I think you totally misread her comments. She didn’t say, “Teslas suck”, she said, “i thought they were supposed to be a super premium car, and they aren’t. They are just an ordinary car. And I didn’t even enjoy driving the one i rented”. I think if you reread her comments in that light, you might even agree with her.
EVs are silent when stationary, but road noise is an issue with EVs because there’s no drivetrain noise to cover the tire and wind noise. At highway speeds, the Model 3 is as quiet as an E-class Benz. In the Leaf, you’re hearing as much noise as you would in a Ram TRX with the supercharged V-8 and loud exhaust: 70 decibels. That’s a big difference. Road noise bothers me, I’m glad it’s not an issue for you.
Also, the Model 3 vents are aimable, and they can be split to direct air around each passenger. The vent positions are memorized, too. When my wife drives my car, the vents and temperatures adjust themselves from my preferences to hers.
The way the 3 handles is also adjustable. My Performance model has a very taut and responsive tune. But when my wife gets behind the wheel, the car not only adjusts the mirrors, wheel, and seat positions. It also changes the steering, throttle, and suspension to where she likes them, to settings I call “Full Buick”.
These features and many other Tesla features are not “virtue-signaling” or expressions of our wealth. We find them comfortable, convenient, and even economical because comparable ICE cars cost thousands more.
That’s what you basically said about your experience and I agreed with you. The difference was the many things that were factually incorrect in the OP and subsequent posts.
I haven’t seen much of that, especially not “blanket condemnations of all Tesla owners”. Speaking for myself, the things I’ve criticized have been specific features on Teslas that I personally would dislike or find confusing or inconvenient, or even unsafe, like the way that doors open (or don’t) on some models, and the over-hyping of FSD that might lead some owners to over-reliance on a feature that does not do what Musk wishes and claims it does. And I also absolutely loathe Elon Musk and wouldn’t buy a Tesla now for that reason alone, although I don’t judge those who bought one before his Trump and Nazi stage.
And the Cybertruck is a joke. I question the motivations and even the sanity of anyone who bought one. It’s not just badly built and unreliable – something purchasers might not have been expected to know – but it’s ugly as sin and, most of all, it’s just bad at all the main tasks that people buy pickups for: hauling cargo, going off-road, and towing. Or to put it bluntly, the Cybertruck is a piece of shit by just about any standards one could reasonably apply.
Here’s the article cited in another thread that I mentioned earlier. It’s from Forbes and is semi-paywalled – you get 4 free views a month and after that it’s soft-paywalled. I was posting from my tablet earlier and it was hard to cut and paste a link:
We all agree that they truck is a joke. We all agree that Musk is a fascist. Most of us who bought one wouldn’t again.
Whether there were a lot or a few things that were objectively wrong, those my only objections.
As for blanket condemnations of all Tesla owners it was in Post 231 but admittedly it wasn’t as bad as I recall so I will retract that.
I think Teslas are a little ridiculous because they don’t have a steering wheel and you have to steer using voice commands and brake using a tumescence monitor
I thought that the brain chip was a little weird but they were right. It didn’t hurt a bit.
Anyway, the consensus is against me so I will bow out with apologies unless I agree or there is a @Saint_Cad level claim that a lot of EVs don’t have physical brake pedals.
Going slightly OT for a moment, I was amused by Musk’s proud proclamation cited in the article, “I do zero market research whatsoever”.
Yeah, well, guess what, Mr. Nazi? Maybe that’s one reason of many that the Cybertruck is an abysmal failure. Simply put, no one wants one. Maybe you should have done more than “zero” market research instead of relying on your own self-perceived brilliance. A lot more!
Also, Elmo, you’re a linguistic dumbass. The quoted phrase is as grammatically ugly as your Cybertruck is aesthetically. One might say “I do no market research whatsoever”, where “no” is a negative determiner intensified by “whatsoever”, in the same sense as the pronoun “none” as in “none whatsoever”. But “zero whatsoever” is not English, because “zero” is not inherently negative like “no”. but “whatsoever” is always a negation intensifier, so Elmo comes off sounding like the dumbass that he is.
Overall I agree with your take-down of Cybertrucks. As I’ve said in this and other threads. But as to this:
I think you completely missed the primary reason people buy pickup trucks: because they are large, heavy, intimidating vehicles that make them feel safe and speshul; better than the other drivers they can now easily bully on the road. Oh yeah, and if jacked up, they serve as penis extensions for the under-30-and-male bravado worshiping set.
Businesses might well buy pickup trucks to haul or tow or drive around dirt construction sites. Suburbanites drive them for their spacious intimidation. CTs do this last mission just fine.
But you know, that’s the main reason people buy SUVs, as well. Nothing special about truck buyers in that regard. So most Americans fit in that mold. If they were honest with their vehicular needs, mini vans and hatchbacks would still be all the rage.
And in the early days when SUVs started to become popular, they were indeed criticized for their (mostly) large size and inefficient fuel consumption and pollution. But today’s smaller, more fuel-efficient SUV models can actually be sensible vehicles, especially electrics or hybrids.
But I agree with @LSLGuy that full-size pickups purchased by suburbanites as daily drivers serving no other purpose than being big, aggressive “manly” passenger cars are a scourge on the environment and the people who buy them without any actual need for them are pretentious poseurs.
And Cybertruck buyers take all this to a whole new level of irrationality that defies understanding. Even an irrational person whose deranged psyche demands a pickup truck for no reason and whose environmental concerns favour an electric vehicle could have bought a Ford F-150 Lightning.
I was reading on a different forum about cybertrucks and someone posted “imagine driving it and all eyes are on you”. I was like “all eyes on me in general is my worst nightmare and specifically in this case it’s not admiration”.
LOTS of people lurve the idea of “all eyes on me”. Mostly if it’s admiration or envy. But also if it’s “Gee, I wish I had a way to stop an annoying douche like you are.” Being that annoying douche with the e.g. loud exhaust is very satisfying to those folks.
In each case it’s about the lookee enjoying making the looker feel inferior or less powerful.
That’s also when something like a CT can backfire spectacularly. Once something formerly thought to be cool becomes an object of widespread derision, what had been the admiration of others turns into head-shaking dismissal or outright contempt.
Of course in a reflexively polarized environment like our country, any organized hating on e.g. CTs will produce a reactionary “We lurve us some CTs” from the other, happily reactionary crowd.
But they’d all be more sensible if they were a minivan or a hatchback. SUVs are popular because they are big, people imagine they’d be safer in a collision, and you get to see over all the other cars. I see no difference in their popularity vs the popularity of pickups for drivers who aren’t using them for some sort of work.
Those smaller, more efficient SUVs are still less efficient than the sedans that they share chassis with. And their higher center of gravity leads to worse handling and braking.
Also note that if someone is interested in an efficient EV pickup, the Cybertruck is more efficient and more powerful than the Lightning.
Nope. Not the small, fuel-efficient ones like the Toyota RAV4, for instance (39 MPG combined city/highway) and there are many others that are similar. Minivans more efficient? Hah! Before my present car I had a Dodge Caravan, and though I loved its practicality it was a gas-guzzler. Nothing remotely like a monster pickup truck, of course, but far greater gas consumption than a modern small SUV.
FTR, I currently have neither. I have a compact sedan that gets great gas mileage and since I don’t drive it very much, I may only visit the gas station every two months or so. The cost of gas is now negligible, though I sometimes worry about the gas in the tank being out of sync with the seasons!
May be true, and note that I’m not a fan of them. But they definitely are much more fuel-efficient than my previous minivan.
More efficient at doing what? Serious question. Their quality is terrible. They’ve had long string of recalls. Body panels tend to fall off. They’re ugly as sin. The pickup bed is an awkward design. And as for off-road performance, there’s currently an internet meme around videos showing stuck Cybertrucks being towed out of whatever they’re stuck in by real pickups like Ford F-150s, Dodge Rams, and Silverados.
Build quality, recalls, ugliness, awkward bed design, off-road performance have nothing to do with efficiency. The Cybertruck goes farther on a given charge, partly because of the bed design. The open box bed of conventional pickups is aerodynamically very “awkward”.
Not being at all a fan of pickups, I don’t know much about them beyond what I read, but a conventional pickup doesn’t have to be “open box” – it can be covered, and many are. It also keeps the snow out in the winter.
But the most aerodynamically efficient bed design isn’t “efficient” at all if it can’t carry the cargo you need it to carry and defeats the whole purpose for which you bought the goddam thing.
Anyway, the Cybertruck discussion is a digression here, so I’m out. From a sales/marketing standpoint, it’s been an epic flop, and the reasons are understandable.
The crash-safety benefit is mostly illusory. As you say.
But the “see over other cars” benefit is very real. To the people who have them. For sure on a societal level it’s a zero sum game. In fact it’s a bit of an arms race towards ever taller cars to see over the other ever-taller cars.
But it is an actual practical advantage for those buyers to be able to see over traffic. And not only for bullying’s sake.
I think the “more sensible” bit of minivans and SUVs is societal, not individual. Americans give exactly zero fucks about society; it’s all about the selfish individual. There’s no rugged, there’s no individualism as in "choose my own path"ism. But there sure is individual-centricity as in “It’s all about mee!”
SUVs also turtle more easily, or at least they did. The first time I ever saw a vehicle on its back on the freeway was a SUV way back when they first got popular ( so decades ago).