrian safety.
Trucks need to be built to take abuse, and this truck has a lot of glass. Hence they want the glass to be practical, which means not replacing sheets every time you go off road and take impacts from road debris.
Any engineer who has live demo’d a beta product should know exactly what Elon was feeling in that moment. “Oh my fucking god” just about sums it up.
No, they didn’t expect it to shatter, there’s no way Elon planned on standing in front of a damaged Cybertruck for the rest of the event.
I got the impression the live impact tests on the real product where a last minute edition. Franz, “Are you sure?!” before throwing the bearing about sums it up.
The same mentality that lets Elon decide to hit his Cybertruck with a sledgehammer on stage is the mentality which gets us Cybertruck in the first place. You have to appreciate the beauty of the whole approach / package.
IMO you absolutely do not get to pick and choose all the innovation that comes from Tesla/SpaceX/Elon without all the drama, and failures, and missteps. This is the thing people don’t understand. You do not get to have one without the other in the world we live in, they are flip sides of the same coin.
I am also not the target market and it is not something I personally find useful. But the post I was replying to was nonsensical (I don't see why they didn't pick the commodity option -> must be gaslighting).
Do you have more information on this. I know there's minimum radius for blunting sheet metal panel edges on the fascias that are prone to pedestrian collision. Seems pretty trivial change to smooth things out a little, though I wonder how much of the sharp edges here is value engineering vs desired aesthetic.
Bullet-proof glass isn't an exotic item, but you're not going to find it in most consumer products.
I understand why you would make the front window super strong. But the side windows, why can't they not scatter like in all the other cars?
As I understand it, the force of a (non-fatal) side impact in a car is generally less--reducing the danger of the above--and occupants need a way to escape in case of non-functioning doors, and so glass that can be broken free from the inside is the norm for cars.
That looks like they laminated the side windows. I'm not sure I'd want to be in that even if it didn't have Musk's...musk...all over it.
1. They're gaslighting the Tesla faithful with "super strong" windows that are just normal. Or
2. Demonstrating they are still wasting tons of r&d dollars on non-problems and ought to bring in an adult who can design and manufacture commodity things efficiently.