Tesla has confirmed it has given up on plans to make a Cybertruck range extender to achieve the range it originally promised on the electric pickup truck.
It started refunding deposits for the $16,000 extra battery pack.
When Tesla unveiled the production version of the Cybertruck in late 2023, two main disappointments were the price and the range.
The tri-motor version, the most popular in reservation tallies before production, was supposed to have over 500 miles of range and start at $70,000.
Tesla now sells the tri-motor Cybertruck for $100,000 and only has a range of 320 miles.
The dual-motor Cybertruck was supposed to cost $50,000 and have over 300 miles of range. In reality, it starts at $80,000 and has 325 miles of range.
Archive link: https://archive.is/CGbaE
Longer range so it can get stuck further from home? 🤭😀👍
Is it just me, or is musk profiting off of selling people tech before it’s actually ready?
Like, we don’t have the means right now to achieve what he advertises, so he lies about it and then ‘alters the deal’ after taking people’s money.
Oh he’s been called out for that for over a decade now, it just got buried under the mass of starry eyed reporting.
Only a fool buys something on the promise of future upgrades and potential. Buy stuff on what it is now.
This is a bad look for Tesla for sure, but no one should be going “I wouldn’t have bought it if I knew this would get cancelled”.
How about giving up on the Cybertruck
“Thanks for all the $16k loans at 0% shmucks. We’ve kept the interest we made while rates have been up and now you can have it back while they’re dropping. Of course, your money is now worth less than it was when you gave it to us during high inflation. Suck it losers. Love, T E S L A”
EDIT: deposit was $150. Still shitty but not the same impact
EDIT 2: Or $2000? … tl;dr: shitty
The deposit for a cyberstuck was $150. The package was valued at $16k.
Being happy about lies being exposed is good, but spreading a false narrative about it is bad.
Ah I misread this
It started refunding deposits for the $16,000 extra battery pack.
You are correct. People make mistakes, not everything is “a narrative”.
If you want a narrative, look at all the full-price $250k Roadster pre-orders they’ve been holding onto for like 8 years now with zero signs of production and complete silence for the last…5 years?
Tesla and unfulfilled promises… Only slightly less an iconic duo than Tesla bad news and stock price going up.
Why the third motor? One for each of the front wheels and one for the rear?
Two in the back, one in the front. There’s also a two and four motor version.
That makes even less sense. Distributing mechanical power on non steering wheels is easy, but for steering wheels requires a more complex and expensive coupling, as well as power losses. Just… why?
Why? More power……
Ima be honest, I like the design of this thing. I’m big into brutalism and the Delorean is one of my favorite car designs of all time. I was really hoping this would be good, but it has turned out to be one of the worst products in recent history in any category. It’s up there with the humane pin.
It makes me a little bit sad because I will never be able to live out my cyberpunk fantasy of driving an electric truck made out of bare metal manufactured by a technofascist corporation.
I hope the N Vision 74 will one day make it onto the streets
hydrogen-powered high performance.
It will literally never make it onto the streets in the US.
Well, they can ditch the Hydrogen part, that technology is done
I’m not a car guy so I don’t understand why your view seems to be so popular on the Internet (at least in the Anglosphere).
Is Toyota doing the Sony thing where they double down on a certain — perhaps less practical — format in hopes that it will make them money if/when it gets adopted as an industry standard?
It’s the nature of hydrogen as a fuel. It’s a gas, and has a very low power density. You can either compress it, but that requires the car carry a robust (and heavy) pressure vessel around. Plus, all the delivery infrastructure has to handle hydrogen at those crazy pressures, or you need to carry the compressor in the vehicle, which again is heavy, and slow. The other possiblity is to condense the hydrogen by cooling it. But now you need bulky insulation for the tank, plus, it will either need active cooling from the car, or your have to accept that the hydrogen will eventually get too warm and blow the tank, and then you have to vent it.
Hydrogen doesn’t make sense at car scale.
Thank you kindly! It just seems so weird that Toyota and even Japan seems so gung-ho about it. I guess it’s a case of sunk cost fallacy?
Not sure. Toyota is a very conservative and risk-adverse automaker. My guess is that they thought it could work better in Japan, as they have less land area and more miles traveled by train. Hydrogen can kinda make sense for a service/fleet vehicle that works in a limited area and always returns to the same location at the end of the day. Hydrogen can be run through an ICE engine, or it can be used in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Plus, everyone else was doing R&D into BEVs, so doing a little into hydrogen makes sense. If you fall too far behind on BEV tech, you can just buy a competitor’s vehicle and reverse engineer it to catch up.
I’m not a business person. Take that all with a grain of salt.
The dual motor was originally announced to be US$39,900, not 50,000. It is lies all the way down at Tesla.
I was seriously considering it back then. My wife hated the look and wouldn’t let me even consider it, but as someone who likes Back to the Future and Tron, I didn’t hate the aesthetic, though it took some getting used to. And I want a comfortably large EV (my compact is too small for my old bones) with 500 miles to avoid range anxiety. A 100 mile distance in the middle of a midwestern winter without a charger at the other end is going to require 500 miles of range to get back home due to heating the battery and cabin, and driving at 80mph. And my longest daily commute was 212 miles round trip before someone asks how often I need to drive 100 miles away in the middle of winter.
I wouldn’t say bullet dodged because I was never really close to getting one, but charging three times the price for only 60% range compared to that announcement is fucking insane.
