He wishes. Delorean is a modern classic, regardless of commercial success. Cybertruck will go down like the H1/H2; something entirely emblematic of the times it was conceived and marketed in, that later generations will go "did they really think that was cool?".

Setting aside JohnZ's personal failings, the car and its production was a catastrophe.

Not that the DMC-1's PRV v6 and tall Renault 5-speed were gonna make getting to 85 easy...

  >blaming the problem on the wrong type of glue, a new adhesive “not prone to environmental embrittlement.”

  >some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along could be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels.

Who's doing the proofreading at Wired now? Is it all just AI?

    > If they read their own link, that never happened?

    > The issue stems from the brake rotors, and the report says more severe road conditions "may strain" the stud holes in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If the cracks persist and worsen, it may result in the wheel detaching entirely.

    > In a recent off-road escapade at the King of the Hammers event in Johnson Valley, California, a Tesla Cybertruck experienced a mechanical failure resulting in one of its wheels snapping off. The incident, captured over the weekend, has raised eyebrows about the durability of Tesla's much-touted electric truck.

  >off-road incident

    > If the cracks persist and worsen, it may result in the wheel detaching entirely.
    > 
    > ...engineers determined that continued use under strain could eventually lead to separation of the wheel stud from the hub.

Telsa made bad engineering choices on this vehicle. There's no point defending it.

And also, Wired is trying to lie by omission and imply that this actually happened (while "merrily driving along"), when no such failure occurred.

    > however much you distrust the media, it's not enough...

I don't trust any singular source, but looking at evidence in aggregate across many sources, there are clear problems with the CT from material selection to parts engineering to overall capability vs what was sold.

I notice this internet world we live in, networked behind screens, really demonstrates the average person's drift to totalitarianism. It's frightening to me.

hilarious sentiment

It's certainly more balanced than a forum of non-owners who's only knowledge about the issue is that they hate Elon with an undying passion.

I’m sure there are passionate people over at the Mitsubishi mirage owners club as well.

We can’t blame political reasons for the Cybetruck failing, especially in the context of the Model Y and Y L selling like hotcakes.

No, the problem with the Cybertruck is the styling is polarizing in person, it came in overpriced and under-ranged, and it wasn’t built for a buyer demographic that exists in large numbers.

Slate understands truck buyer motivation and demographics a lot better than Tesla. Chevrolet with the Silverado EV understands much better what their buyer demographic for an EV truck needs to succeed (be a regular half-ton truck, get as much range while towing as possible). And those companies are still likely to struggle or are struggling to sell EV trucks, respectively.

If Tesla knew what they were doing they’d have made a true full-size 3 row SUV similar to the EV9, and they’d also make a city car for Europe. But they blew development money on a bespoke single-country truck.

The answer was wait a long time since they’re sold out. Obviously someone wants them.

With numbers that small, any vagary of demand can lead to lots full of unsold vehicles or waiting lists.

I just find the moral grandstanding a bit off. The vehicle industry isn’t exactly a paragon of executive virtue

I don't know what the others think so I can't judge on that, but I can judge based of what Elon says and does.

And aside, Elon's been lying for years about everything and promising stuff Tesla can't deliver.

IMHO, there's a strong parallel between the Elisabeth Holmes/Theranos situation and Elon/Tesla.

Just because something is "angular" doesn't mean it's in any way comparable to a Cybertruck.

The Countach was just the usual Lamborghini luxury scam, and I say that as someone who grew up a few km from the factory. Nobody cared if it was kinda crap inside, because it existed just to look like a cool car. A truck is supposed to, y'know, be a truck.

You realize style evolves right?

That style was futuristic in the 70s. It is not futuristic anymore. A lot has happened since the 70s to change what the future should look like.

Ironically, I am finding myself thinking that all the supposedly "bland" electric cars nowadays finally look like cars from the future, simply by being normal car looking, with very slight and subtle styling accents.

Because that's what a future car looks like: Roughly the same aerodynamic profile but with electric motors. That's literally what everyone wanted in the first place, as was Elon's thesis for Tesla as more than a niche car company.

The Cybertruck aesthetic is stupid because it is literally a middle finger to what people want, as Elon himself noted.

I don't get why people are so stuck on "But it looks different" as a good thing.

It's a car. Why are you so stuck on needing your car to stand out? Why is it a problem for you if cars look the same?

"If Kenmore had the wherewithal to manufacture 4wd electric chest freezers...that's what they'd look like."

...but I'm not offended by it. I think that sort of whimsical craziness is all too often missing from modern durable goods, so I'm glad it got built.

I'm even happier that its existence upset mincing, peevish little eurotwee Conde-Nasty scribblequeefs like this Wired author. If it'd guarantee him leaping off of a tall pier, I'd pay MSRP for a Cybertruck.

Doesn’t the new ~flying car have similar design vibes?

But then I saw it in-person, and it looks indescribably weird and bad, akin to the uncanny valley. The problem is that it's a real vehicle and not in a video game.

The steel chassis provides rigidity instead of a traditional frame. They ended up having to be flat, not curved, to meet the design goal.

I guess we all just want something that “looks like a pickup”, is heavy, and guzzles $7 a gallon diesel fuel

IIHS only really tests how good a car is at preventing an accident, not what happens when it fails like for example Euro NCAP does (and so does NHTSA starting nowish).

No actually the lightning and the R1T are pretty well loved by the people who took a chance on them

I would say the issue is more that there has been little to no progress in mainstream consumer car aesthetics in the past 25 years. It used to be that you could clearly tell a 50s car from a 60s car from a 70s car from an 80s car, etc. Everything from the past 25 years or so is pretty indistinguishable, so something comes along with a clear but possibly misguided aesthetic vision, its naturally going to appeal to some people.

But where I live (deep blue territory) most people would not be caught dead driving Musk’s favorite car around

DeLorean is the real life 80s reference of course, but in cyberpunk revival media like the coupe in Ghost in the Shell 2017, the spinner in Blade Runner 2049—those cars are all much smaller cabins than the cybertruck

It just looks too weird.

It doesn't help that nearly all chargers are arranged such that I'd block important parts of the parking lot for half an hour if I was towing when I needed a charge, then I have a complex back out (where something is behind me that I need to avoid). Most gas stations are designed so my trailer might block a pump from someone else using it but otherwise I'm not in the way.

The only actual difference is time you need to charge. Pull through charging stalls are ubiquitous where I live

And I just don’t know…how often are people towing loads over 100 miles regularly for this to be a problem? Where I live I see pavement princesses towing the occasional boat or landscapers towing gear and rocks.

Neither of those is going to max out the range on an EV truck in an average day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUV#1980s_to_1990s

I live in the PNW and you see people not using their trucks as trucks every single time you go out on the road. This includes urban areas.

I’ve owned an F150 and an R1T and for camping, overlanding, snow trips, etc the Rivian is hands down the most capable vehicle I have ever driven. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a Ford

But process of replacing a radiator on a Rivian really isn't any different than replacing one on a Jeep.

Most people who work on any vehicle don't know what the fuck they're doing, there's plenty of people in Autozone buying their 3rd O2 sensor for their Jeep that's throwing a P0420 as well.

It's basically irrelevant in pedestrian collisions because the pedestrian is already taking ~95% of the impact even from a lighter car and the <5% difference between that and an arbitrarily heavier vehicle is completely dwarfed by any of the other variables like the speed of the collision. For a pedestrian it's better to get hit by a freight train at 35 MPH than a 3000 pound vehicle at 39 MPH.

If they have the same mass then they each take half. If one of them is 19 times heavier then the other one takes 95% of the acceleration. If one of them is six hundred trillion times heavier then the other one takes ~100% of the acceleration, but this is still only <5% more than taking 95%.

This is the silliest argument against the Cybertruck, IMO. Its forward visibility is significantly better than other full-sized trucks, yet people continue to bring up pedestrian safety every time the Cybertruck is mentioned.

The quality of the vehicle is actually quite high.

If we can get some affordable electric trucks in the US, it will be very interesting to see how the more rational segments of the market react once they are no longer priced out.

I'm a current truck driver and very excited to swap out my ICE truck for a Slate next year. I need something that can haul my trash to the dump, grab a load of wood chips for the garden, and bring home the occasional sheet good from the home store.

I agree with your assessment as it applies to the Cybertruck or F150, but not the idea of an electric truck. Some people buy trucks because they need a light-duty hauling solution; unfortunately, the market seems to only want to sell luxury SUVs that happen to have truck beds.

Work trucks are a very different market than for passenger vehicles. Their usage is a lot more consistent and known. This means that electric works very well for some work trucks and very poorly for others.

The other aspect of work trucks is that their generally purchased by very conservative businesses who don't want to buy the bleeding edge, they want several years of reliability data before committing. The F-150 Lightning was cancelled just as that data was starting to come in.

Of course, most F-150's are sold as passenger vehicles rather than work trucks. Along with almost all Cybertrucks.

1. People who need to haul stuff in the bed

2. People who need to tow stuff behind them

3. People who buy them for some form of self expression.

Electrics are probably fine for people in 1 & 3. But for 2 I have yet to find one that both tows and gets range.

1. People who need them for work. 2. People who need to carry bulky loads 3. People who need to tow. 4. People who buy them for some form of self-expression.

The only real use case for electric trucks, imho, is construction site supervisors who do most around-town driving but may occasionally need to haul stuff. Their towing range is absolutely abysmal (F150 Lightning range dropped to about 90 miles when towing a moderate trailer!).

They have a rack or canopy on the back, tow modestly and drive a few hundred km a day at most to and from the job site, the supply store, etc.

Every single one says they slashed their fuel bill by at least half, and they’re staggered how good they are.

They are going to be very valued collectors items in 30 years once the kids of today have enough disposable income to buy whichever are left roadworthy by then.

My kids are too young for this, but surely there's a tradeoff here. Should you override some of your child's natural wonder because of adult aesthetics (or worse political concerns)? Yes. But how often? I'm not sure the line should be drawn at a truck design. (Although, maybe you're teaching your kid taste, again I'm not sure.)

Every parent influences their children. It's called parenting.

Both think it looks ugly.

No need to influence most people, IMO. Vehicles are shaped the way they are because the designs have broad appeal in general (familiarity? proportions? trends?). Most of us would find a normal, well-tailored black suit to be appealing and be baffled by avant garde, high fasion men's clothing.

Why should anyone be surprised that a completely novel design isn't appealing to most?

Isn’t it mostly fuel efficiency standards and manufacturability? You’ve got a chassis that’s used for like five different models for five years between refreshes, not a lot of room to innovate without driving up all the costs so only the luxury cars can afford to look different.

People who want cars to look different for it's own sake are saying they want worse cars.

Why? Why do those people need their cars to be shittier cars just to look different? What are they after? I bought a car as a toy, but it's average looking and not really special, and that doesn't have to actually impact how much I enjoy it. My previous shitty car was also very much enjoyed.

I don't understand the insistence that it looks "different" as if there is any virtue to a car design that was randomly generated to look different.

Create hundreds of thousands of jobs, paid the most tax of anyone in history by a large margin, and provided hope for America? Where would we be without spaceX launches? Still reliant on foreign adversaries to access space?

Otherwise you're of course right.

Why are my tax dollars going to foreign healthcare, education, and food banks when we could definitely use that here?

> claims about 200+ year olds recieving pensions Elon and a SSA inspector general investigation identified approximately $298 million paid to 24,000 deceased beneficiaries over a period spanning 1998–2019. Some of that money was recovered.

He did nothing. He was an advisor to the president, and his team made reccomendations. Also, there is a GAO that has reviewed all canceled contracts. All of the recipients had the right to protest... unfortunately, most of the NGO's simply had to show up to court to get the contracts back, but they didn't because it was obvious fraud.

And, that grok part? What is all that about? Any AI, can do all of those things? Spending on election interference? So all money donated to political orgs are election interference?

The reasons you seem to hate him, all seem like good things to me?

I somewhat agree. You vote for universal healthcare, or against it?

Either way, addressing communicable diseases in far away places also helps keep them from becoming nearby diseases. It's far cheaper to fund some vaccines in a far away land than deal with widespread disease domestically. And in the end, cutting these things did practically nothing for the deficit. It was a rounding error of spending to save so many lives around the world.

And they want to argue they're instituting a "Christian" nation. How about following His red text words?

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.

1. Elon didn't "create jobs," he profited off other's labor by having his name on some pieces of paper. Furthermore it's often reported that rather than an innovative force in a company, usually people have to work hard to keep him as uninvolved as possible, because he's mostly incompetent.

2. He's the richest man in the world. I don't care the volume of tax he paid, I care what percentage of his spending power it is, because that's how my taxes and my neighbor's taxes are calculated, and it's only fair his should be as well. By that measure, he pays functionally no taxes. My taxes impact my purchasing power and I have to budget for it. His should as well. After all, his money only has value because of the existence of this government.

3. SpaceX sucks the air out of the room the same way his fake drill company killed California HSR. Stop letting crony capitalists suck government contracts dry and then have their buddies sell the "more efficient private solution" that also doesn't get delivered. It's frankly absurd to not nationalize something as critical to sovereignty as a space program.

I worked at Tesla for two years on the capital expenditure team... He literally goes around the factory making hundreds of changes. Sometimes those changes are bad, and are reverted but in my experience, he's right 95% of the time, and the other 5% he'll revert when shown evidence of why it's a bad idea. I'm sure he does the same thing at SpaceX. He is literally the HEAD ENGINEER. He approves the factory layouts, he is responsible for tak time personally, he is constantly on the factory floor.

>"Furthermore it's often reported that rather than an innovative force in a company, usually people have to work hard to keep him as uninvolved as possible, because he's mostly incompetent."

WTF are you talking about? Who could possible keep him from being uninvoled? he is on the factory floor bi weekly making adjustments and negotiating equipment delivery. No one has the power to try and "Keep him uninvoled" and if so, they would be quickly fired.

>It's frankly absurd to not nationalize something as critical to sovereignty as a space program.

Uhh... we tried that. it'd called NASA, and it's been behind the soviet union since the early 2000's.

What happens when you nationalize it? You realise you can't force people to innovate, right? Do you think Gavin Newsom will be a better CEO of SpaceX? Do you think we have any chance of reaching mars after nationaliztion?

Why do you feel the right to be able to take what someone else has built?

What criminal charges, specifically, do you think he could and should be tried on?

Mostly I've seen younger kids love it. I was at the park and a little girl saw a Cybertruck pull up -- "Look, Dad, it's from the future!"

I think Cybertruck is probably ultimately a failure, but the amount of hate it gets when they are at least trying to push things outside of the normal makes me sad. The amount of negativity towards anything new that's not perfect is insane.

A significant portion of the hate they get is for what they represent and who they’re from, not because they’re “new” or “different” or “not perfect”.

But anyway, I don't think it's fair to say he "hoarded" wealth. It's all from ownership in companies he led, or selling stock in said companies. It's not like, I don't know, post-soviet Russian oligarchs or Carlos Slim or something, who you could all reasonably say were hoarding wealth.

If the CyberTruck were the size of a Honda Ridgeline or Ford Maverick, I think truck folks (who skew conservative) would look at it a lot less derisively. There are entire swathes of the half-ton truck market that the Cybertruck simply cannot compete in due to a seeming fundamental misunderstanding by the design team of what the vehicle needs to be capable of and amenable to. This is especially evident in the fleet/work truck market where the unibody design immediately shuts out folks who need to put an aftermarket bed replacement (think plumbers, welders, and other trades).

It straddles the 1/2 to 3/4 ton segment in terms of specs, but it is fundamentally impossible to tow a 5th wheel or gooseneck trailer with a Cybertruck.

Again, there is "think different" and there is "misunderstand the market."

Because adults groomed them to do that opinion.

Let’s keep in mind that Tesla invested in this truck to be the next F-150, which is the best-selling vehicle in the USA for the past multiple decades.

Even the hated Edsel is worth quite a bit today. Although it might be harder to keep a Cybertruck running for 50 years due to all the computerized components. Restorers will probably be relegated to rebuilding Cybertruck bodies with new components.

And all the well-documented reliability and quality issues.

Really no different than any classic car, really. GM isn't selling OEM parts for a '57 Chevy, for example. If you need replacement parts on those, nowadays, you're likely going to specialty manufacturers given there really aren't any "parts cars" around anymore.

Good book on the subject: https://www.sup.org/books/history/disaster-dearborn

Tesla’s corporate leadership would be much happier if the Cybertruck was selling 100,000 units a year and was not at all a collector’s item.

Nobody said anything about it not failing, it certainly did fail just like the Ford F150 Lighting before it.

Liking something is subjective and lots of people like the design of the Cybertruck. Just because you dont like it doesn't mean everybody else doesn't as well.

This is interesting to say given that by most objective measures of what constitutes a good truck, the cybertruck is a bad truck.

There is literally no such thing. But regardless, in this subthread, we are discussing the response of children to the pure aesthetics of the truck (or lack thereof) vs. the coached, politicized reaction to what it is claimed to represent.

There are, of course, plenty of subjective measures such as NVH, amenability to modification through the aftermarket, total cost of ownership, offroad capabilities, etc.

From everything I've seen, some of which OP mentioned in an edit, points to the Cybertruck being a terrible truck seemingly designed by folks who have never owned/used a truck. And again, that is ignoring Elon's politics.

It's always an excuse and everyone else's fault that things are politicized. The same people telling us to leave every social problem to the Invisible Hand get fussy when it actually manifests.

God you people are retarded.

Yep. This is the world the Supreme Court handed us with Citizen's United. Now that money is speech, we all have to accept that when we buy things, our money can be used against us.

This is the world they wanted, and if you hate cancel culture, then you need to get on board with fixing the damage from Citizen's United... not raging against regular people who are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, and using their money as speech.

What you buy is your politics now. It fucking sucks, but look at it with clearer eyes.

Not all HNers are good parents

The Cybertruck does not have that quality.

The classroom of kids Ive seen (my kids attend 3 different schools), all of them are amazed by them - age ranges: 3, 7, 9 all their classrooms loved them. Same with some of the older kids I've been around. They're all boys, I do imagine it's a very boy-friendly car.

I personally don't have a cyber truck, not big on it personally, but never put my own opinions into my kids. The kids may not "like it", but they are amazed by it.

I'm in an area that doesn't really hate Musk, so I think that does have an impact.

Do you have anything empirical to back this up? This feels like someone kind of hoping something is true. It's like the Harley rider sure that everyone thinks they're super cool with their super loud bike.

In the same way that I'm entirely certain kids don't look at a monstrous mobile trash bin and say "wow, cool!". But the owners of those ugly abominations sure think they look cool.

Unsurprising, as they look like they were designed by an 8 year old.

There's going to be 3 owners perpetually going to Cars and Coffee with theirs, rotating with their pristine Pontiac Aztec.

And that's all they'll do with it because there is no way a CyberTruck is going to last 30 years otherwise.

The size is just too impractical. It would never fit in my garage. On top of that, the standby drain was significant. Just sitting idle, it would lose 10 to 20 miles of range.

The battery capacity on those things is equivalent to 9 Tesla Powerwall units.

They may be ugly, but the emergency prepper in me always wanted one after hearing that story.

[0] https://caredge.com/tesla/cybertruck/depreciation

You also need to have the house setup to run off a generator. You don't want the truck power feeding back into the grid. IIRC, that's usually done with a big switch near the main panel.

There is a model of Ford Lightning that has power sharing and now that resale values are way down it just might be a cost effective home battery that you can drive around during non-emergencies....

You can also just plug into the 30A240V bed plug and use the onboard inverter on the lightning or powerboost hybrid f150 with less headache.

For example, Metron sells several: https://eauto.si/metron-shop/product-category/vehicle-to-loa...

Car makers are reluctant to support this. In case of Tesla because of market segmentation.

If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.

There is an entire genre of welding equipment designed for this scenario.

https://bakersgas.com/collections/miller-engine-driven-weldi...

A $80K-100K car that replaces the two isn't some genius purchase.

Sure you can spend all the money you want on a luxury toy, but it's weird trying to justify it as anything but that.

That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".

From redundancy perspective, a genset + car is hands down a better combo. A functional ICE car is cheaper and goes everywhere without any trip planning around charging stations, which is another plus.

I never said EV is not great and it is nice that it is working out for you, but facts are facts. Also, while EV footprint is growing around the globe, there is wide vast world beyond USA where charging issue is still true (and the repair shops).

If you're looking at two $55,000 cars, and one has power interconnect and one does not, it's not like adding a $1000-$10,000 generator on top is somehow immediately better unless you're adding in factors that make it better (like buying a cheaper car). There's 3 or 4 superchargers within a few miles of my house, and every time I've lost power I could easily go charge my car so I never worried about that.

Not everyone lives in that situation or has the same "one or two days without local power but chargers still work" threat model. It just so happens that's been the biggest actual, real, problem that my car could have fixed for me.

That puts the total setup price to about 10% of a CT-Energy station.

We could start comparing used EVs if we want to.

Personally I never really understood the value of a generator in the first place but that’s just my opinion.

Not a huge deal,I’d siphon/drain at the carb, just wonder if people normally keep the tanks empty or what.

If you live in an area where you can only get ethanol gas, then you definitely don't want it sitting more than 6 months, even with Sta-bil (in my experience). So that means yeah, you gotta cycle through the generator's tank twice a year, which if you live in an area with reliable power, means spending more money than you need to on gas and oil. Also, keep all containers (including fuel tanks) as full as possible, to minimize the amount of air in the container, to minimize the amount of moisture the ethanol can suck out of the air.

Depends on the vehicle of course. But for me at least, my 5-speed Civic for $2500 is way cheaper over its expected lifespan than a $7000 Nissan Leaf (and the Civic is way more flexible, since it can actually go more than 100km every 6 hours in the winter). At $1.50/L and 6L/100km, I can drive about 50,000km before I spend more on gasoline than the price difference between the two. The actual breakeven math (assuming 21kWh/100km) is closer to about 65,000km when factoring in electricity at ~$0.12/kWh. Oil changes are negligible (I do my own maintenance and oil changes), and a used Leaf is going to have just as many problems (if not more) with "the rest of the car" as a gas car (suspension, steering, brakes, tires, electrics, interior components, not to mention battery pack services).

If you buy a nicer EV than the break even point goes even further out. At least where I am, the EV equivalent of any gasoline car has a breakeven point of at least 50k km driven, usually more.

> Then there’s also the potential scenario of “buyer prefers an EV anyway.”

Entirely fair, but I'd still buy a generator and an EV. Because coupling your house power to your car just seems like a bad idea (to rely on it, at least; if you live somewhere that you never need to rely on off-grid power, then who really cares). For instance, my house has a sump pump that must run every ~hour or my basement will flood, and during storms that gets down to about 20 minutes. If my area doesn't have power, then I can't charge an EV anywhere nearby, and if I'm powering the house off the EV, how am I going to recharge it without my basement flooding?

Good grief, what year is that Civic from? LOL. I just bought a 10 year old Corolla for my kid and it was 12 grand. Civics aren't much cheaper.

In Australia, $10k would buy not only a ton of solar panels but also batteries. The US has decided to make solar and batteries at the home super expensive, unnecessarily.

See, your problem is assuming that the EV is 80-100K. Or that the ICE car is 30K. This is a contrived comparison. An average new car is well over 30K. And I bought a brand new Lightning for 50K. Being able to use 131kWh of battery for things other than driving is a pleasant bonus, and I prefer it to having a gas generator I have to keep maintained and store fuel for.

Or rather, you can take half of the difference in price and install some proper PV + battery system in your house that can be used when there's isn't a catastrophe too.

Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.

None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).

This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.

We are far away from, but slowly approaching, Mad Max levels of institutional failure, and everyone seems to treat it as normal and unavoidable.

It’s unclear to me how a vehicle battery can be 9-10x the size of a house battery, be used as a house battery, include an highway safe cabin, motors and wheels and only cost 4x what a single home battery costs. Oh, and at least Kia rates their battery warranty based on miles driven, so using it as a home battery does not impact any 10-year capacity guarantees.

AI tells me they are completely different though, so I must be missing something.

They want ~9k for a freaking 13.5kwh pack.

I can buy a UL certified, 16kwh, outdoor rated pack for 3.5k (ex - EG4 allweather)

I can buy just the LFP batteries themselves for the new powerwall 3 LFP version (no BMS, no shell, no certification) for $1116... https://18650battery.com/products/byd-302ah-3-2v-lifepo4-pri...

Powerwall is a scammy product. WAY too expensive for the storage it provides.

---

So the summary is: Cybertruck is using a different battery chemistry, Powerwall is a scam.

(I mean - to be clear, the Cybertruck is also a scam, but it's a different kind of scam not directly related to the battery capacity, since it's hauling around a 123kWh NCMA battery pack)

Propane generators here have the same problem.

That still doesn't explain the price gap. You can literally just get a V2H EV and use it instead of a home battery (or, you could if the ecosystem was more mature).

5kWh of battery cells at the moment run around $500. The rest of the cost of production is in the power electronics (probably around another $500).

It's why you can buy 4kwh worth of battery backups from Amazon for about $2k right now. Yet the same thing sold as a home battery backup costs $5k.

Lack of competition and likely low amount of sells is what's causing the margins to be so high.

The quiter part makes sense, but there are a lot more practical solutions to that too.

Also, I built it myself so the labor costs aren't included but I am about $8k into a system (4kw of panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwH battery).

I personally wouldn't be able to make vehicle cheaper than having no grid tie. I get that the costs are different once you include labor. Also I am on 40acres so the panel set could be ground mounted.

But to make something commensurable with a propane home-powering generator seems a lot more do-able.

I just bought a kit to convert to natural gas though. Most people who've done it are happy to not change bottles all the time. It won't help after an earthquake but the regular PSPS outages I get make natural gas a better fit for the moment.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/heat-waves-and-annual-death-ra...

In a traditional house with thick brick/stone walls and large roof overhangs you'd be uncomfortable but a lot less likely to die

This is a common enough occurrence in rural Louisiana, at least. And I think almost everyone I know has a 200gal or larger propane tank in their yard, specifically for multiday outages. My father-in-law doesn't have a single propane appliance, but he does have a 250gal tank, for his generac.

We don't we have a single 100lb tank, but that will run the little AC for 3 or 4 days.

This is important enough to me that I researched slow start AC units ~8 years ago when replacing my AC. I learned that almost any heat pump will do, so that's what I have.

It’s possible to get larger propane tanks and refill them more cheaply (rather than exchanging expensive grill tanks at the store). Some hardware stores will refill tanks directly. You can even get very large tanks (refilled by a truck that comes to your house) if you want weeks of power on tap. But this is probably overkill for most, unless you’re very remote.

A propane generator is a temporary solution but likely is good enough for most folks who just need to keep the fridge cold and maybe charge cell phones. It's not going to be able to run your house AC or anything, though.

Cybertruck was announced first. Then Ford _released_ the F150 Lightning, including the ability to operate as a backup battery for a house. And a dozen or so months later, Cybertruck comes out at a much higher price than F150 Lightning ever was.

As has the F150 lightning. It lost so much money and demand was so low that Ford had to kill it to stop bleeding money.

First time I’ve been compared to an AI agent.

Most people just plug an extension cord into the onboard inverter. You have to manually flip it on and plug it in, but 240V30A is plenty for an emergency. Doing it this way isn't any different from any other vehicle with an onboard inverter though.

On the other hand there are no tricky rules for an electric truck to have extra power outlets in it.

https://www.tesla.com/powershare/#vehicles

> Powershare allows you to draw power directly from your compatible Tesla vehicle to power your devices, your home or the grid.

> Powershare is currently available for all Cybertruck vehicles, and all new Model 3 and Model Y2 vehicles ordered on October 1, 2026 or later.

> To verify if your vehicle has Powershare, navigate to ‘Software’ > ‘Additional Vehicle Info’ > ‘Powershare Support: Enabled’ on your vehicle touchscreen.

To power a house directly from an EV, the main options now are the EV trucks -- Lightning, Silverado, Cybertruck all can have this ability, 240V 30A typically

I don't think the residential power generator is needed anymore if you have an electric car.

Completely missed opportunity. I won't be buying an electric vehicle that doesn't allow powering my house, ever again.

Only available on Tesla models ordered after October 1, 2026

Tesla models older than 6 weeks are SOL (for now? Maybe it just needs some backwards compatibility testing)

It sounds like it will require a hardware retrofit, that isn't being offered to consumers yet: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/4585/tesla-publishes-vehic...

Don't give the USB consortium any ideas...

We have a 12v port that we can get ~200W out of, so that could power our internet.

But I agree, a real joke to have 150KwH (two EVs) in my garage and no way to even plug in a fridge.

V2H/V2L is a must have in my next EV.

As you probably know, there's a 12 volt battery in these cars. That battery is automatically recharged by the big 100kWh main battery.

Some years back, I bought a 12 volt, 2000W inverter and connected it to this 12 volt battery in the Tesla, ran a couple of extension cords, and powered our refrigerator, extra freezer, and a number of other things with it for many hours. The main battery percentage in the car showed an appropriate drop. This actually wasn't during an outage, it was contingency testing. We already have a natural gas, 3600 watt generator that connects to one of our panels and use that during (unfortunately frequent) outages.

In my 2017, it's a bit of work to get to that battery, but it's quite doable and seemingly quite safe. The obvious, very rough/estimated/simplistic math is the 100kWh main battery divided by 2kW is about 50 hours. Different factors would push that number up and down of course.

1) if you're permanently modifying your home or electric panel you're over $1k. (General Motors "Vehicle2House" is ~$10-20k for hardware + installation... an EXTREME investment unless you plan on regular "emergency" usage of it)

2) if you're buying some portable solar panel "battery boom box" you'll likely run out and the folding solar panel it comes with is more gimmick than reliable

3) if you're buying a "real" gas/diesel generator, you have to run it + change the oil every 6 months otherwise it might not start in your emergency situation

...just buy a thing that clips to your car battery and dangles out the front hood of your car!

You already maintain your car every 3-9 months, you already (should) have at least 1/2 tank of gas at all times (especially in a weather / outage situation), you can generally idle your car for at least 2 days off a tank of gas in an emergency, and if this thing can charge your phone/battery packs, keep your fridge running (kindof?), and run a small space heater overnight...

It makes soooo much more sense to buy a $500-$1000 emergency accessory that piggybacks off the car you already maintain than trying to stand up a whole extra distribution mechanism for "survival-ish power, maybe 1-2 times over 3-4 years".

Despite the dealer saying the used one I bought supported it, it turned out to not be available in the trim I got. My fault obviously for believing something a car dealer said.

It sounds amazing. Only thing I wonder if it can even be set up so that it will be like an Uninterruptible Power Supply. So that when there is a blackout, the V2H supplies all the power without any interruption.

I have several computers but no UPS yet. Imagine if I could buy an electric car and when I am not using it, my car is UPS for my whole house including my computers! :D

That's the point of V2H (or a residential battery, which it emulates). Although you still want a UPS for computers. Although "without any interruption" is probably not at the scale of a UPS, and possibly not at the scale a desktop computer will require. So you'd still want UPSes for that. Notably it depends how the grids cuts off, if it cuts off in one shot (like throwing the breaker) the failover should be almost instantaneous, but if it fluctuates before failing the battery might need a lot longer to engage.

If power loss is a regular event you probably want V2H, but if it's just a remote fear or something that happens once every 5~10 then V2L and a few extension cords will do.

As soon as we got the adapter for our Ioniq 5, I sold generator to a neighbor. The car will run what we need for four days, which is longer than the generator and five gallon can of gas is going to last.

If you're after the V2L feature, you can get for much cheaper: for 16% of the price of a Cybertruck, you can get 86% of the battery capacity (about 8 powerwalls) by buying a used Fisker Ocean Extreme (107kWh vs. the cybertrucks 123)

I think this is why these EV trucks don’t do well (ford also cancelled the F150 lightning). For truck things, they aren’t particularly capable (you’d get less than 100 miles towing). For daily driving duty, a car or small suv is much more efficient.

That said if you have a Mall Crawler who's heaviest loads are your monthly Costco run, an electric truck would probably be great for you. I still wouldn't recommend a Cybertruck though.

You can get a special account for home charging that lowers that rate to $.32/kwh, and at my work I can charge my car for $.28/kwh. At those rates, and with gas where it is now (typically $5.50 - $6.00/gal) it makes sense to use electric.

Yes, but the energy density of the energy storage mechanism in the cybertruck is substantially lower than a gas pickup truck

I am not a fan of the truck, but let’s make some sense here

Not a Cybertruck fan myself, but unless you are going to tow or take many long road trips, an EV truck will work great for anyone who can charge at home. And most people don't tow, or take long road trips, with their trucks.

- the Cybertruck uses almost twice as much energy as your Niro EV

- the 40% efficient Prius uses about 2.5x as much energy as your 95% efficient Niro EV.

what seems off?

Little's law is another related phenomenon that is super critical. Measuring things when the units don't match has bitten me more than once.

Actually newtons are just a constant factor (3.6) compared to Wh per km, since there are 3600 seconds in a hour while there are 1000 watts in a kilowatt. For example 144 Wh/km (or 14.4 kWh/100 km) would simply be 518 N. This also means that pushing along a Tesla on the highway at constant speed is roughly as hard as holding a 50 kg weight, giving you an intuitive sense of how "hard" it is to keep things moving.

Of course, in everyday life, since we buy electricity from our utilities in kWh rather than joules, it's more convenient to talk about kWh per km (or per mile).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5b8_KBtT8

I thought you were autocorrected badly but I guess this is a term people use?

All cars just use a ton of power moving a lot of mass. It is actually impressive, it's like 100KW at full tilt. I think i saw someone do the math for how much power transfer you would need to get EV charging as fast as gasoline refuelling: It's in the megawatts.

The only way you could signifigantly reduce power usage of vehicles is to reduce mass dramaticially with a motorcyle or autocycle. The Aptera is an interesting autocycle design based on this line of reasoning, but we are also seeing the emergence of a lot of electric motorcycles.

Also regarding filling up an EV as fast as gasoline, there’s a company in China that has demonstrated charging from 20-80% in 5 minutes. They’re using 3MW charging.

It makes you realize why gasoline has been so popular for so long, you can stop for 5 minutes and dump 500 kWh of energy into your tank. Unfortunately most of that is wasted as heat during the combustion process.

Yeah that's the exact post I saw. I didn't believe the video at the time but I suppose it's possible with enough battery paralellism and cooling.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/new-ev-technology-cha...

Also, if you factor in the construction, idk what the timeline to pay that off would be.

https://www.peravescz.com/electric-version/

ICE trucks are equally inefficient for towing. People just don't seem to be able to factor it in.

Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.

The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.

The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.

So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.

Not so sure about that one, boss. I can fully-load up a Ford Ranger to its 7500lb rated towing capacity and lose ~10% in fuel economy/range while you just dropped something like 30% (from the base power package range of ~240 miles, platinum package at 300 miles you're losing half if you only get 150 miles out.)

To get their equal ranges, a Ford Raptor would have a ~4 gallon tank. The fact that the cybertruck can go so far while not towing is the miracle. How far do you think you're going to get with 4 gallons?

Driving in general uses a lot of energy. It’s the physically moving a 1,000 kg or more object that takes a lot of energy. Orders of magnitude more than a few lights or a phone. Same with flying of course; also moving a heavy object.

I have a lightning and it averages 0.5kwh/mile and my electricity price is $0.15/kwh, so it costs me $0.075/mile to drive. At current gas prices that's pretty much the same as a very efficient hybrid compact car (55mpg @ ~$4/gallon). If I had solar I could probably offset almost all of the lightning fuel cost based on where I live (sunny) but it's so cheap it's not worth it.

Do you mean "much more efficient" in places where electricity rates are significantly higher than the national average? Or only much more efficient when compared to when you're charging at charging stations?

Went looking for the campground host and bumped into another camper, who was pissed the power went out. "Don't worry though - if you need to charge something, you can put it in my truck."

Ended up on a phone charging expedition that ended up with me hanging out in a local library for the first time since I was a child.

Came back and met the host: "Sorry about the power last night - some dumbass tried to charge his truck and tripped the breaker to the whole campground."

(I'm sure there's more to the story, and the details aren't important, but if charging a vehicle is tripping breakers for the whole campground there's something wrong.)

It's exhausting reading these kinds of articles from a tech publication none the less. It's just so negative. Here is a summary of paragraphs:

Cybertruck is ceasing production

Here's a mean tweet from some X account with 2,649 followers: "Fuck that shitbox"

The car rusts sometimes

Truck sold very few units

Even with low sales they're still going down

Wildly unpopular with design flaws

Mention embarrassing demo from 7 years ago

It just goes on, truly exhausting.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a36715409/why-does-...

It’s niche just because natural disasters are thankfully relatively rare, but I still think having good contingencies is worth it.

Fuck being seen in a cybertruck though.

Electric vehicles won't, ever, be prioritized over bringing up residential, commercial and emergency services. The fact that even on a super charger it's 20+ minutes to charge a Cybertruck means the two or three at the local gas station will just end up with 12+ hour lines. Even now generators are fueled before private vehicles.

Bringing up power after disasters is super dangerous as is. A lot of systems that hadn't been turned off in years do a cold start, and sparks fly. It's why the power company and fire departments coordinate very very closely on grid work.

You know someone's going to try and bypass any safeties and circuit breakers and end up taking down their house when they try to restore power after a flood or something. People already regularly die from running their generator in the garage and most of these aren't wired directly into house mains.

> Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap

TBF an EV car has an absolutely massive battery relative to the electric consumption of a house, unless you're using resistive heating all around. Especially if you ration use.

https://youtu.be/yO5fJ8z66Z8

My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.

I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.

It's 30kW for one hour.

(Or 1.25kW for 24 hours, or however you prefer).

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour]

30kW is a rate.

30kWh is a measure of energy, about 100MJ.

30kWh/day is a rate again, 100MJ/day.

It seems clunky, but it's a way energy usage in a house is typically measured.

If you want a "better than nothing" but imperfect analogy, Wh is how much water you have in a bottle, and W is how quickly you can get the water out.

The value of the same, repurposed to a "powerwall" - $10k per 10 KWh

The value of it once attached to a "movable powerwall" - :) add a few more zeros

Clearly, I am in the wrong business...

When we got solar we asked for quotes, but ‘No Tesla’. The sales rep said ‘We get that a lot’.

But it is still cheaper to stockpile some generators and gas than stockpile a cybertruck. If there's an EV charging station up within a 1 hr drive, gas stations are also going to be up.

Not really. Some areas in California have multiple PSPS outages during fire season. Many people have gotten gas generators or powerwalls to deal with it, but using your EV would be ideal.

Generators have solved this problem. My family used to lose electricity anytime there was a semi serious snow storm. We got a gasoline generator after the second time and it was always sufficient. We never needed to siphon gas from the car either. We later transitioned to a natural gas generator. The lines are all underground and tie into the existing system for the stove and dryer. No car involved.

  > This seems like an awfully niche case, no? 

A Cybertruck has nearly 10x the battery capacity of a single Powerwall, and to buy that much Powerwall capacity would cost at least as much as a Cybertruck. Even a Tesla Model 3 (which now supports home backup) is over 5x Powerwalls.

You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k), but you don’t need anywhere near the amount of very expensive supplemental home batteries.

Also, even an EV with a 120V outlet and no home backup support could be very useful for recharging a portable battery bank.

Regardless, the thing that’s really great for cost effectiveness is that the same large battery can be used everyday for driving and also used rarely for emergency home backup systems.

10% to pay for their costs - materials and labour

90% to pay for their new Cybertruck financing

$10,000 to install a socket, a breaker, and a transfer switch?

Surely not.

Electricians like their transfer switches because they are right sized and everything, but the interlock approach actually gives you more control because every breaker is allowed (a transfer switch will only expose some small subset of all your breakers usually), you just have to manage the power supply yourself.

No. It's like a generator except way more power and mobile. Rechargable via solar. So basically just a much better generator.

So there's that to consider. Or don't.

Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!

It has other downsides, obviously. But the notion of "emergency power for your house" is kinda moot.

My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.

And that's assuming they are sunny days.

It takes about a day to charge my Leaf on a small solar install.

But yes, it needs to be sunny.

I'm 100% off grid on solar in the middle of nowhere. My panels could burn up, get hit by hail, get searched by law enforcement, flooded out, eaten by mice, stolen by miscreants, abducted by aliens or buried in snow. And of course in the event of a volcano they are probably not gonna function well.

So they are of course totally unworkable in events when the power grid is down.

But I like using them and they've been reliable so far...

There are practical issues with it, but it's possible. The question is EROI or Energy Return on Investment. Do you get more energy from it than it took to make it, which unfortunately is not there yet. Shrinking it down to fit into your backyard is an exercise left for the reader.

And are regularly rotating that stockpile, because gasoline has a shelf life measured in months

Simpler gas equipment like mowers and generators don't have enough compression to really care about anything but ancient gas, and if you run any vehicle that is multi-fuel capable it can detect and adjust compression based on a fuel's capabilities.

Ive been repairing and fixing junkers of cars, mowers, ATVs, generators, and more for 30 years and not once has bad gas stopped something from running. I only remove it if it was clearly having water raining into the tank. In every other case where I couldn't start something after sitting around for 5+ years, it was from the gas gumming up in the carb or the shitty diaphragm pump, which generally means there is little to no gas left to start with.

I wouldn't even suspect gas of ever being bad unless it was atleast a few years old. If the tank was open it could have evaporated, if the tank was closed it probably ain't great gas but I bet it would still run in anything but a high compression application.

"The generator was called the Electric Power Pak. From 1969 to 1972, Ford offered a 2,500-watt underhood generator, mostly on the Contractor’s Special, though it could be special ordered on other trucks. It also wasn’t driven off the engine’s belt. It was a separate Onan generator with its own 5.5 hp air-cooled single-cylinder engine, feeding an outlet in the bed. It sat on the driver’s side splash pan. The package the commenter calls a “Rancher” is likely the Farm & Ranch Special, which is one of the trucks that came with it.

The chainsaw was real. Ford sold Ford-blue chainsaws from 1970 to about 1976. They were rebadged Ohlsson & Rice saws: the Eagle I/II and the smaller Hawk. A mount was also sold that held the saw on the F-250’s driver’s side inner fender"

https://www.fordification.com/tech/images/onan_brochure-phot... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5601f99be4b059... https://www.fordification.com/tech/onan.htm

When I was shopping in 2025, this was the only truck with that kind of output.

You would need to add an accessory generator (which probably won't for under the hood) and possibly upgrade the cooling system.

But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways. A portable power station and solar panels are probably the better move unless you have some really massive power needs.

(Admittedly, a nuclear winter reduces the effectiveness of those solar panels somewhat)

If you can choose between a truck that can’t power your house and a truck that can, prepper mentality is to choose the one that can.

You can stockpile diesel for a generator. That's what actual prepping looks like.

Take it from a Ukrainian.

Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.

>Much easier to just buy some solar panels to recharge the electric truck.

Much easier to use it in your diesel-powered vehicle.

And then you have much, much energy in your stockpile.

Is this thread being astroturfed? This defence for the Cybertruck ITT is one of the least rational threads I've seen on HN in the past few years and if the CT was actually valuable tech it wouldn't be one of the worst selling vehicles of all time.

Take it from a Ukrainian.

PS: my dual-fuel gasoline/LPG Renault Twingo in Poland will outrun any Cybertruck on the continent.

And, unlike electricity, you can stockpile gasoline.

Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.

Propane, sure, but now you're talking about something fairly exotic, at least in terms of vehicles you can buy "off the shelf."

In any case, you can't produce propane yourself. You can "produce" electrons with a solar panel.

But for conversations sake, if we're talking about diesel trucks, and specifically an old mechanical diesel like a 7.3 ford or a 12 valve cummins, and we're talking about stored diesel, ideally a class D died diesel with a high sulfer content, then you'll get considerably more lifetime out of it than the recommended 18-24 months.

Additionally, you can burn about anything, old motor oil, fry oil, diesel with algee in it if you treat it and change your filters. A good, mechanical, not very picky diesel will burn fuel that is 20+ years old. Not forever, and you'll go through some filters and maybe injectors. By the time you get to fuel sources that can't be burned in a machine like that, or you've burned it up past your parts and ability to repair. you'll probably have a lot of other problems.

If we're talking generators, you can get off the shelf propane generators and propane stores well.

If you have a vehicle that runs on gasoline, you don't have to store gasoline for a long time to have a stockpile.

The cost of a few empty canisters is by far smaller than the cost of solar batteries, and putting gas into a vehicle in case of an emergency within a span of seconds rather than hours is a huge asset.

Not to mention: not everyone has space for solar. City dwellers are particularly constrained (as in: people who live in apartment complexes).

Where I'm located, in most cases when there is an outage, neighboring areas do have power.

Specifically for my model 3, I've been considering tapping into the HV system manually to keep my Ecoflow battery topped up, but I wish there was a way to directly connect it.

1. America is huge. Comparing it to places in Europe is like comparing it to New Hampshire.

2. American has imported tons of people who are incapable of sustaining a high standard of living on their own. It only takes a few percent shift in GDP/person to change how much infrastructure you can build and maintain unless you are truly willing to let all the folks with less than a high school education and no special job skills live in favelas.

Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.

I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).

You know that Helene was a category 4 hurricane that crossed six states, affected tens of millions of people and cause $78 billion dollars in damage. It was a major event like nothing that has ever happened in Iceland. That level of event in Iceland would remove it as a going concern.

And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.

PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).

Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.

In what universe is backup power a niche use case?

This is a pretty common feature in High capacity cars.

Even my mid-range BYD came with power strip attachment so you run basic electrical appliance with it.

Of course there are two issues that are completely solveable if we had reasonable governance:

1. Adopting an Australia-style solar installation regulation and permitting scheme, which is literally 1/5th tho cost of the US method, and pays their tradespeolpe higher salaries than US workers get

2. Allowing EVs to feed back into the grid. This is something that naysayers would never be useful because nobody would ever want to waste battery cycles on their home. Which of course has always been nonsense. Don't buy EVs without this basic capability, IMHO.

This combines to ensure that any solar installer will do lots of very expensive things: 1) have a large sales force to close the sale, which last I looked accounted for 30%-40% of the overall cost of solar in the US, 2) roll out trucks many different times during the planning and install, each costing lots of money, 3) never have to compete with a bunch of other hyper-competitive installers and find efficiencies like batching installs together in the same general area.

There are also massively high solar PV tariffs in the US, more than tripling the cost of the panels, but that's not even that big compared to the rest of the needless inefficiency in the system.

What the fuck

Depending on how much you want to power, there are 'rollable' battery packs that you can plug into a transfer switch. They can be recharged with (foldable) solar panels or a traditional generators (perhaps on cans of propane, which does not go bad like petrol can).

I really wish my Model Y had the V2H support... my next car definitely will.

You can get a generator that will get the job done for under 1000 bucks and you can store diesel or propane to get the job done.

That's before we factor in the likelyhood needing to travel quite a distance (and assume there is no access to grid power), and that you won't have any of the cybertruck defeating issues like heavy rains or standing water that might void it's warranty and fry it's electronics.

A prepper rig is a mechanical diesel that can be roll started or hand cranked without batteries, has no electronics to get fried except the radio, and can burn almost any combustible fuel source on hand. Slap a 200 Gallon transfer tank on the back and keep it full and you can drive across the country without fueling up. And if you also have that diesel generator to power your house, you've got a years worth of fuel for that generator.

You can get all that done for around 25k USD, so, not sure how a cyber truck even enters the conversation.

https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/franklinwh-...

https://gmenergy.gm.com/vehicle-to-home

Ford came in and bought up all of the parts from our suppliers and I had to qual random suppliers for weeks. Even at the time, I was thinking there is too much disparity and this will haunt us for years.

We were a bit more agile and I made a lot of kernel hacks to compensate.

Ford didn’t fare better for all their choices. Recalls galore. Honestly, they made my life hell so fuck em.

On to the truck, they had a proprietary charger and power wall solution but it could run the house for days.

Weird looking truck, glad they took the risk

The cybertruck is $70k, which in a 14-day power outage is $5000 a day.

There are cheaper options to weather such a storm. Like flying first class to New York, getting a limo to the Central Park Ritz-Carlton and spending 14 days being waited on hand and foot.

Renault is designing cute things again, so that's a good development. So is Citroen, apparently?

So that's a good development

There were other things that contributed to the decision, too: the announced "stressed skin" exoskeleton was panned in favor of adhering the body panels to the body with glue, it became clear that Tesla's profit and valuation were funding Elon's right-wing political project, and I would have preferred a solid-axle design.

The absurdity was not what was wrong with it. It's OK to be absurd. I really liked the stainless steel design. Less trail damage when off-roading and no need to worry about paint scratches causing body rust. The door wedge design? Meh. But it enabled the stainless steel body.

In the end, I want what the Cybertruck failed to deliver: a full-size electric pickup at a good price with excellent range. I currently have my eyes on the RAM REV. We'll see if that one gets axed, too.

Frankly Tesla is dumb lucky the Europeans and Japanese have botched the EV market so badly overall. Tesla shouldn't even exist at this point with how trivial their lineup is.

The poor people that bought them were the butt of his joke.

Rivian selling the first EV pickup truck even after Elon’s announcement of the cybertruck is pretty embarrassing

Later cars from Tesla looked more generic but still like looked like regular cars.

The cybertruck seems like a throwback to the old electric cars that looked like something out of nerd's sketchbook.

There's nothing wrong with nostalgia and the Cybertruck felt like it was from Hard Drivin' or 4D Sports Driving/Stunts.

The cybertruck had good enough safety ratings, but kinda just decided to not care about the aerodynamics and economy side. Which freed Elon up a lot in terms of style.

Personally, I also agree that it was refreshing to see something bold out there on the road. It's just that the final product looked just 'off' enough to make it look bad in the end.

Like, it's wheel base is about 6 inches too long and the ride height is about 6 inches too low, making it look a bit toddler-y to my eyes. The bed was also just not practicable and too small (something I see on a lot of trucks these days). The speed was good, the torque was great, the giant screen you can't feel when driving was not. The seats were uncomfortable for my build.

Overall, the car was a statement, one that just barely missed the mark to my eyes, but it did miss

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/18/tesla-cyb...

> The bodywork of the vehicle is particularly problematic: the sharp-edged, rigid stainless steel panels of the Cybertruck violate EU safety regulations, which primarily serve to protect vulnerable road users.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cybertruck-remains-banned-in-Ge...

In many other countries it wasn’t even street legal because it couldn’t meet minimum safety standards.

And that's not just in cars but technology, furniture, lighting choices, clothing, etc, we're just converging to the same styles globally.

That’s a platform we can all get behind.

The Cybertruck that was released did not have that, instead the panels are just normal body parts connected to a standard car frame underneath - like any other car.

Most pick up trucks are body-on-frame style.

The Cybertruck is a hybrid. There is an aluminum frame for the tow hitch and battery pack, but the body panels are also structural (unibody).

Good design that breaks the mold and then succeeds for that reason is what changes the world. Bad design that starts from the desire to be different without understanding the forces that led to the preexisting equilibrium is what we got. If you start out with hundreds of billions of dollars you can fake it for much longer, but if your premise is fundamentally economically incorrect then it will only last as long as you can subsidize it.

I prefer to believe that this statement is incorrect.

There's nothing quite like the Cybertruck and I don't think there ever will be again.

Brings me to a point I'd like to make: it boggled my mind that Tesla decided to execute the 'Cyber' aesthetic via a pickup truck, particularly after the US auto industry ramped up marketing the pickup truck's familiar shape as a cultural facet during/after the Great Recession and the fuel economy regulation changes.

Tesla could've capitalized on the billions Ford, Chevy, Dodge, and others spent in the 2010s marketing pickup trucks as God's gift to humanity, but instead decided -that- was the best market to try a complete novelty in. It makes no rational sense -- I've heard it ultimately came down to Musk stubbornly wanting the Cybertruck, but I don't know if that's factual.

At present all Tesla has propping it up is bubble dust and one car model (one increasingly dated car model). Somehow after 14-15 years (Model S released in Summer 2012) these people still can't release a real SUV of any sort. The model Y is a grotesque joke of a fake SUV, a mutilated model 3 that doesn't really look like an SUV in any regard. The model Y is an SUV like the Cybertruck is a truck. They might as well have unlimited money to do it, and they can't do it. Same reason they couldn't release the roadster even after all this time. It's a fundamentally broken company because Musk won't get out of the way. Whatever Musk is good at it, it's not running a large scale automotive company.

It probably would have been better had they not been mass produced, and maybe did a very limited quantity run - make it more like a collector item... I suppose thats what it'll be now. I see quite a few on the road, it takes away from the uniqueness.

thank god these monstruosities were forbidden in europe

A lot of what he's going on about with respect to the Cybertruck looking old is that it was—intentionally or not—an exercise in retro-futurism, not futurism. Elon attempted to make a truck that Schwarzenegger would have driven in the 80s. Or as he showed, the M577 Armoured Personnel Carrier from “Aliens.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism

As Wikipedia points out: As opposed to futurism, which is an artistic movement anticipating upcoming technological advancements, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. So Cybertruck is actually a nostalgia product. "Remember when we thought that manly pickups would be stainless steel and low-poly and drive around silently?"

So, nobody looking for the truck of the future wants a Cybertruck. It does not represent what we anticipate the future will look like.

I'll stop here, because if I point out that the Roadster circus stunt featured a flying car with gas thrusters at night that was an exercise in retro-futuristic nostalgia for Blade Runner, this will turn into an essay.

The design aesthetics for automobiles can be stale and this could also be a terrible, unworkable, ugly design.

The amount of hate it gets has been yet another clear indication to me just how annoyingly tribal people are. It shows you’re in the in-group and definitely-a-righteous-good-guy if you hate on the cybertruck. Not hating on the cybertruck is basically admitting you’re a fascist (I’ve had a friend literally tell me this non-jokingly). I think that’s really what 80% of the hate comes down to.

You can celebrate Tesla for trying something new while still hating the actual thing that they tried for being bad.

48 volts, steering wheel, no paint ( better durability), trunk, wipers etc. the car pushed the boundaries. If you compare level of creative thinking of cybertruck vs lets say electric ford, it's not even comparable. I respect that despite one person behind it. I don't care how it looks. It's polarizing. oh well.

My 11 y.o. relative from abroad asked me to take rl pictures of the truck, after he heard my neighbor bought it.

I blame Tesla and their "giant iPad" interiors for many of the cost-cutting trends we see in cars today.

I'll give you that it was a unique design. But if we're talking about engineering... it could not have promised more or delivered less.

instead of paint/clearcoat getting scratched you can pit / etch / scar the raw metal!

And yet there were still durability issues with the truck? My understanding is that there were many manufacturing issues, and it also experienced several recalls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_EJ3DyiiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn4XzbMf9nY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey0ZAaF2L4E

Questionable choice, 12v works just fine OEMS just need to stop putting it in stupid locations.

>Steering wheel

??? the weird actual steering wheel or the terrible steer by wire?

>No paint

It's ok the panels just fall off their weak plastic attachment points instead

>Trunk

The one that would crush your fingers?

>Wipers

The singular poorly thought out wiper?

The only boundary the cybertruck pushed was NHTSA safety regulations and recalls

I hope some random kid roasts you for something you like that they dont.

Tesla could simply come up with a more prevalent looking EV pick-up truck of course.

But the CyberTruck is just one man's doodle-after-an-acid-trip kind of design.

Ford failed due to massive production costs which they assumed would go down as the tech got better. They bet wrong, and ended up loosing thousands per unit.

Battery tech needs to get better and cheaper for it to work properly.

Who would think we could get satellite internet that works?

However, it provided content and distraction and kept the stock high longer than it should have and I feel like that’s what Musk continues to excel at.

I had a friend who 'preordered' to get Cybertruck and he couldn't justify the price which was $140k CAD, so he bought a new Chevy pickup truck instead for $70-80k.

There's also a big market for luxury SUVs. But you could buy a nice BMW SUV for nearly half the price. So it was really just competing with some highest end SUVs.

Which is why I believe it was mostly a price issue, not that there isn't a market for such a hybrid (half SUV / pretend truck) concept.

Also, the RAM's transmission overheated on gentle slopes.

The slate looks great (more cargo weight capacity than our full sized RAM ICE truck; half the price, much lower fuel costs, much more convenient to own).

If their second model is 250 class, we'd probably buy it. The Lightning can only tow 10,000lbs, so it's not great at hauling rock, etc -- it can do it, but only ~2.5 tons per load when you add in the weight of the trailer. This means we have to keep paying $100's to delivery services.

It'd be nice if that hypothetical 250 slate seated 5-6 people too. That'd let it be a backup kid hauler, like the lightning is.

I think F150 was the right vehicle but the wrong price point.

If:

Fuel economy regulations had not been suspended and the electric vehicle credits hadn't expired I'll bet there would still be a Lightning.

Unlike the CyberTrash. The question (to me) is did Ford make a semi-rational short-term financial decision at the expense of its future competitiveness?

I think it was killed for political reasons: They repurposed the plant for AI datacenter batteries. I predict we'll have EV pickup trucks again if the 2028 election looks like the 2026 election.

Anyway, my next full sized pickup will also be a pure EV. If I can't get a Ford, then I'll get something else. (The lightning is far better at truck stuff than our late model GMC and Ram trucks were. Maybe I can get a truck from China + register in Mexico? Is that a thing?)

The new Lightning has a useless serial hybrid setup and gets 700 miles of range (who needs that?). I suspect it'll end up being like other serial hybrids, and an option to omit the gas engine will be available, and also substantially lower the price (or enable a larger battery). In the meantime, they'll tell Trump that he managed to kill EV pickup trucks.

I got one, years ago. The bed was not large enough to readily hold full sheets of plywood (the minivan I owned before could hold full sheets!). And yet, the truck was long such that parking, maneuvering in parking lots, etc, was a pain in the ass (here the minivan was about tied with the truck).

So sucked as a regular errand-car, sucked for hauling sheet goods.

(Sold it during the tail of Covid when used car prices were skyrocketing for whatever reason. Never again.)

Sports cars are for the track, trucks are for hauling, and most drivers don't need either.

If someone says "I need a truck or suv" then I understand saying "you may not need one." But someone saying they want one then someone else explaining what they need is just condescending.

I wish I could show you the photo of my Mazda Miata with six 12' 2x6s hanging out the back. :-)

Someone hasn't seen not the Dakar Rally, but the support trucks class for it. The rally cars need support. Replacement tires, suspension parts, engines. How do they get them? A fleet of support vehicles doing the same course. So then they made that a race as well. The Dakar Rally Truck edition features heavy vehicles weighing over 3,500 kg (7,716 lb) T4/5 racing across 8000km/5000 miles of sand, rocks, and desert.