At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto’s 0.85. (In absolute terms, FuelArc found, 27 Pinto drivers died in fires, while five Cybertruck drivers have suffered the same fate, at least so far.)
…and unlike the Pinto, because we are so deep into fucked-reality-ville, it won’t get recalled.
Ford’s reasoning was that it was cheaper to pay out for the injuries and deaths than to change the car. Cybertruck has a much better plot armor, a fanbase that refuses to believe it’s crap.
I think that fanbase is staying to wane. But who knows, maybe the gas loving Maga rednecks will start buying…who am I kidding, most of them can’t afford the ridiculous price tag.
Not only that, it’s not even a proper truck. They could have come up with a standard truck design and used tech and EV to create a new niche that was usable. But no one can tell Elon no, so his 5-year-old self’s vision had to be made because it’s different. Sometimes different doesn’t mean better.
The kind of car Blade Runner would have driven.
Blade Runner vehicles were more aligned with 1960s coupes
You mean he drew the design with a crayon?
What often happens in cases like that is people on the edge leave, but those who remain are now distilled insanity.
the maga crowd has diesel truck attached to their very masculinity, thats never happening.
The MAGA crowd mostly needs to give their truck gender-affirming care by giving them truck nuts.
They can just buy a used one since the value of these fucking hunks of junk drops dramatically once its driven at all.
I read a reddit post recently by a guy who had bought one for $135K after shelling out $50K to a broker to find him one. He was wanting to sell but couldn’t get more than $70K for it lol.
According to the article there are already five less of them than there used to be.
The very real origin of the Fight Club joke about not doing a recall
“joke”
Fight Club - The Recall Coordinator’s Formula
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve seen or encountered strong pro cyber truck sentiment. Maybe a bit of online excitement for like a day when they were first rolling out but now it’s been a laughing stock.
IRL owners are something else to deal with. they get mad when you point and laugh at their rolling dumpster
I sped up and passed one on the freeway just to give him the finger. He even looked like pre-gender affirming surgery Elon. Who looks a lot like Andrew Tate.
There’s 3-4 Wankpazers around here and I see them around once a week. I flip them off every chance I get.
I’m a school bus driver - kids love the things and go apeshit whenever they see one. Fortunately, not many elementary school kids can afford one.
Nah. The Ford Pinto laid the groundwork for the NHTSA’s regulatory control of forced recalls. The only way this thing doesn’t get recalled for being dangerous is if Musk’s D. o. g. e manages to undercut or defund the NHTSA.
Additionally, other countries with better regulatory bodies won’t even allow it to be sold or will require mandatory recall of these vehicles which means the end of the cyber truck. They can’t even sell them because people don’t want them.
The other thing is that insurance companies can absolutely refuse to insure them and if I’m honest, they may be the main reason that the NHTSA doesn’t back down from regulating them (insurance companies are a powerful lobby, and they absolutely can countermand the automotive lobby in some cases).
My point is, it’s more complicated than just “Musk is a government official now, and historically dangerous cars weren’t recalled”.
Project 2025 has explicit targets for reforming NHTSA. It is unambiguously in their sights, just lower on the priority list.
Agreed. And that’s where consumer choice comes in. People don’t want them. Tesla is having to rework their entire plant to use the assembly lines that produce cybertrucks because they can’t sell the ones they’ve already made. They projected and prepared to manufacturer and sell 500,000 and they’ve sold something like 40,000 and the rest are just sitting in retail lots or holding lots collecting dust. The best estimate seems to be that they might be able to sell another 30,000 in 2025. But with tax credits for EV’s going away and other regulations going into effect world wide, that is probably a pipe dream.
Look, all I’m asking is that Tesla investors lose all their goddamn money.
Lol. You’re getting your wish. They basically would be in the red if it weren’t for some credits and Bitcoin they sold.
https://electrek.co/2025/01/30/a-quarter-of-teslas-earnings-were-due-to-recongnizing-a-600-million-gain-on-bitcoin/
I would love it if the board voted Elon out. I know it won’t happen because they’re a bunch of sycophants, but “Elons antics and poor decisions are causing us to lose money” is a great reason to do so.
On a scale from 0 to 3 (out of 10), how surprised would you be to read that the DHS decided to purchase 250.000 cybertrucks, because they are bulletproof? Before you go to Google it - I made it up, but there is a 50% chance of it coming in the next weeks.
I would be surprised for a lot of reasons. The main one being, they’d have to be dirt cheap and have an exceptional warranty agreement attached in order to compete with other automakers who make bulletproof vehicles. And, further there’s too many other problems with the amount of information they collect that the DHS would not have full and direct control over. Tesla’s are well known for recording anything and everything. We learned when they blew one up outside that Trump Hotel that they can be remotely locked by Tesla the company. A private company should not have that kind of direct access to government vehicles or any kind.
I think that really underestimates how corruption would work. Tesla might make a show of a “government edition” software loadout, whether because they had to or even as theater to pretend they catered to government requirements when in actuality it’s largely the same but maybe with some branding.
In terms of pricing, I’m sure that any actually “bulletproof” vehicles cost plenty. Which is why even departments like the DHS have largely unarmored fleets. Tesla wouldn’t meet those standards, but the marketing might be sufficient to serve as a bullet point over the current non-armored vehicles they use.
You mean that dog killer lady and Nazi weirdo care about competition and data security?
I’d like to thank you for this measured take in response to my unbridled cynicism.
To be fair, you made a good point. In the article it states pretty definitively that the NHTSA hasn’t been allowed to have the Cybertruck independently crash tested which is bogus as hell.
The fact that it can’t force that from any car manufacturer doesn’t really make sense. They haven’t even received relevant data related to Tesla’s in house crash testing and I can’t even begin to understand how that’s legal.
They will be neutered even further soon, they’re on the project 2025 list.
I believe they’re absolutely not street legal in the UK, nor in the EU. Those were never “ridiculous sized trucks” Walhalla to begin with (although I see more Rams than I care to, these days), so there’s roughly zero chance those things will become mainstream here.
Heck, we have rain here, that’s enough of a wankpanzer repellant.
They haven’t been banned from sale in the UK or EU so far as I can tell, according to the article.
But the relevant safety organizations and municipalities have been impounding them when they show up, so that’s something.
They don’t have to explicitly ban the Cybertruck if it doesn’t pass the existing regulations. It’s not legal to drive in UK/EU. You could buy one for display-only or something I’m sure.
Let me simplify it for you… Musk has been targeting agencies that stood in the way of SpaceX. Did you hear he started targeting OSHA this week because of the spotlight on Musk’s intentional dismissal of safety regulations? Or that he is also targeting the consumer protection agency? Everything that protects regular citizens is being shut down as “wasteful”, and his only criteria is anything that costs him money or prevents him from exploiting workers.
Don’t forget the revelation that USAID was looking into Starlink in a critical way…
It will take Leon 20 minutes to shut down the whole agency claiming that they actually eat babies and people will just go with it.
I don’t know why you keep saying intentionally inflammatory things that don’t take into account the full list of factors and facts we have about how the real world works, but you do you, I guess.
Because the way the world worked changed a few months ago. Trump is immune and has pardon powers.
I mean, the thing is already outright illegal in most countries where pedestrian safety is taken into account. An EU version would have to look completely different.
Nah, he will just get more government grants to “fix” it. (Aren’t they up to like 30% grants at this point?)
Probably why he’s closed the CFPB.
These are cybertruck owners…