I shit you not, there is no frame. They removed all of the structural components from the vehicle and instead they’ve made all of the parts which would ordinarily be non-structural into structural parts. This was done with the explicit stated purpose of reducing the manufacturing cost of the vehicle by making it non-repairable.

I’m talking about load-bearing Lithium-ion battery cells, structural plastic housings, even the glass window panes in the doors are considered so structurally important that rolling them down fundamentally changes the driving characteristics of the vehicle. It has a crash safety rating of Did Not Finish, it’s not water-tight enough to be driven in the rain or go through any car wash.

The high repair costs and relative fragility of the vehicle are intentional aspects of the design goal for the Cybertruck, passing all possible costs onto the consumer by making a disposable pickup truck and offering OEM mod package installation and a complete factory replacement/refurbishment as the only two after-sales service options on a truck that cannot be serviced or modified by anyone other than Tesla, and will brick itself if it thinks you tried.

They built a car the way you’d build a disposable vape.

Check this out, here’s a photo of it. They’re essentially just a pile of plastic parts hanging onto these discrete stainless steel sheets.

It has like, a structural aluminium tub where you’d normally put the frame of a truck. That’s why the tailgate back half of the car rips off when you try tow something heavy with all that torque.

It’s truly the car homer simpson would have designed if he were less intelligent.

All the Elon Musk fanboys: “Genius move, Good Sir!”

I remember reading about structural battery packs a few years ago. Are any other EVs doing it? I assumed it was standard practice now.

Depends on what you mean by “from the outside.”

A car manufacturer could absolutely manufacture a vehicle using more conventional and safe methods with an industry-average level of attention paid to mechanic access, and which appears more or less identical to the Cybertruck as released from the outside. Likely there would be some minor differences based on tooling, but let’s just handwave away the little stuff like that or “parts bin” items that another manufacturer wouldn’t have access to.

Given that the level of attention paid to safety or repairability of the actual Cybertruck was worse than none, I imagine no other car manufacturer would actually make or sell something with quite the same number of deeply stupid and actively dangerous ideas even for a one-off concept car, so the interior would look quite different, but let’s again handwave that away as well.

The actual problems show up with the interior space. The stupid cost cutting and deliberate disregard for safety or durability did allow Tesla to use a manufacturing method that results in a thinner roof structure and lower floor height than conventional manufacturing methods would allow. A truck made to look like the Cybertruck with conventional manufacturing methods would have a much shorter cabin space and would likely feel more like you’re sitting in a sports sedan or a subcompact. There would also be large intrusions into the cabin (likely both in the ceiling and floor) to fit components that Tesla either skipped or didn’t need to use because of the manufacturing process that they chose to make the actual Cybertruck.

Tbf I’m old enough to have set off airbags on strangers vehicles with a well placed kick to the drivers side headlight when they were first released. They are no longer this way, but they used to be.

Just some perspective.

My wife hit a concrete mailbox doing like 5 mph, 8 kph and all the airbags went off. All depends on how its hit.

Not $200k cars or, if we’re being more accurate, ~$80k cars

yeah, I’ve heard that argument. and while true, even with all the new safety features, driving still murders drivers and pedestrians in the states with pretty reckless abandon. like as though the real danger is less about the individual vehicle and more about the civic infrastructure.

personally, I don’t see what is so safe about charging $4,000 for $1,000 dollars’ worth of center console toy screens for drivers to play with that comes standard in all cars now.

our roads as they exist are a charnal house no matter what. I solve this by driving extremely defensively and have made major life changes to avoid having to get behind the wheel as often as I used to.

the safety features manufacturers talk up in their pitches only seem to serve their repair shops, because now if you bump your Ford Dreadnaught XLT into the Nissan Galacticus 1A in the Kroger parking lot while watching the navigation cam feed, both vehicles deconstruct themselves and become undrivable.

That’s why I dislike all the Foundation-related works after Second Foundation. They veer directly into Great Man Theory nonsense, with a side of misogyny that goes even beyond the original stories.

The AppleTV series is the worst of all. It’s unrecognizable. Salvor Hardin is a brooding loner who fetishizes their gun, which is so fucking offensive to me. I’m perfectly fine with gender changes so long as the core of the character remains faithful to the stories. And that’s just the start of the bullshit changes.

Right? I love that they’re all from the perspective of the exact same geographical location on Trantor.