I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift…
>I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics That and also it's just a bad product. >That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one edit: agree there's a market…
Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
691–700 of 1001 posts
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. When the cyber truck was announced we decided to buy a Super Duty instead. That was 5 years ago. It's now paid off and driven us and our RV all over the country, and still worth more than half it's purchase price with many more miles to go, and no issues at all (knock on wood). A lightning, cyber truck, or even rivian can't do those things. Instead of waiting for a slate just buy a little gas pickup and GO USE…
>> no issues at all Other than all the CO2, CO, and NOx you've emitted over that time period. The government should have started taxing barrels of oil in the 70s.
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were absolutely giving attitude towards people in Teslas in general, and Cybertrucks in particular, around the peak of all the DOGE nonsense. Still are, for Cybertrucks
Nonsense? Yeah, you're right, the US Federal government is a peak engine of efficiency and it's nonsense to think massive sums of money are wasted.
Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.
Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.
Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-eng...
After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.
Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm. That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge…
That’s exactly the problem. I’d be happy to use an EV daily, as I drive short distances. But when I drive longer, then I don’t want to waste hours on charging. The other day I drove 700km in just about 5.5 hours (German Autobahn). Few stops to pee. With EV that would be few hours more (!). If this doesn’t bother you, then it’s fine. It matters to me though. Sometimes I also drive early in the morning 600km, and in th…
If you got an EV with fast charging (and there were fast chargers on your route) it would actually be under 20 minutes more.
For example Ioniq 5 has a range of ~480 km. Let's say you started at 100% and drive down to 10%. That gets you 430 km, so 270 km left to go.
At a 350 kW charger the Ioniq 5 goes from 10-80% in 18 minutes. Assuming you do not want to take it below 10% that's 340 km before you next need to charge, more than the 270 km you need to reach your destination. You arrive with 70 km left before needing to charge again.
Let's do the round trip extra time. That's 1400 km for the trip. Again assuming we start at 100% and we don't let it go between 10%, then we get 430 km using before the first charging stop.
At that point we've got 970 km left that will have to be powered by our charging stops. Every 20 minute stop is giving us 340 km, so we'll need 3 stops, or one hour of stop time.
You might also need a stop, most likely shorter, at your destination if you are going to do a lot of driving there before returning home.
In a majority of cases with EVs charging speed is a bigger factor in how much time you spend stopped than range. Many people overlook this and might be a longer range EV when they would actually have faster trips if they got one with a much higher charge rate even if it had a substantially lower range.
The way to think of it is once you get past the range you got from charging before you left, every km travelled on the trip comes from stops during the trip. If EV X charges twice as fast as EV Y and they both need a stop at the same place, Y is going to spend twice as much time on chargers for the rest the trip as X no matter how many times they have to stop. If the fast charging X has half the range it will stop twice as often, but an X stop will be 1/4 the time of a Y stop actually charging.
Y making few stops does mean less time spent on stop overhead, by which I mean the time when you are off the highway but not actually charging. That should only be a couple minutes or so per stop though since you can overlap time consuming stop activies like visiting the bathroom with the actual charging.
On most trip that saving from less total stop overhead can't come anywhere near the savings from faster charging and so fast charging meh range will usually beat crap charging but great range unless the trip is short enough that only the short range car needs to stop. The great range car also does got farther before needing the first stop, so it doesn't need to add as much mileage during the trip put that too usually doesn't make much difference either other than fairly short road trips.
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#695Trucks in general are doomed to decline in sales.
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
Range is the misconception, because people view range through the "sit and fill up then drive till empty" paradigm. That is not how EVs work or how they should be used. They should be charged overnight/when you are doing something else, and on road trips should be charged to align with other stops even if those stops are 10 minutes. It's rare that I have ever done the "sit in the car for 40 minutes waiting for charge…
people forget all the stuff they had to figure out about ICE cars when they first started. Like: - turn off the engine in your garage - don't hold the ignition switch on and break the starter - don't smoke cigarettes while filling up with gasoline - the heater doesn't come on until the engine is warm
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#697At a normal auto company the board would have fired Elon long ago. It's a shame too, because the right CEO could really turn Tesla around.
What evidence do you have of Tesla performing poorly as a whole compared to others in the space, and/or Elon not successfully growing the company at reasonable rates?
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#698It's a shame the Lightning got discontinued. As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters. People think EVs are cars with tanks of electrons, and run aground the same way you would if you thought horses were cars full of hay. It's a different transport tool that gives the same results, you just have to know how to…
Yes, I've had conversations with ice owners and the misconceptions are enormous in their minds. Practically speaking¹, normal people could buy a tesla and drive it like a gas car, except with a full tank of gas every morning. They could still drive across the state once a month to grandma's and they could supercharge if range got low. This is due to a couple things that were not in place for early EVs. - teslas have…
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
US was the first to make EVs mainstream
US was also the one that started the solar panel industry during the cold war. After the cold war the politicians saw no value in it and a lot of the IP was sold to China. China is now out pacing the technology in solar. [0] It is not about being first it is about continual investment to do it better. China are also the ones that have the most electric infrastructure to greatly reduce their reliance on foreign countr…
Yeah starting first doesn't mean winning. I don't put much stock in any stats that China self-reports, but none of those things would surprise me.
Re: Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics That and also it's just a bad product. >That said, even though it's not to my taste, I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one edit: agree there's a market…
> A pickup truck should just be max utility, especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one The modern US pickup truck isn't built for utility. It's a $60,000 four-door lifted luxobarge with leather interior and a short bed. It signals (perceived) wealth while preserving working-class alignment. It can also be justified by way of having to pick up used furniture for TikTok refinish and flip projects or bim…
Reading the HN version of truck drivers is such a stark contrast to interfacing with actually contractors on a day to day basis.
A vehicle being comfortable and luxurious isn’t something only the bourgeoisie can appreciate. People who work spend a lot of time in their vehicles too.