Good lord, I just glanced up at the driveway across the street, and…
You on good terms with your neighbor? Ask 'em for a ride! And report back.
Unfortunately not - these are new folks, we knew the prior homeowners quite well. We’ll see if it’s just visiting or there to stay!
I saw a Cybertruck parked at the strip mall where I was getting lunch today. It was the first one I had seen up close, and that thing really looked ragged. The body panels looked like they had all weathered badly and they were all different shades - they hadn’t weathered evenly. There was also visible pitting on the stainless steel.
I live near the beach, and the salt air can be rough on stainless steel. My refrigerator is starting to show some pitting, and it lives indoors.
Looks like the entry-level model is now a hundred grand. Sorry, only $99,990. A bargain!
I am so confused. Normally you’d do that if you had really high demand, but we just saw a few weeks ago that Tesla sales were slightly up (+2%) while profits dropped 45% because of discounting (but also a restructuring charge).
Hard to know what’s really up with this company’s financials, ever.
There can be high demand for a single product while the rest of the company does poorly.
Oh, wait, I misread the article - they’ve simply dropped the rear-wheel drive version from orders, and then up-priced the rest, but not by some insane amount.
Sounds to me like, pre-introduction, they weren’t sure whether the CT would become a popular work truck or a popular urban assault poseur vehicle (“UAPV”).
So they built the 2WD stripper for work and the 4WD loaded model for the UAP market.
The market has now spoken & the stripper is history. UAPs FTW!
This morning I ate breakfast at a cafe looking out on a suburban main boulevard. 45mph speed limit, 2 or 3 lanes each way plus left turn lanes/bays. This was roughly 8am to 9am, so busy w cars and the usual folks going places or doing their local commute to work. So far so ordinary.
In my ~45 minutes sitting there I saw a plain stainless steel (“SS”) CT going south, 15 minutes later a plain SS going north, 2 minutes later another northbound plain SS, then about 10 minutes after that a dark gray wrapped one also going north.
So 3 distinct CTs for sure in one direction and a fourth going the other way that might be a different vehicle or might’ve been the same as one of the later northbounds.
So at least in my trendy poseur-ridden zipcode they’re becoming commonplace.
I have not yet seen two in the wild simultaneously. But I predict that’ll happen within a couple months.
From $61 to $100,000 is a pretty insane increase to me.
I finally got to see one (wrapped) up close. I’ve long thought it looks like a neckless origami bird from the outside but the exterior minimalism continues on the inside, too. I can’t help but thinking what I see driving around are pre-completion models that they yanked off the middle of the assembly line & that it needs more to be ‘complete’ vehicle; paint, curves, dashboard, etc.
Gotta give Elmo props, though. It’s very tough to not only knock the Aztek from its perch but make it into a beautiful vehicle in comparison!
I should have been more clear when I posted that link.
It isn’t that the base model was increased by that much. They’ve eliminated the previous base model and raised prices on all the others, so the new “entry” model cybertruck is 100k, up from 80k. Which is still quite a lot.
I disagree with you; they advertised a base model for $61 but it’s now going to cost you $100k for a base model. No matter how they market it, it’s gonna cost someone a lot more to be a poseur than they were previously expecting it to.
In my EV rich area I’m still not seeing the Cybertruck daily, but at least one per week.
Recently I was behind one that was wrapped in a kind of olive green color, which was fine, if boring. The thing that made it look really bad was that one of the tail lights was crooked. There are the two lights at the top corners of the back. One was square to the body panels, and one was twisted a bit. It looked really bad.
I mean, the fit and finish on my 2018 Model 3 is pretty bad compared to my Dad’s new Lexus, but going down the road the variations in panel gaps is not obvious, and doesn’t detract from the look of the car. The wonky tail/brake light was obvious from several cars back, and made the whole thing look cheap and busted, beyond the normal outlandishness (tolerate it or hate it).
French Designers vs. the Bushveld Engineer. Personally, I like the looks of the Citroën better.
The Citroen looks like a modern evolution of that funky car you see in Viet Nam war movies. It actually looks pretty good to me. The Tesla is just ugly.
Tesla rejiggers their prices like most people change their clothes. It’s purely a function of the current perceived demand and their ability to produce them, maximizing profit. And they’re happy to do so even for short term disruptions. Battery pack production not quite up to snuff? Raise prices. Demand starting to tail off? Lower them. But the changes now don’t have much to do with what they’ll be in 3 months, let alone a year. Or the current product lineup, for that matter.
If they have (indirectly) announced the cessation of the RWD-only version in favor of only the significantly pricier AWD models, IIRC that’s a change of a different nature from the kinds of price / minor feature changes that you rightly point out are common with Tesla. And are similarly common with other car makers.
It’s not precisely the same thing, but Tesla eliminated the RWD Long Range Model 3 for a few years, and then brought it back. They did have a standard-range RWD model in the meantime. For now, there’s no lower-range version of the Cybertruck, which is actually contrary to what they announced originally. They all have the same pack. So they may just be waiting for a time when they can produce a smaller pack efficiently.
By “lower range” do you mean lower maximum driving distance, or lower trim level / features / max acceleration, etc.?
Yes, on an EV those two things are related, but I found your usage ambiguous. Are they stopping selling strippers or are they stopping selling larger motors?