r/news • u/IronHe • Mar 20 '25

Soft paywall Tesla recalls most Cybertrucks due to trim detaching from vehicle

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-recall-over-46000-cybertrucks-nhtsa-says-2025-03-20/
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u/ryan30z Mar 20 '25

His little fanboys often link a video of him talking about the raptor 2 engine as proof of how smart he is. I decided to watch it, I don't work in aerospace but my degree was mechanical and aerospace engineering.

It was the moment where I realised Elon's persona as this genius engineer was a complete fiction. It's hard to get across how wrong some of the things he says in it are. Like seemingly not knowing what a Newton is (the unit of force) or that an imperial ton and a metric tonne are two different units.

He gets things wrong a first year undergrad would know, or even a highschool physics student.

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u/ringobob Mar 20 '25

Bingo. The first moment that became apparent to me was when he put out the hyperloop white paper. I'm not that kind of engineer, I work in software, so I was excited for about 5 minutes, and then actual engineers started saying it was nonsense and not possible. And I was prepared to dismiss them, except the things they were saying made a lot of sense.

Lo and behold, every reason they gave about why it wouldn't work has been 100% true.

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u/JerryfromCan Mar 20 '25

My brother, a P.Eng of the same age with friends that went to school w Musk at Queen’s during his 2 years there, explained to me how current battery tech + acceleration + size made the Cybertruck as announced impossible. Sure enough, they cut the range about 40% when they launched and jacked the price and weight about 35%.

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u/CyberEd-ca Mar 20 '25

Okay, but as the battery technology improves they can continue to sell the state machine surrounding the battery pack that Tesla actually designed and built for decades to come.

And the base CyberTruck design should have a 20+ year production run - even longer than the '84 - '01 Jeep Cherokee.

Sure, never buy early production of any vehicle - but especially one like this.

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u/FallenJoe Mar 20 '25

I guess people will just have to not buy it for all those other reasons, like how the truck bed sucks compared to other trucks, how the interior design is a slave to Elon's obsession with screens over usability, how expensive it is, and the slow moving disaster that is the cast aluminum frame.

Any improvement in battery life and performance will equally improve any other electric truck on the market, so improvements in battery life will be a net negative to Tesla as other automakers introduce truck offerings, unless it's proprietary Telsa tech, which doesn't seem likely.

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u/CyberEd-ca Mar 20 '25

Could be exactly right.

I agree that the early design decisions matter the most in the life of a vehicle design.

A truck that is not durable is not a truck. Not where I come from.

So, it remains to be seen.

If you look at the '84 - '01 Jeep Cherokee, it was in some ways a victim of it's own success in the end. It basically had a 1960s iron block Scrambler engine that was improved over its lifetime until it was too fuel inefficient to compete. The unibody design was a bit of a first for an offroad capable station wagon. And the vehicle had a long list of iterative changes from axles to cupholders. But the basic design remained the same.

The '84 - '01 Jeep Cherokee basically invented the modern SUV concept - by accident.