Want to hear something entirely predictable? During Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Elon Musk moved the goalposts for Cybertruck production once again. According to the CEO, manufacturing will start “sometime this summer” as he’s long promised, but he was careful to delineate between the start of production and mass production.
“I always try to downplay the start of production,” Musk said, according to The Verge. “It increases exponentially, but it is very slow at first.” Even then there’s no word of when in 2024 this level of “mass-production” might be.
If the Cybertruck enters mass production in 2024—and that’s still a big if—signs point towards it being anything but a mass-market product. According to The Verge, Musk claimed last year that the Cybertruck will have different specs and a different price from when it first launched, which means that there likely won’t be a $40,000 Cybertruck at all. It’s the $35,000 Model 3 claim all over again.
At a higher price point, the Cybertruck will compete with a whole raft of much less bizarre electric pickup trucks that are already on sale from the Ford F-150 Lightning to the Rivian R1T, plus newcomers like the Chevy and GMC EV trucks and whatever Ram has up its sleeve. The Cybertruck is old news, even if it’s not even here yet; yet Tesla is intent on ramming it into production without focusing on developing other fresh high-volume products.
This focus on the Cybertruck leaves Tesla with a rather neglected product line for the better part of a year. Tesla hasn’t launched a brand-new car since 2020, whereas companies like Hyundai and General Motors now seem to be rolling out at least one new EV every year.
In addition, Tesla hasn’t replaced a car in its lineup ever. The second-generation Roadster is currently about as real as the tooth fairy, and even the Model S has been around 2012, even if it’s received multiple upgrades since. While battery packs, motors, and interiors have been upgraded, you can’t limp an old architecture along forever, even if it was avant garde when it launched.
As it stands, competitors have caught up to Tesla on acceleration and charging speed, and are beginning to catch up on range too. It won’t be very long until Tesla’s only truly unique perk is the user-friendly Supercharger network. Hmm, a company with aging products and only one key service perk. Where have we seen that before?
This may be a bit of a surprise to some of our younger readers, but the iPhone wasn’t always the premium smartphone to have. CNN Money reported that back in the first quarter of 2009, BlackBerry held roughly 55.3 percent of the U.S. smartphone market share, far ahead of Apple’s 19.5 percent market share.
Granted, Android was only getting started and Symbian was still a thing, but BlackBerry got into the premium smartphone market early and established a lead. One of the key perks to owning a BlackBerry was BBM, short for BlackBerry Messenger, an encrypted (albeit not end-to-end) instant messaging service exclusively for BlackBerry users that was incredibly convenient, fairly secure, and really the first exclusively mobile instant messaging service.
Users loved BBM for its reliability and peace of mind, the same reasons Tesla owners love the Supercharging network. Suddenly, something traditionally patchwork and confusing for many people was foolproof. However, BBM alone couldn’t keep BlackBerry going as a dominant smartphone maker. By February 2011, BlackBerry was on a direct flight to irrelevance having been surpassed in sales by Apple and Android devices, with the Washington Business Journal reporting just 5.4 percent market share for BlackBerry devices.
Today, BlackBerry enjoys virtually zero smartphone market share, instead having primarily pivoted to being a software and security company.
The death of BlackBerry’s smartphone success was caused by the same complacency we’re seeing from Tesla today. The Cybertruck could end up as Tesla’s BlackBerry Storm – something completely different from what Tesla is used to making and a flawed product that’s too little, too late.
In the case of the BlackBerry Storm, two big sore spots were its infuriating SurePress keyboard and shortsighted lack of Wi-Fi. In the case of the Cybertruck, the stainless steel bodywork should be incredibly difficult to repair and, as our own Jason Torchinsky reports, the whole vehicle doesn’t seem like a usable truck. The Storm was launched around the beginning of BlackBerry’s decline and the Cybertruck may launch around the time Tesla starts to fade from absolute dominance in the EV market.
Indeed, Tesla is already losing U.S. EV market share. While Forbes reports that the marque held 79.4 percent market share in 2020, new competition means that despite plenty of sales still happening, Tesla’s U.S. EV market share was down to 68.2 percent through in 2021 and 65.4 percent in 2022. Even in an expanding market, losing 14 percent market share over just a few years is cause for alarm.
Loss in market share may have been a factor in Tesla’s recent price cuts, which have allegedly spurred demand. Musk stated on the fourth-quarter earnings call that “Thus far in January we’ve seen the strongest orders year-to-date than ever in our history.” However, as more manufacturers launch more EVs, Tesla’s share of the overall market should get smaller and smaller, as that’s generally how things work across all markets when more options are introduced. One way to prevent a critical loss of market share is to crank out new mass-market products, but Tesla doesn’t seem to be interested in that right now.
As it sits, it’s too soon to say whether Tesla will eventually become a smaller player or burn out entirely. It’s still the world leader in EVs, and last night announced its 13th straight profitable quarter; the days of announcing Tesla’s pending doom are behind us.
However, all current signs point toward a retreat from dominance of some sort. The Cybertruck may be Elon Musk’s vanity project but without a serious investment into Tesla’s mainstream lineup of cars, it could just cost him the company’s status.
(Photo credits: Tesla, Inc., Blackberry)
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The actual chances of this making it to production in 2024 are laughably non-existent, and very clearly demonstrate just what level of fraud Tesla’s entire board is a-okay with.
Because back in November, they were crowing that all of the tooling for the Cyberflunk was completed.
Uh-huh. Sure.
Not only that, but this is a product by amateurs, with little to no experience, and authority ranked by their ability to polish shoe leather with their tongue. Meaning the current iteration? Legally can’t ship. Guaranteed.
GM had to go on a maniacal diet to get the Hummer EV below 10,000lbs, which is the legal limit. If the Hummer weighed even 10lbs more, that’s it. They couldn’t sell it to the general populace – or at all in some areas. And to get there they had to find weight savings everywhere they could. Battery packs, motor construction, wheels, everything. The bed might be stamped steel (likely for weight balance/distribution reasons,) a positively absurd amount of the body area is plastic, all of the suspension components are aluminum or alumag alloys, the roof eschews all insulation, the interior is all lightweight plastics, and so on. And of that 9,046lbs? Fully one third of it is the batteries.
A truck which is even larger dimensionally, with heavy gauge stainless steel panels (304 is 7.93kg/m^3 minimum versus ABS at 1.21kg/m^3, before coatings,) extremely heavy ‘ball-it resistant’ laminated glass everywhere, and all of the other stupidity? You’re easily talking 15,000lbs. Which makes it illegal to sell pretty much anywhere. Tack on an insistence that it can tow ‘infinite mass’ and it is now illegal for you to tow anything without a CDL since it’s into HDV6.
Tesla claims it’s going to have a 200kWh usable battery based on the Model Y pack. The Model Y pack is roughly 1000lbs per 67kWh usable; that means 200kWh’s usable has a minimum weight of 2,985lbs – or in line with the Hummer EV, unsurprisingly. So that means the remainder (6,000lbs) based on simple materials math will be between 1 and 8 times depending on what metal GM uses. (There’s a lot of aluminum in there.) Given Tesla claims they’re using cold-rolled 3OX (which they keep changing claims on) that’s 301-class. Which AISI is >8kg/m^3 minimum.
Big oof.
As an engineer, I appreciate the math and the standards referenced.
Do it again, please.
8,000 kg/m^3, not 8.
I’m sure rw meant 8Mg/m^3.
but point taken, gonna be too heavy
Comparative is correct, but I typo’d units. I don’t usually work with stainless, I work with much more unpleasant materials. (Seriously, way worse stuff.)
UNS S30400 (304 Stainless) is 7.85-8.06Mg/m^3
ABS ranges 1.020g/cm^3 to 1.250g/cm^3 or 1.25Mg/m^3
Stainless 30X is actually a ridiculous variant of 301 and a pig at 8.03Mg/m^3+
And using 301 for a car is just the absolute stupidest thing ever. The absolute dumbest fucking thing you could do. Thermal expansion is 18.5×10-6/K. Cheaper 304 is 18×10-6/K. 301’s compressive strength is 310MPa vs 304’s 515MPa. 301 has a marginally higher tensile strength – which is irrelevant when it’s body skin! And of course, using the ‘proprietary’ 30X means it costs a lot more than standard 301.
Literally the only reason to use 30X is because SpaceX is not a competently run organization either, and neither can survive without a lot of government subsidies and self-dealing.
And as if we needed more proof? DeLoreans are SS304, the same as the containers in your local salad bar, and SpaceX completely abandoned SAE301 and 30X for 304L.
Anyway, doing my back of napkin math. The bed segment is roughly 8.25ft by 2.5ft per side for 20.625ft^2; we’ll call it 2 square meters. We already know they’re dumbasses who insist on using 3mm thick panels. So we end up at 0.03m^3 or 1.0594ft^3 which gives us over 1100lbs for just the bed side skin.
A complete Ford F150 bed weighs less than those skins.
I wish the “lm002” guy which is obsessed with the CT would read you. Arf, he’ll probably don’t understand anyway.
Your math doesn’t check out. 2 sq meters at 3mm thick works out to .006 m^3. At 8000kg/m^3 that works out to 48kg, or 106lb for the bed skin. Still a lot, but not ludicrous.
The only ” good thing ” about stainless is how it welds . It sucks to machine , bend , drill , grind and polish . Also if you’re gonna use 300 series , spend the extra and go with 316 L for best corrosion resistance . The truck is already gonna cost a fortune anyway …
BlackBerry has 0% market share of the smartphone market now, the last BlackBerry phones stopped production way back in August, 2020, when TCL lost their license for the trademark. A new company, OnwardMobility, took over the rights, and were supposedly working on a new BlackBerry phone design, but collapsed in bankruptcy in February, 2022 without ever releasing anything.
I came to BlackBerry very late in the game, after owning 4 iPhones and a Motorola, but bought a KeyOne in 2017 and loved it. Had never owned a smartphone with a physical keyboard before that, and found I typed way faster and more accurately on it and decided that’s what I wanted from then on. Replaced it with a Key2, then they stopped production, so now I’m back to a Motorola.
Provided they get it in production and I can buy a new one before 2026 I’ll most likely get one.
Well I guess you aren’t getting one then. Sorry.
We’ll see
Tesla is looking like Ford under Henry Ford. The Model T was perfect in every way, and didn’t need to be updated, as far as he was concerned. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was losing market share/sales every year. Edsel finally convinces him to bring out a new model just before the market crash, and Henry insists low sales are because of the Model A, not because people have no jobs or money.
I had a BlackBerry Storm and like the Cybertruck it was too bloody heavy. (I worked for Vodafone and they gave it to me, I would never have bought one, kinda like a Cybertruck).
Don’t fully agree with the article, though I don’t fully disagree either.
Just an “actually…” kind of comment. Tesla’s charging network will very soon be open to all EV’s, mostly to access federal subsidies from recent legislation. If that is the main feature that sends people to Tesla over other EVs (I am one), they can’t count on it for much longer. Not only any EV will be able to use it, but chargers will likely get absurdly crowded once the floodgates open.
https://electrek.co/2023/01/22/tesla-leaks-magic-dock-ccs-adapter-opening-supercharger-network/
Price will be atrocious to keep non tesla users away. It will be emergency scenario
I quit reading when you said the iPhone wasn’t premium because Blackberry had a larger marketshare.
Yes sir, I guess Ferraris aren’t premium because there are more Toyotas on the road. Stupid take.
I quit reading your comment when you said you quit reading.
And I kept reading this thread because of your profile picture. What car is that?
It’s a replica of the 1956 Pontiac Club de Mer concept! Gorgeous car, snapped the pic at a Concours d’Elegance in Florida a while ago.
Your reading comprehension is pretty bad. Sorry for you.
I don’t disagree that Tesla has a product problem right now, but pointing at the fact that they’re dropping from an 80% market share doesn’t prove much. No carmaker was going to keep 80% of the market forever. My hot take prediction is that even if Tesla pivots today and starts coming out with amazing new vehicles that actually exist, their market share will still continue to drop just because there’s much more competition these days. If they end up with 20% of the EV market that would be a huge success, but it’s also a massive drop from where they are.
Globally they’re at 13% and dropping.
Spot on with the comparison. I had one of the first BlackBerry devices that was the size of a text pager and only did e-mail, before they even added phone capability. They used to be the “must have” device for the jet-set lawyers, and I was just a professional nerd. Now I see a mix of Android/iOS with all my customers, haven’t seen a BB device in I couldn’t tell you how long. Tesla could update their product line and refine what they have, think Model S.1, Model X.1 and so on. Update the look, really key in on build quality, focus on reducing weight, or increasing battery capacity (both would be excellent, one would be good to keep them in the hunt). The “legacy” players (Ford, GM, Toyota, Hyundai, etc.) have made massive strides relatively quickly, and Telsa is about to become an also ran niche player instead of selling 25 million cars. Maybe if Elon quit playing with Twitter?
All Elon Musk companies (excepting, maybe, just maybe, SpaceX) are vanity projects. He’s an idiot that spends money to look geeky-sophisticated-cool and makes claims and proclamations untethered to reality to brew up attention and interest.
He’s bored with cars. Turns out the actual engineering, incremental reliability improvement, and consistency in product that a car company requires to continue is dull compared to running up and planting a flag on the “Gull wing SUV, Fastest accelerating sedan, First Affordable BEV” mound. You don’t get daddy’s approval from improving maintenance intervals by 8.3%.
Tesla will not have another model generation. It will fizzle out like the ‘dotcom burst’ in the late 90s.
SpaceX is absolutely a vanity project. Everything leading up to Musk launching himself to Mars (and that can’t happen soon enough, if you ask me) is just a means to an end.
He’s too chicken-shit to launch himself to Mars. He won’t even copy Bezos and do a low “space” flight.
I only hedged on that one because it has government/NASA contracts.
Never. Gonna. Happen.
And if it does, it will lose a metric shit ton of money. If the flame-thrower wasn’t a big enough sign of his egomania, actual production plans for this ‘cybertruck’ (lowercase and apostrophes intentional) should have been.
My first smart phone was a Blackberry Storm.
God, the thoughts that conjures up.
Anyways, remember when I was saying that if Tesla didn’t start to innovate they were gonna end up getting eaten alive by the other manufacturers and would eventually be absorbed by one of them? I just wanted to say it again.
I’m predicting 2026 at the earliest, 2032 at the latest.
Tesla generally only had 2 models on sale during 2022, model 3 and model Y.
Both are:
Quite ugly!
Too expensive for most buyers!
Only available in 5 colors and 1 trim level (2 interior colors though)
Only available for sale in around 35 countries.
And do not forget, battery electric.
Despite this, they account for 2+% of global car sales in 2022.
Not some percentage of electric car sale, but 2+% of global cars sales, including 30 year old Renault and VW models still being produced in third world countries and Tatas in India.
On top of this, Tesla managed to increase units sold and revenue about 40% year over year and still increase profit margin significantly at the same time.
Blue ocean, turning red. Take notes and write another book in 10 years when this plays out. Going to be interesting.
It’s increasingly clear the Mr. Musk (I’m being gracious) needs to be removed as Tesla CEO. The sooner the better.
While a brilliant innovator, disrupter and entrepreneur (pre-Twitter), he lacks the steadiness and maturity needed for corporate Tesla to evolve into a long term player on the world automotive stage.
There is recent anecdotal evidence that his personal views on political affairs have alienated a large pool of potential buyers who will have nothing to do with Tesla products. In fact, recent media reports contain stories of current owners of Tesla’s who are abandoning ownership of their vehicles in disgust. You do not build residual values this way.
Tesla desperately needs a real car person as CEO.
There are some lessons to be learned from old school legacy manufacturers. You can’t let your products get too stale, as alluded to in the article. Tesla needs product refreshes immediately. A predictable new product cadence would reassure investors. A focus on the customer, perhaps for the first time, would be a huge step forward. Easier access to service centers and more timely repairs would build the kind of loyalty you need for the long run. As much as legacy manufacturers are maligned, and I will be the first to acknowledge their shortcomings, they do some things right.
Mr. Musk has many other corporate and life interests he can focus his time and resources on in the future. Leave the running of Tesla to mature adults with world class corporate automotive manufacturing credentials.
Tesla needs its own Gwynne Shotwell. That said, I’ve seen a lot of hype, some delivery, but no innovation for the past several years.
great post. seems fitting: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
oh Blackberry. You were so close. Literally had the tip in. In the UK BBM didn’t require any data or minutes on your plan so ALL the kids had them so they could message each other for nothing. I hung on till about 2011, with the Z10 and Q10 which were great, but the app store killed them.
This is what I think is ultimately going to start slowly bleeding Tesla dry. The fact that their bread and butter cars (3/Y, which are basically the same damn thing) are verging on a decade old, and their high margin cars (S/X) are pretty much already there. And overall, the design between each model really isn’t significantly different. They’re sorely in need of a full redesign across the entire lineup in the next five years. Especially since the used Tesla bubble has burst and flooded the market with cheap cars that are visually undifferentiated.
It doesn’t seem likely that this will happen though. They’re dumping all of their money/attention into the Cybertruck and Semi and don’t seem to have much else on the horizon. I truly don’t believe that the focus on the Cybertruck and Semi will make up for the loss of S/X/Y/3 sales if they’re left to wither on the vine (if there’s even enough demand to justify producing either at scale, which I find questionable). The diehards will keep buying Teslas, sure. But cars are a status symbol, normie car buyers (especially those wealthy enough to afford $40K+ cars) want the next new thing to show off to their friends and neighbors. They don’t want to buy a brand new car identical to the clapped out, rusty ones that start showing up in mobile home parks and Walmart parking lots. If we haven’t reached that point with older used Teslas yet, it’s just around the corner.
Funny you mention clapped out models. Here in Honolulu, Tesla 3/Y cars are almost as common as a Camry. Just yesterday while driving to work, I was behind a Model 3 that wore a matte brown vinyl wrap, a caved in LR quarter panel, scratched to hell on the drivers side, all the wheels were curbed enough to be noticed at 30mph, and it was dirtier than a 20 year old Focus sitting in street parking. I have no idea what year that particular car was or how many hard miles it had accumulated, but it was the first one I’d seen that was clearly neglected and not cared for. You’re right. That eventuality is coming quickly.
And if other used, 3rd owner luxury cars are any prediction, Model 3s and Ys are going to start showing up at sketchy buy here/pay here lots with dead or partially dead touch screen displays and laundry lists of interior features broken, and get caught in revolving doors of being “sold”, repossessed, and “resold” over and over again from the same lot. Also expect we’ll start seeing them with ill-fitting Chinese diamond tufted vinyl floor mats and ugly AutoZone faux wood steering wheel covers at some point.
What do you mean, START showing up?
They’ve been showing up.
https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/link/340444689
If the Cybertruck ever makes it to market, it’ll be in a fun club (including the Hummer H2/H3, Cadillac Escalade EXT) of rolling red flags.
TH, the Blackberry Storm comparison is so spot on! I was working in B2B sales for a major Telecom when that dumb thing finally was released. BB promised the “moon” about how good it was gonna be, and…it…sucked…so…bad. I spent the majority of my time after the launch helping customers process returning them (which wasn’t even my job, but I was trying to save face and my reputation for pushing it).
I feel like the same thing is going to happen to the Cyber “Trick”. It very well might be the product that gets even the die-hards so pissed off that even they will realize the flaws in their loyalty.
Tesla (and most of ol’ Musky’s companies) will survive because of how they diversified what they actually do, but their demise as a car company is probably coming to an end in short order. It probably would happen even sooner, but Ford can’t get their shit together.
*final telecom note: The iPhone actually kinda sucks compared to the top-shelf Android products. To each their own and all that, but I think of Apple as the Bose speakers for the audiophile world. Have a nice day 🙂
I could have worded all that better, and my bad for not proofreading it, lol.
I thought we were told about a new commenting system happening?
New commenting system will began limited production later this year with mass production beginning sometime in 2024.
damn that’s cold
Love the Apple::Bose comparison. Two brands built on the illusion of being “better” when in fact their stuff (mostly) isn’t that good.
“Tesla (and most of ol’ Musky’s companies) will survive because of how they diversified what they actually do, but their demise as a car company is probably coming to an end in short order. It probably would happen even sooner, but Ford can’t get their shit together.
Same as Blackberry today lol
Ultimately, Tesla is in business to make money. They must focus at any given moment on the things that will bring in money. Right now, that appears to be the Semi, and plant expansion, and ways to build more and better batteries. If the Cybertruck ever comes to fruition, it will be a niche product, and those are rarely very profitable.
See, the thing with “being in business to make money” is that you can’t be reactive. The idea that you must “focus at any given moment on the things that will bring in money” is wrong. You can’t focus on any given moment, you have to focus on future moments.
Also, mentioning a niche product at an earning’s call sounds like a recipe for disaster. So in Musk’s eyes it isn’t a niche product.
If its not a niche product and it is something that they are gonna focus on and promote heavily, then they are very close to shitting the bed.
The Seinfeld/Leno NSX commercial was in January 2012, and the car didn’t actually go on sale until mid 2016.
The Bronco was announced in January 2017 and didn’t go on sale until mid 2021.
Those two have always been the poster children to me for ridiculously long delays, but it looks like this is going to top them both.
Didn’t they tease the Supra for an entire decade?
There were rumors forever and a concept that looked like the Supra, but Toyota didn’t officially confirm production until a few months before sales began.
Technically, Ford showed the first concept for a new Bronco way back in 2004, and kind of hemmed/hawed will we/won’t we for a few years after that. Its the new Boeing airplane model of cars, something that gets discussed on and off for years without happening. Except Ford did, eventually, build a new model, instead of sticking an EcoBoost in a facelifted 1966 Bronco body and calling it a day.
Remember when we all thought the fabeled Model2 hot hatch was right around the corner?
Research in Motion until they ran into a wall of Apples.
I just can’t take the Cybertruck seriously, it’s low poly design to usability. I suppose the people buying these have no desire to use it as a truck, though. It will be a “Look at me” status symbol. I expect prices will be closer to Model S territory, though the recent Tesla price cuts may mean Tesla has room the maneuver on pricing.
Bingo. What made the Blackberry great at the time was its user interface – I still miss mine, as that physical keyboard as wonderful for work emails on technical subjects.
The Cybertruck (as far as we can tell anyway) has a terrible interface in that it doesn’t seemed designed to do truck things in a truck fashion. I think you’re right that it’ll be largely bought by the self-conscious I’m-a-non-conformist types in the cult.
The Blackberry Torch was the finest device of its day from a usability standpoint.
Great antennas too. I haven’t hauled mine out in a couple years, but kept using it on workouts for years after switching to Android because its GPS pickup was unparalleled.
I’m indifferent to this whole thing because I’ll never buy a Tesla product, but Musk was asked some time ago now when they planned to replace the Model S, and he said “Never”… he thinks periodic refreshes will be sufficient, and so far he seems to be right. But that won’t continue forever.
You have to update the interior and exterior occasionally to at least make the buying public think it’s a new car (and not just a refresh).
Personally I am very intrigued to know how the Club Drive for Jaguar-ass thing is going to handle crash tests and other regulations. Once the flight of fancy collides with reality what is going to happen? Hell there is a rumor they’re trying to avoid airbags for some reason.