Topic 9 Posts

Elmo

Indulging Elmo

Tesla’s styling update cycle is way too slow. People lease EVs because they’re improving fast. Leases end every 2-3 years.

Model 3 is 7 years old, Model Y is 4. A legacy automaker would’ve done a Model 3 refresh in Y3, full redesign Y5-6. E.g. Ioniq 5 ’21 is getting a refresh this fall.

Tesla just dribbled out a mild M3 refresh in Y7, updating front and rear but same basic profile. Cheaper.

Meanwhile BYD’s spamming new EV models every few months.

Imagine MS just… forgetting to upgrade Windows. They did used to slip by years, but Tesla’s stretching the restyle more to save capital than over bugs and dev delays.

Tesla f’d themselves. The new model, tech and style energy went to Elmo’s extremely niche truck. Like if Apple moved the entire iPhone team to Jony’s silly little $17,000 Watch.

Vanity projects get small teams, not a whole of co effort. Tesla is wildly mismanaged and ripe for shareholder revolt, heading for takeover if unfixed. They should dismiss the board and fire Musk.

Elmo’s defrauding shareholders with his Cybertruck fixation as badly as his nonstop dipping into the corporate till. 

Are we the baddies?

The militaristic Cybertruck, used to pick up kids at school, marks it a truck for bed-wetters and guys anxious about their masculinity. It’s Joe Keery in Fargo. It’s open-carrying a rifle to a bagel shop: a cry for help.

Elmo launched his Cybertruck Kickstarter on a day in 2019 when Blade Runner takes place. Its dystopic message went over his head: the angled, bladed designs are the villains.

Elon does not understand movies, like right-wingers don’t understand songs (“Born on the Fourth of July”).

Knife missile

On regular cars, panels curve over corners and meet on flat planes, protecting people from sharp edges while shielding internals from rain and snow. Each panel has rounded edges covered in several layers of paint.

On Cybertruck, flat steel panels have gaps at sharp origami corners. This exposes the internals to weather and insects in the directions of travel and rainfall.

This is for polygon styling and cost control. The material is difficult to work with, poor fit for a car but a great one for buzz and stock pumps.

The panels form points and blades which could harm drivers and pedestrians or be forced apart in a collision. A knife missile, a guillotine on wheels.

The lines of these panels aren’t straight down the length of the body, and the panel gaps aren’t uniform. The panels don’t appear uniformly reflective, the metal finish appears uneven. The effect is a kid’s science fair project, or a defective Hibachi.

Consider who would’ve even worked on the truck. The design studio reportedly revolted, thinking the concept a joke. So it’s mostly built by Elon-fan preppers or pure mercs.

Ironically the prepper truck is a danger to its own driver. It’s another of Elon’s dangerous-by-design products, along with FSD and Xitter.

The truck’s bigger and not as ugly in person, like the Ioniq 6. But has massive Escalade wheels, and the outward-sloping Kammback does it no favor. No door handles, just buttons, an especially unfriendly primary interface.

Gigawiper: a base and an extension

There was no line to see it. Overheard a woman: “It’s so ugly.”

Front, front quarter angle and front side look quite nice, especially in black. Side proportions are wonky, short frunk / long rear. Back looks like a dumpster.

First principles of materials

The typical auto body panel is 0.7 mm thick. Cybertruck’s are 3 mm, 4× thicker for no good reason.

Current electric trucks are limited mainly by range. They often tow loads and are shaped like unaerodynamic bricks. Door dings don’t figure in the top 10 selling points.

The added weight cuts range, the angular cross-section adds drag, the unfinished steel is hard to patch and match.

It’s anti-functional, like T•••• demanding gold and marble on his weight-sensitive planes. Functional only for the con, selling futurey sizzle to marks.

The “no paint, no door dings, easy to patch, and bulletproof” stuff was grafted on later. The main draw of the throwaway design sketch for Elon was that it “looked like the future.” But it’s lo-poly angular because 3 mm stainless is hard to bend, hard to work with.

Elon’s materials-illiterate “10 microns” demand ran completely counter to using this kind of material, totally incoherent.

He’d only ever heard of it because it was a tough, relatively inexpensive material for SpaceX’s specific application of orbital reentry.

Elon’s slogan is “first principles physics thinking.” Even the slogan is a lie—especially the slogan :)

Elmo comedy

To everyone mystified why Elmo’s ranting against Wikipedia…

… he’s dumb, so *it’s always hilariously personal* :D

“Why does a nonprofit need money” is the exact same line he used when OpenAI became a unicorn after dumping him :D