>The Cybertruck was a huge misstep. I imagine truck people are mostly practical - so a design out of blade runner not only creates unnecessary engineering challenges, but misses most of the market.

I really don't agree with you. I live in a rural area and make major use of my truck, and the Rivian looks to me like an urbinite's idea of a "practical truck" while looking like trash, wtf is even the point of a "truck" with a 4.5 foot bed? And I absolutely hate how many of the EV truck designs try to ape ICE limitations as aesthetics, like having some huge hood (which is now just a "frunk" not with a big engine). I want the cab moved way forward to give me better forward visibility taking advantage of what the EV platform makes possible. Whereas the Cybertruck at first unveiling looked eminently practical to me more so then anything else I'd seen yet. Actual useful truck bed. Cab forward. Design looked like it'd be good in the woods and on class 4 roads going through lots of branches. There is stuff I would have liked to see to take it even farther, I didn't like full cab required at first (I've mildly come around to it not being killer since unlike with my ICE truck an EV truck would be the most efficient vehicle I own since I have no other BEVs yet, so using it in general might make sense), there are other cool features EV might make easier I'd like to see as options at least like winches or dump. A "cyber" truck that had look-through floor or dashboard for even better visibility would also have been a far more interesting and practical "ambitious" feature then garbage like driver assist. But even so, up until recently the Cybertruck was the only truck that seemed to have form following function overall.

>When I look at all the Rivian's around town, I think, man, that is the truck that I expected Tesla to build. The Cybertruck is clearly at vanity project at way too early a point in Tesla's history. An embodiment of Elon's departure from reality. Tesla - please drop the Cybertruck (and the robots, too)! And though I am no fan of mergers - maybe you should look into buying Rivian.

Is this your opinion as someone who heavily uses trucks for work?

To me the biggest problem with the Cybertruck, and this Wired article seems to back it up, has simply been that it never came out and never got iterating and that apparently it was starved of resources at critical periods vs the Model 3 and other endeavors. The FSD has been a big stupid suck of management and economic capital. They poured everything into ramping existing areas but let their pipeline of upcoming stuff wither, and it's a lot harder to turn that around.

The whole thing smells of a the classic repeatedly screwup of underfunding and losing focus early on, failing to build the right teams and momentum, and then having it drag on non-linearly longer and resulting in something worse. And a product that would have been incredibly competitive if released on schedule ends up not being so when coming very late, plus then everything is behind in terms of iteration and real world experience etc etc. And there is pressure to try to "catch up" with iterating competitors, which then makes it all even worse.

I don't know if their effort can recover from that at this point without major organizational work. This may also be a symptom of Musk getting too spread thin, too divorced from fundamentals. And competitors are revving up fast at last, I don't know why the BEV truck market has been so far behind the car market but that's clearly changing and other players are starting to do more EV-ground up designs like the Canoo [0]. Most of these, including Canoo, are probably going to fail and go bankrupt or at best get bought, but a few will work. And Tesla certainly won't be as differentiated as they would have been 3 years ago. But none of that is because of the Cybertruck's looks. It's just seen very, very bad execution.

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0: https://www.topspeed.com/canoo-electric-pickup-truck/