I wouldn’t doubt that Elon designed the Cybertruck. I mean just look at how ugly and impractical it is. He probably drew it on a napkin or MS Paint or something.
Ironically I’d buy the Cybertruck because its design reminds me of the polygonal models of my gaming youth, but… it’s too expensive…
Honestly it might have been fine if he managed to keep his public image under control or it was not so tightly coupled with Tesla’s brand. Most large trucks and SUVs are suburban grocery getters or used to take Timmy to soccer practice so they don’t actually have to be practical at all.
I honestly like the blade runner look. At least it’s a little different than the ubiquitous cross overs that all look the same. I would never buy one though because Tesla has shit quality and Elon is a wanker.
Indeed, what Tesla’s REALLY selling isn’t an electric car, it’s the idea that Elon Musk is this ubermensch, the real life Tony Stark… he’s the mascot so to speak.
This is the problem with having your mascot be a real person in the social media era.
Tony The Tiger can’t go on a drunken twitter rampage about how we need to make America GRRRRReat again. Colonel Sanders can’t ruin KFC’s image because he’s fucking dead.
I was his fan at the time and at the reveal and it still looked like a joke to me. He also didn’t deliver on range and price.
The only people that got interested in it are those that wants to get attention, because the shape provides it. It doesn’t look like the car provides anything else.
Was that the reveal where he said the windows were indestructible, then proceeded to smash one on the first try?
Apparently he has a bad habit of telling the engineers to do things that are literally impossible, and then firing them when they can’t do it. So they actually have a guy who’s job it is to distract Elon Musk so he never talks to the engineers, because it’s either that or keep hiring new ones.
*two
You can taste the embarrassment in this photo.
He kept boasting that it was “bullet proof”. Meanwhile I could easily imagine the engineers in the back really badly hoping he would shut up about that because they understood the gravity of the costs and compromises that would have been required to actually make this car bulletproof
Guess what, turns out it’s not bullet proof after all. What a shocker.
Yeah, lol.
They should have made like 10 and raffled them off for charity.
Then he gets the goodwill of “They actually delivered a car that looks exactly like the prototype” without the expectations on quality and performance of a made-by-the-thousands serial production product.
The firm who makes a few carbon-fibre Batmobiles for film sets and rich geeks doesn’t get the same guff that GM would if they started selling them in Buick dealerships.
I won’t ever win a wank mobile, but some of the components and castings are really high quality. Some are really fucking poor design decisions too though.
That’s the thing. Design implies engineering decisions. Decisions requiring huge amounts of expertise, talent and work. All Musk did is get in front of his lead engineers, handed a crudely drawn triangle on a piece of paper and said “It must look like this, make it happen”. He did the easiest 0.001% part of the job of coming up with an idea for something that he thought looked cool and the rest was done by people who are far more intelligent and talented than him. And yet he is the one giving himself all the credit for it. This undeserved self-praise, stealing of credit (and wages) from other people’s work and the sheer arrogant intellectual dishonesty of believing that he is as smart and hard working as those people who are actually making things happen is why I can’t stand Musk.
The fact that the Cybertruck is a stupidly flawed, barely functional monstrosity with tons of production issues and insane price tag are side effects of all the compromises that had to be done to fulfill Musk’s demands. It is literally Musk’s equivalent of The Homer car from the Simpsons.
I know there’s a lot of reasons to hate about Steve Jobs and I’m not contesting those, however what you said reminds me of this quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Yow6rd-lw
where he talks about taking an idea to product
It’s definitely his Homer Simpson car. I bet he drew it in crayon with his tongue out.
Watch Aliens. The armored personnel carrier is clearly the inspiration for the cybertruck. https://www.reddit.com/r/LV426/comments/e0d0yc/teslas_new_cybertruck_looks_familiar/
Embedding:
Huh, I thought its inspiration is the lego car I’ve built when I was 3. They didn’t quite manage to capture the more intricate details of my magnum opus tho.
I was thinking Minecraft blocks.
I consider this an insult to one of my favourite Sci-fi vehicles. The one from Aliens looks much better, much more practical, and much more like something humans should try to build.
Its really impracticle. Its riding so low to the ground. What kind of combat terrain could it possibly be useful in othet than a perfect undisturbed urban street?
Canonically, this is the lightweight model meant for flatter ground, roads, and the insides of spaceship corridors, and it was deployed to a colony with paved roads and indoor corridors, so it had its adjustable suspension set to minimum ground clearance for better handling. Obviously, this was retrospective to explain away the exact point you’re raising after they’d already made the prop and possibly released the film, but being a sci-fi vehicle, adjustable suspension, something that’s available in cars you can buy today, would be something safe to assume it must have just from watching the film and noticing the lack of ground clearance.
Thats a clever way to explain away the flaw. Ok ill buy it. Its scifi afterall. I can suspend my disbelief
It’s obviously for a perfect undisturbed urban street with aliens on it.
Musk is only good at one thing, which is play investors like violins to generate hype and secure more investments for the company. The rest of the company’s success is owed to the extremely competent and talented engineers and workers making those extremely ambitious projects a reality.
Every time Musk tries to pretend he’s an engineer and tries to micromanage engineering and design decisions we end up with things like the Cybertruck.
I’m going to keep repeating it until it becomes common knowledge: When Musk stole the company from its original founders in a board coup, he specifically demanded that the cars have flush-fitting door handles despite his engineer’s objections. Reinventing the door handles was excessively time and cost prohibitive because of the crash safety requirements involved but Musk would hear none of it. And it was. It nearly bankrupted the company early on and it was only saved by government grants from the Obama days.
Every time Musk tries to pretend he’s an engineer and tries to micromanage engineering and design decisions we end up with things like the Cybertruck.
I read a comment somewhere by someone who worked at SpaceX, and they said a crucial part of the job was tactfully distracting him while he was in the facility. Otherwise, he would make nonsensical design suggestions and expect them to be implemented.
This is there title from a Blomberg article:
SpaceX’s Secret Weapon Is Gwynne Shotwell
She launches spaceships, sells rockets, and deals with Elon Musk.
I think it’s that, she is one is there most influential person that made SpaceX successful.
Cybertruck is what happen when people don’t say no to Musk.
It saddens me our government has been funding this foreign apartheid bastard piece of shit this whole time.
Oh fElon woulc have hated that: a Black guy bailing out an apartheid guys business.
He is a good marketer and salesman. If he hadn’t been born rich he would some schlub somewhere selling timeshares to old people.
I think this is the best take, just like Trump he’s willing to say any old bullshit to get his way. I’m unwilling to call it charisma, I’d rather go with mythomania.
Apologies for being completely off topic. But I have a theory that if he’d been born a pleb he’d have “taught” English in some country where a white person doesn’t require any kind of teaching qualifications beyond the ability to speak their first language. He’d be regaling everyone who’ll listen with his judgy observations about the local culture and teaching wrong grammar rules “because that’s just the way we say it.” That’s who I’m pretty sure this twit would be. Would definitely have a blog called something like Korean Musk.
It’s missing that Musk was fired for incompetence
It’s missing that Musk paid twice the value of twitter, then tossed it off a cliff making it worth only 20% from the original value. Basically he just pulled a joker and burned a huge pile of money for shits and giggles
Musk has gotten his money’s worth, and thensome, from Twitter.
Just because it went down in monetary value doesn’t mean he hasn’t benefited in other ways. He most definitely has.
I mean, he could’ve had both the influence and the money if he played it smart.
True but through buying Twitter he also obtained the ability to suppress other people. Xitter hasn’t been replaced as the global town square. It’s starting to become obvious that a lot of the accounts of people who directly criticize Musk, or say things he and his buddies don’t like will be suspended. There’s no way he could keep his money and stifle other people’s free speech, because that’s what he bought. He didn’t buy Twitter, he bought complete control over the ability to suppress speech in the global town square.
That depends on whether you think Twitter swung the 2024 election.
DOGE will probably double that money the way he’s planning to run it.
Oh absolutely. Trump found his Goebbels. And aside from that, he’s talking about axing departments that effect him and his business. He’s already talking about CFPB and he had been talking about making X into an everything app (including handling payments), which CFPB would absolutely oversee.
I’m sure he’d be looking at NHTSA for Tesla and EPA for all the lithium he’s gotta deal with, too.
Who will benefit from this? Certainly not the X users who will get defrauded or hit with excessive fees. Certainly not the people who get hit by injured or killed by self-deiving Teslas that were prematurely approved, or people drinking polluted water from runoff from lithium mines.
And there will likely continue to be no oversight over social media or any of the internet. Fake news will continue to spread virally with even more velocity than it does now. Probably exclusively on X, since Musk has known to have a long standing feud with Zuck, and will probably directly impair him. I have a funny feeling Meta will become an unlikely ally in the resistance.
Modern day Edison extracts wealth from Tesla and tells everyone they’re his ideas.
This is exactly right. Musk is the Edison of the current era, and I mean that in all the worst ways possible.
He’s just another trust fund schmuck with enough sense to pay someone smarter than him to do all the actual inventive shit, like Edison did (especially, but not exclusively to Nikola Tesla).
IMO, it’s blasphemous that he owns a company named after Nikola Tesla.
Edison actually did some electrical engineering. He’s not even as good as Edison.
I’m sure Edison did some good things, but I did say that I meant my comment in all the worst ways.
You can omit anything “good” that Edison did from my comparison, including any actual electrical engineering.
He’s just a modern day Thomas Edison, the only thing he invented was a way to steal other people’s credit.
Nope, he stole that from Edison.
Edison seemed to know it was important to leave science to scientists and engineering to engineers. Musk seems constitutionally incapable of respecting expertise.
I’m sure Edison interfered here and there, it’s human nature to monkey with things.
But to the level of Phony Stark? No way.
It’s pretty clear he’s had a hand in the
CanyoneroCybertruck, and with Xitter’s strategy - they’re going great, right?…Oh
…ohhhh nonono.
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American Pride!
Canyonero! Canyonero!
Top of the line in utility sports, Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!
Canyonero! Canyonero! (Yah!)
Forgot to add in “Was fired for incompetence”.
Ever wonder why Musk’s talks about Tesla are so stilted? Because he didn’t do shit at the start, he doesn’t know anything about how it started.
Listen to Tarpening and he talks in and out about EVs and Tesla’s business model. He knows because he did it. https://youtu.be/JW95LCkxlb4
Musk doesn’t even have an imagination.
His mind is the film Underworld on repeat, next to a bowl of pizza rolls, a PlayStation 2, and a stack of cyber-goth monthly with any attractive girl torn out and taped to the wall.
Surely PS1, or the Cybertruck could have had more polygons and the panels would line up because they didn’t need their vertices rounding to integer pixel coordinates.
FALSE! He dreamed up the Cyber truck. The most useful vehicle for mechanics.
Elon also has never lead a government. In case he starts saying that after the orange hits the ground.
He is one thing and one thing only. A walking bankaccount that sells money for ego.
I’ll share this with my mom, she believes Space Karen is the new messiah.
I you already know how that will turn out.
He invented hyping companies to astronomical valuations based on nothing, or at least perfected it
Even Steve Jobs beat him to that with his reality distortion field
At least Steve jobs had the biggest selling phone on the market, Tesla is not even top 10
Okay, I get that it’s fun to shit on Tesla and what not, but the Model Y is the top 4th selling consumer vehicle in the US lol. Also, Steve Jobs was holding on by an absolute prayer prior to the explosion of the iPhone. Apple was an absolute joke in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Yes because if you look at models Tesla has like 3 while the other brands have hundreds, look by brand instead and you will see that Tesla is 14th.
I guess if you want to add the qualifier of “best selling brand”, that’s fair. Nowhere did you say this was the case, however.
He invented modern day snake oil
No Steve Jobs did that; while also buying a lot of it.
