Large, extremely safe, no paint to maintain, no body that gets easily dented, impact resistant glass, electric, high performance, long range, great torque and acceleration, can haul stuff, can fit a family, can be used in a pinch for power, and looks awesome.

And maybe the self driving stuff will turn out to be useful too. Too soon to say.

Electric vehicles are coming much more slowly where I am and they cost 1.5-2x what they do in the US. So I bought a ICE car this year. But I hope one day a cybertruck will be a practical option for me.

It's extremely unsafe. The design is illegal in at least the European Union, UK and Australia.

Unsafe to others, yes.

Maybe it makes me a bit of an asshole, but I’m ok with that tradeoff. I’ve never had a collision in my life, but my cars have been hit by others.

I’m principally concerned with safety for myself and my family. Concern for others on the road comes a lot further down the list. Sorry. I drive with great care and responsibility, but many others do not. I’m worried about protecting me from them, not the other way around.

You do realize that the Cybertruck literally has no airbags right?

I do not realize that, and I question your sources.

Technically not public info yet, whoops!

I do not understand people like you. Everyone does the wrong thing sometimes, but I do not see how you can calmly and knowingly choose to do evil and not even be ashamed of it. How can you be so casual about hurting other people for your own selfish ends? It is completely alien to me.

Let he with no sin throw the first stone.

You forgot the end of that story:

"Go forth and sin no more."

All I ask is that you try to do the right thing. That's it. I can understand, accept, and forgive failure as long as you try.

* * *

But haven’t been.

>extremely safe

Do you care about the safety of others, or only yourself? You listed safety second in your list of positives, but I'm curious if you're considering things like pedestrian safety or just driver/passenger safety.

> I'm curious if you're considering things like pedestrian safety or just driver/passenger safety.

I'm sure some people do hold this view, but I've never met someone who's buying a vehicle and looks into how well it deals with people outside of the vehicle as part of safety considerations. While pictures of lifted trucks and high-bumper vehicles are fairly common posts on Twitter, usually for dunks, people still buy SUVs and crossovers that are known to be unsafe to those outside of them. Often this is disguised as "but I need it to go skiing once a year" or "what if I need to drive the entire soccer team home?"

The mindset of drivers, and especially Tesla's corporate view of it, channels Lord Farquaad. "Some of you [pedestrians] may die and that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

We haven't met in person, but hi! Part of why I own a sedan rather than an SUV (although not the only reason) is safety of others. It's also part of why I avoided car ownership for many years!

I'd prefer that this safety consideration be handled via regulation, though. I'd love to see cars that recklessly endanger the lives of those outside the car banned, limited, or taxed.

Safety of others is the domain of the government or regulator. And that, unfortunately, relies on the government being competent, and free from corporate influence. Neither of which are really the case in the US (nor much of the world).

I've owned cars for almost 30 years and I have never once "maintained" my paint. Where did live that this is a thing?

I envy you. My new car is only months old and I’m already having to pay to pop out dents and touch up paint. Careless people parking next to me.

It's the other people. It's always the other people.

I think you’re being sarcastic. But yes.

I probably should have noted it. It's a safe assumption that any comment I make about Tesla is at least somewhat sarcastic.

I forgot, truck ownership didn't used to overlap with image-consciousness.

But we all saw the cannonball demo, didn't we? Do you really think the body is going to be invincible?

I, for one, look forward to testing cybertruck body panels when they park too close to me.

If you don’t at least touch up the paint it rusts. At least where I live.

This kind of attitude is why car culture is killing so many and traffic deaths continue to rise.

I understand you are excited about this truck. I just want to highlight that aside from the paint thing most of this applies to a Rivian or a Ford F-150 lightning. I am not really sure the "no body that gets easily dented" is true - time will tell how durable the body is.

But I am not arguing with you about your preferences. I am saying that for the broad base of consumers, most of these needs (except no paint) can be met by existing vehicles. The Rivian for example is getting great reviews, and I think it has great looks. And the F-150 is already the highest selling vehicle in the USA, so an electric version will be a good choice for many of those consumers. Tesla coming out with such a unique vehicle means they're really going to have to prove its worth.

Yes, I’d be surprised if it outsells the electric F150. That being said, I would obviously rather have the cybertruck. Time will tell if it was a good business decision or not for Tesla. I think they’ll do alright though, and nothing stops them from bringing out a more traditional truck later as well.

Nothing stops them from coming out with a more traditional truck later except that it clearly takes them many years to ship a new model, and all the while customers who want a truck now or don't want a cybertruck are going to competitors.

Of course at this point they are committed to release. But I agree with others that releasing a more traditional truck would have been more savvy.

Why do you think they're committed to a release?

I don't know much about their status but other people in this thread suggest their factory is tooled up and they are close to release, so it might be a bad time to cancel everything and go back to the drawing board. Then they would have no truck for another 5 years.

But Mr. Musk is playing 11th dimensional chess that the rest of us are incapable of understanding. But more seriously, there are reasons they didn't start on it until now, maybe those reasons will persist and they'll get past the sunk cost fallacy and just decide to cancel it.

Even then, what's the chance that Tesla will remember who gave them a $99 deposit. SpaceX completely forgot about how I gave them $599 for a downlink terminal. I had to email them scans of my credit card bills to convince them to look for their records of the transaction so they could refund the charge on my credit card. (And even then, they only refunded $500 or the $599 I spent.)

But I'm grousing about SpaceX, I'm sure Tesla has a better AR/AP/CS system.

> impact resistant glass

Don't be suckered by Tesla's advertising drivel, and certainly don't repeat it.

Here's the glass of a VW Golf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWzUh53H_VU

Tesla's dog and pony show is for credulous rubes. You don't need to be one of those.

Unless I’m mistaken, there’s quite a difference between the cybertruck glass and regular auto glass. It doesn’t exist yet, so it’s possible that could change, but it’s also not marketing drivel.

Watch the video.

You're mistaken.

Cybertruck glass is just premium auto glass.

It would have taken years to certify an entire different kind of glass for automotive purposes.

It remains to be seen what it ships with, but you can add films and coatings to the glass to make it much more resistant. I don’t think that would affect certification, although I could be wrong.

You're not wrong, you've been suckered by advertising. Watch the video.

The water is there, horse. Drink it.

> Your attitude is obnoxious.

Aggressive swipes will get your account banned here, so please don't post like this, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Aggressive swipes will get your account banned here, so please don't post like this.

Edit: You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Um. So. They're going to invent new glass between now and the time they ship the Cybertruck?

Let me start off by saying that it's silly to discuss the design of a vehicle that does not exist. All anyone has seen so far is a scale model. I'm not sure it's even developed enough to call a concept. We might as well discuss whether it's better to ride a unicorn or a griffon.

>Large, extremely safe

So engineered to kill everyone except the driver. Big, heavy cars are safe only because they flatten the other party in a crash. The Cybertruck will be even worse than your average murdermobile because, as an EV, it will be unusually heavy.

And it gets worse:

>no body that gets easily dented

Cars don't have squishy bodywork by accident. Flexible, easily-dented bodywork is a safety feature. The front end of a car is designed to crumple to minimize acceleration.

Well, everyone knows about crumple zones. Clearly cars need to crumple at highway speeds, but the driver is in no danger in a parking lot. However, it is crucial that this happen even for minor collisions. Any collision with a pedestrian is a minor collision from the perspective of the car but catastrophic from the perspective of the pedestrian. The hood, bumpers, and panels must flex and dent even in a fender bender if they are to protect a pedestrian at 20 miles an hour.

The reason that body panels are dentable is that denting helps absorb impact energy, and replacing a body panel or two is cheaper than totaling the entire car due to a dented frame creating a risk of structural failure. IOW, it's a feature, not a bug.

It's also safer for the other party in an accident, since the vehicle(s) will absorb crash energy that would otherwise be transferred to the occupants/pedestrian/cyclist. Given Tesla's abysmal self-driving record (literally, more self-driving accidents, injuries, and/or fatalities than the entire rest of the global automotive industry combined), that's a fundamental consideration.

Similarly, most cars have impact-resistant glass, but not shatterproof glass, for safety reasons. There are plenty of times when you want the glass to break.

Um... the impact resistant glass was not especially impact resistant at the unveiling, but you just go on believing that it was. Life is too short to get bummed out by consensus reality.

There’s more to that story than meets the eye. The other tests and sledgehammer hits to the door may have weakened the glass. Either way it’s more than my car will handle now.

Both windows failed, not just the one hit by the hammer.

It’s just cool. Feel like nobody has any creativity or originality in the car market since the 60s and Tesla is the only one driving it.

Getting the government to subsidize their manufacturing operations is the oldest (and most un-original) move in the auto manufacturing game.

I reserved one because it looks different from anything else.