It seems like I actually seen the prototype uncovered somewhere.
We have two Ford Fusion Titaniums and really like them,they're very
comfortable on three hour trips to see our kids.

They had over 455,000 reservations by end of 2017, and by around October 2018 they sold all 100,000 vehicles that they made. By your math they should have sold only 45,000 or so and then had endless unsold cars sitting on lots and yet they continued selling every car they could make long after that, eventually becoming the best selling passenger sedan. Would I expect then to sell 100% of the reservations? Of course not, but history shows their cars have huge demand even though various old media loves to portray them having a demand problem because it fits their narrative.

As someone else mentioned you have a gas car so you are dependent on thousands of parts that electric cars don't need. But more importantly given that you don't buy new cars, why would any car maker ever care to cater to you?

If you want to go anecdotal, our Model X got rear ended by a gas burner with no autopilot, and yet we had the car all back all repaired in 3 weeks. It took me longer to wait for recall parts for my Chevy.

That's fine, I'm certainly not saying their cars are for everyone. But your comment of them being bad for long trips is silly. Also as someone else likely mentioned, you can reboot a Tesla at anytime even while driving, it doesn't affect safety. I'm guessing people are thinking the lights don't work or the car will crash because of some false article put out by old media, but whatever it's almost impossible to fight the fud out there. I suppose not surprising with a company that's shorted around 30%, far too much profit to be made from the death of an American company.

Good news is young folk don't fall for any of this crap and they show huge interest in Tesla which is awesome, and I love fielding all their questions and interest to it when they ask. Old folk still think my Model 3 is a 100k foreign car but whatever, let them live in their cloud of ignorance.

On a side note, i have some friends who are from Texas with their hubby always driving trucks and he actually wants the Tesla truck. More surprising is that they have many friends and family back home in Texas wanting one. Color me surprised! I figure it must be a hit though once Jim Cramer came out and predicted it will be a bomb.

Is that a self destruct button on the dash?

Actually that's exactly where code excels. With unpredictable behavior a human on the receiving end will react in all sorts of unpredictable and often fatal ways including doing the wrong thing, reacting too late or even freezing up and doing nothing at all. An ai can run through endless permutations and scenarios to a more successful outcome.

How many Pedestrians have paid the price on Humans that didn't care or were too drunk to care?
Is it more right for the AI to kill the driver and possibly passengers by swerving into a parked dump truck or the Pedestrian who crossed in the dead of night in the middle of a road (not crosswalk) wearing dark clothes? Would a Human driver have even seen the pedestrian? These are theological debates above my pay grade.

I get it; loss of human life is terrible.
I don't think it's fair to blame the car for things that couldn't possibly be programmed for.
Next you'll tell me the Tesla should know the ground would open up beneath it thru pre-cognition during the next big one and stop the car before the kazam appears.

It takes time to learn a behavior. The benefit with auto drive tech is that that learned behavior can be replicated across the entire fleet. The same cannot be said for hand/eye behaviors learned by a human. I'm not Richard Petty... and he can't transfer the knowledge to me instantaneously or exactly.

That’s the thing about computers, they get better everyday and they can share that knowledge to the entire network.

As a society we will decide on a safety number that will make most of us okay with autonomous cars. I’m sure that number will be in the 95% Or greater safety range. But it will come.

Air travel is not 100% safe, train and boat both see occasional crashes. Why would we require cars to be any better then these other forms of travel, even simple things like elevators kill people every now and then, yet I ride one everyday.

Nobody is buying a Cyber Truck (or probably any Tesla) because of 'virtue signaling', it's not a Prius and it's not 2005.

LAtest update claims 200,000 deposits. Show
Me the money tsla!

I’ve got my deposit in!

That's the full power kill switch. Just in case something unforeseen happens during the test phase this vehicle is obviously participating in.

Reread my post below. While driving on I-275 near Detroit near a major junction of three freeways, the electronics completely shut down, except for the "engines" and brakes. I was about to use my turn signal as I needed to get over two lanes to enter a different highway in a mile (1.62Km). No turn signals. In an instant, the display went dark. Music shut off, climate control shut down. I could not safely operate the vehicle to exit to where I needed to go. I did not know this was a reboot when it happened the first time.

Those 20-30 seconds before the display just started to show the Tesla logo seemed like forever on a crowded highway that was still moving at 60-70 MPH (100-115KPH). This is why I asked if the headlights will stay on or not as I would not want to be driving at night in that situation.

When my "old school" ICE car has a major failure, I usually get an idiot light or more. I kinda like it when the dash board looks like a pinball machine where both the Specials and Extra Ball lights come on along with other feature lights lighting up. At least I know the car is somewhat alive. I was not about to pull the driver card out of my pocket and hold it by the console to attempt to "restart" the car. At least when it happened again a couple weeks later, I just kept my cool. I believe if this happens to more than a few vehicles in somewhat of a pattern, there could be a service campaign or worse to correct this.

If you were a programmer working on code for a self-driving vehicle, these are some of the circumstances you would have to think about:

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ (click "Start Judging")

There will be conditions where a self-driving car has to pick specific damage/deaths over others.

It's not like there aren't pedestrian and road deaths today, yet we accept that and live with them.

I think Musk spoke to the point that perhaps we could reduce fatalities by 90%, but you'd still have people getting killed.

My assumption with the style of the cybertruck is that it should be easy to manufacture with all the straight lines.

Musk tweeted about that a little, from what I can gather they tried to stamp the metal but the press was too weak. Thus all the flat surfaces. He mentioned that even the angles had to be scored deeply to make the fold.

No clue how true any of that is.

Need a nice vase and flowers to go with that marble looking front dash piece

Because at this point it's straight up state run media.

??? Maybe take the tin foil hat off. I don't get why everyone has to make all of this political. I also don't get why the vast majority of electric cars have to be weird, or flat out ugly looking. I thought Tesla nailed it with the Model S and kinda with Model 3. Those look like normal, functional, attractive cars. How do you go from that to some flat panel, ugly pickup truck? Then there is the Mach E. How do you use the iconic Mustang name and not style it like one? Instead you get a bloated suv. Maybe someday I will be an electric but not if they continue to be the most boring or ridiculous looking cars on the road.

The original Cybertruck pinball machine.

12628496_10153877790559244_280388255831140579_o (resized).jpg

My F150 decided to shift into 1st gear without any notice while on the highway. It almost caused a serious accident because the rear tires locked and went into a skid. All without warning or brake lights for everyone behind me.

This design flaw affected thousands of trucks and it took Ford several years before it finally issued a recall.

This is just one of many recalls which have involved fires, rollovers, etc. People tend to forget the Big 3’s long list of dangerous issues.

Long story short:
I’d much rather be in a Tesla rebooting than an F150 which has a transmission that has a mind of its own (in addition to other TSB’s and recalls)

I love this thread. I have my deposit in. But only 50-50 I will buy. My wife says absolutely not.

There is definitely some truth to this. I recently picked up my car from an auto body shop, and I was shocked to see a couple dozen Teslas sitting on the lot. I asked the guy what was up, and he told me it was because they can't get parts for them.

I guess you got unlucky and got a bad Model 3, but believe it or not there are bad gas cars out there as well that fail without warning, they don't always show a magical dash light to let you know things are about to fail. And by the numbers it will happen far more often on legacy cars for the simple reason that they have far more parts to fail. Regardless, claiming electric cars are bad for long drives because they will leave you stranded is still a silly claim. I mean hell just driving to Vegas I'll see a dozen gas cars knocked out on the side of the road, stranded. It's not surprising, they have so many parts that can fail.

Also just fyi, you do not need to pull out the driver card for a Model 3 to restart it. In fact you don't need it at all, I only keep it to hand to valet. Just hold down both buttons on the steering, even while the car is moving, and the software resets.

The political lean for old media channels is extremely easy to determine actually, for any channel mind you be it Fox, MSNBC, etc. As usual it's about the data. I won't get into it in detail, but look around and you'll find data for example showing how often certain topics are covered by certain channels, etc. Look at the data on a graph and it become staggeringly obvious how biased many "news" channels are, and how obvious it becomes that they have an agenda. Keep in mind this isn't just for politics, it's also to sway public opinion to their narrative on whatever topic they like, and keep in mind this mind trick isn't only done by the usual suspect channels. The reason this mind trick works so effectively on the older demographic is that they primary watch cable news. For example, the median age of viewers for CNN is 61, 65 for MSNBC, 66 for Fox. That's why that older demographic is so easy to sway and often comes across as having bizarre views not in touch with reality. This trick doesn't work as effectively on the younger demographic because they get their news from elsewhere and from multiple sources.

Because they don't want you to buy them. Legacy auto makers make what are called "compliance cars", they made electric cars to make it seem like they are actually trying to do so to political figures and to the public. But they in no way wanted you to ever buy them. To ensure that they made they look like clown cars, saddled them with all sorts of limitations and priced they stupidly to make sure buying one made no sense. On top of that they fight to make sure no one else can sell them as well with lobbyists and money, and also they make sure to obfuscate every detail possible about electric cars to make sure the masses are fully confused and/or have false information about them. That's why in 2019 we still have people that think a Model 3 costs 100k, takes endless hours to charge, catches on fire every 3 minutes, is made by a foreign country, has only 40 miles of range, is slow, etc, etc, etc. Hell even when we had our Model X repaired at our local authorized Tesla repair shop, the old lady behind the counter commented how our car was "a foreign car. I'm not making that up, it's absolutely insane! Legacy automakers also still fight hard, successfully so far, to make sure that companies like Tesla cannot sell their ironically more American made car in America itself. They also fought hard to make sure there was no standard charging network setup around the country, that's why the current charging network is so sparse and such a colossal mess of standards, speeds and payment methods.

There's lots of reasons why they do this but to keep it simple I'll focus on one, and it's because there is far too much money to be made with the thousands of parts needed to keep ice cars running. When you buy a gas car they have you on the hook for years, because everything in there is built to fail. Sure parts don't fail as often as they used to but they got around that by simple raising the price of parts and labor to a staggering amount. Your purchase of a gas car does not end at the bill of sale, they have you on the hook for as long as you own the car, you are an atm they can pull from regularly as they know the myriad of parts in cars will ultimately break.

Enter Tesla who wasn't saddled with any of these things, and in a mere 7 years they built out an entire fast supercharging network worldwide along with cars that smoke exotics and yet run on electrons. They actually did it and as a side bonus for once we did it with a home grown American company. That's why their cars didn't look like compliance cars, because they actually wanted to sell them. As for why the Cybertruck looks so different, I explained that in an earlier post but you can watch that video by MKBHD as well, he explains it nicely.

Man tough decision silver metal or the matte black .. that black does look pretty bad ass

A poor and not so original assumption.

I think that's the point. It's a vehicle for EV enthusiasts, not truck enthusiasts. Smaller number of orders is easier to fulfill, and the audience will be more receptive to the growing pains and weirdnesses of a first generation electric truck.

Can you imagine getting preorders for a million of these things from people who are used to how F150s operate? It'd be a nightmare.

They can always roll out a design that appeals to most truck owners later on.

Car manufacturers make ugly cars because they don't want to sell cars? But when Tesla makes an ugly car it's because they are smart and forward thinking? Makes sense. And the reason people don't want to buy a Tesla is because they are too good of a car and nothing to do with price, features, needs, etc?

The Cybertruck isn't ugly, it's just boldly different. I'm already loving the shape and it makes traditional trucks with all their rounded curves look effeminate and overly delicate.

Look how sad and droopy the F-150 looks next to its conqueror!

Colorado will need self driving cars with all that weed you guys are smoking!

Again, that's the point! You're completely right. Traditional truck owners who have behaviors and specific requirements centered around what they've been used to for years probably aren't going to buy an electric truck (yet).

So why bother aping an existing design to capture a market that's not in the market for what you're selling? Electric trucks aren't ready for broad market appeal, doesn't matter what they look like. They're for EV enthusiasts.

I guess electric car guys think completely different. An ugly car is an ugly car in my book. A 63 Corvette is a beautiful car. An 83 Corvette not so much. Which you think is more desirable today? Saying that electric car market is different thus electric cars must be designed awkwardly ugly is ridiculous. Perhaps there is a market for ugly trucks for people that don't buy trucks. Read something that there are already 200,000 deposits down for the truck so maybe I am wrong. Man, it's going to ruin my day to be stuck behind one in traffic and have to stare at it's storage shed ass.

You have a point there. With the high rear end on this thing it's going to suck for any normal height vehicle behind them. Maybe the tesla sw could flash the brake lights when the light turns green since the car behind won't be able to see it...

EDIT> I guess it's about the same as any other truck actually. Except the sun will be reflecting off the tonneau cover into your eyes.

Inspiration probably came from some 80's Megaforce or BattleZone. Awwwww...yeahhhh! Pew! Pew!

megaforce (resized).jpg

battle zone (resized).jpg

That's subjective though. I was around 12 (the impressionable years) when the '83 Vette came out and hence I love it. Faceman after all drove one in the A-Team. Then again I'd also happy cruise pch in an 80's convetible IROC-Z, another car that was around in my impressionable years which many deem hideous. Your age and what you grew up with I suspect has a huge impact on what you think is ugly.

I mean then why even enter this market? Isn’t the point of why Tesla has been allowed to lose billions of dollars for > 15 years has been that it will take over the auto market and displace the current players? That’s why they released the model 3 right? A mass market car to sell in large volume as opposed to the niche luxury vehicles they had made before. So they create a truck; trucks being the highest margin vehicle and one of the few that makes money for traditional American carmakers. But instead of making a more traditional style that may convert ICE truck owners to EV owners and grab lots of market share, they’re back to niche luxury versions? Makes no sense.

Right now Tesla has more announced future designs than cars in production.

Model Y, semi, new roadster, cybertruck. They’re really good at rolling out prototypes and doing a pony show. But I still don’t see a sound business strategy or improving margins. All I see is collecting more preorder money. Of those cars the Y is the best bet because it should share a platform with the 3 and should improve margins. But it’s taking them forever to ramp up and execute in the kind of volume they should be doing based on how long they’ve been in business.

My only view of Why Tesla takes on these challenges and even losses is to Push the automakers to finally Do something! Lets be honest pre-Tesla the oil companys and big three never gave a crap about any green, efficient, or innovative products. Seems if anything Tesla is Making them move forward hence the open technology they built from. For years I drove a goofy Honda Insight Gen 1 averaging 71 miles per gallon (mostly highway but real life average) and wondered why only Honda could build a commuter that didn't drain the planet?? That car ran 230k and I bet I changed the oil 10 times lol. Glad to see the US builders creating again even if forced!

That's a fair question. I'm just speculating about why that industrial design was chosen.

Sure, and they shit the bed with Model 3 mass market production.

I have a reverse cargument! I think Tesla making an F150 clone would be the rough equivalent of Spooky making a Star Wars game. There's no way they could fulfill the order volume and there's no way they could manage customer support for the huge percentage of buyers who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the technology. So you either don't go into business or you cater to a smaller market and learn.

I don't know what investors expected or what Tesla promised. I don't own a Tesla or any of their stock.

I personally think it makes no sense to expect a company to take over an industry with a 100+ year head start on infrastructure, business ties, market share, and cozy government relationships in just 15 years. Amazon has been around for 25 years and Walmart still more than doubles them in revenue.

Who knows how it'll shake out. Obviously we're all just speculating, which is the fun part.

Exactly. Tesla doesn’t need to make an f150 clone to convince the truck lover. It needs to make a product good enough to convince ford to evolve. Then the next time your local gas loving f150 driver goes shopping for a new truck they will see an electric option. They might even give it a test drive....and like it. Then they might look at the competition, and when they see tesla has better performance and battery life, then they might come buying.

Wait so the point of Tesla is to ... make other car companies successful? Naw dawg, the Occam’s razor on this one is Tesla has a petulant CEO and poor corporate governance; the CEO wanted a space truck from mars which makes no sense in the truck market... but because the board is packed with sychophants, no one could tell Musk that his cybertruck is a dumb idea and won’t make the company money.

Can you get an OMVI with a self driving car?

Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. ... Tesla believes the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better.

You win. Musk is bad and all the company does is wrong. Totally makes sense.

So what exactly does a 1983 corvette look like? I know what an 82 looks like and an 84, but not an 83.