> Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap

TBF an EV car has an absolutely massive battery relative to the electric consumption of a house, unless you're using resistive heating all around. Especially if you ration use.

But it is still cheaper to stockpile some generators and gas than stockpile a cybertruck. If there's an EV charging station up within a 1 hr drive, gas stations are also going to be up.

A Cybertruck has nearly 10x the battery capacity of a single Powerwall, and to buy that much Powerwall capacity would cost at least as much as a Cybertruck. Even a Tesla Model 3 (which now supports home backup) is over 5x Powerwalls.

You still have to pay to install home backup support on your home’s breaker (at least $10k), but you don’t need anywhere near the amount of very expensive supplemental home batteries.

Also, even an EV with a 120V outlet and no home backup support could be very useful for recharging a portable battery bank.

Just really confused on how "smart readers" can get so scoped in to see a single point rather than the wider view. Forest through the trees something something

If you can choose between a truck that can’t power your house and a truck that can, prepper mentality is to choose the one that can.

(This post doubles as an indictment of PG&E.)

Many super charger stations are located very close to the actual substations, so there’s a high likelihood of available power.

With climate change causing more extreme weather events and an aging and increasingly more and more difficult to update power grid facing unprecedented strains, I think power disruptions like this are more likely than less. So it makes sense when you look forward rather than backwards in time.

I expect that the charging station will be in an industrial park with an industrial power supply.

Ford has also marketed their hybrid F150 as being able to power home appliances for several years.

I'd have animals too but society is still stable enough to provide me with food.

Not really. Some areas in California have multiple PSPS outages during fire season. Many people have gotten gas generators or powerwalls to deal with it, but using your EV would be ideal.

Natural disasters are often niche cases, and often life-or-death as well.

But for the other 99.99% of humanity, there are certainly more cost-effective ways. A portable power station and solar panels are probably the better move unless you have some really massive power needs.

(Admittedly, a nuclear winter reduces the effectiveness of those solar panels somewhat)

Doesn't make sense for what they are charging for it. But still!

At 6000lbs+ it's a section 179 write off; if you combine that with some of the previous incentives the car was not that expensive to the right population.

Where I'm located, in most cases when there is an outage, neighboring areas do have power.

Specifically for my model 3, I've been considering tapping into the HV system manually to keep my Ecoflow battery topped up, but I wish there was a way to directly connect it.

No. It's like a generator except way more power and mobile. Rechargable via solar. So basically just a much better generator.

It’s niche just because natural disasters are thankfully relatively rare, but I still think having good contingencies is worth it.

Fuck being seen in a cybertruck though.

In what universe is backup power a niche use case?

Of course the Prius Prime on electricity is way more efficient than both, but it still uses a lot more energy than a house.

I have a lightning and it averages 0.5kwh/mile and my electricity price is $0.15/kwh, so it costs me $0.075/mile to drive. At current gas prices that's pretty much the same as a very efficient hybrid compact car (55mpg @ ~$4/gallon). If I had solar I could probably offset almost all of the lightning fuel cost based on where I live (sunny) but it's so cheap it's not worth it.

Do you mean "much more efficient" in places where electricity rates are significantly higher than the national average? Or only much more efficient when compared to when you're charging at charging stations?

Driving in general uses a lot of energy. It’s the physically moving a 1,000 kg or more object that takes a lot of energy. Orders of magnitude more than a few lights or a phone. Same with flying of course; also moving a heavy object.

ICE trucks are equally inefficient for towing. People just don't seem to be able to factor it in.

All cars just use a ton of power moving a lot of mass. It is actually impressive, it's like 100KW at full tilt. I think i saw someone do the math for how much power transfer you would need to get EV charging as fast as gasoline refuelling: It's in the megawatts.

The only way you could signifigantly reduce power usage of vehicles is to reduce mass dramaticially with a motorcyle or autocycle. The Aptera is an interesting autocycle design based on this line of reasoning, but we are also seeing the emergence of a lot of electric motorcycles.

That said if you have a Mall Crawler who's heaviest loads are your monthly Costco run, an electric truck would probably be great for you. I still wouldn't recommend a Cybertruck though.

To power a house directly from an EV, the main options now are the EV trucks -- Lightning, Silverado, Cybertruck all can have this ability, 240V 30A typically

Completely missed opportunity. I won't be buying an electric vehicle that doesn't allow powering my house, ever again.

1) if you're permanently modifying your home or electric panel you're over $1k. (General Motors "Vehicle2House" is ~$10-20k for hardware + installation... an EXTREME investment unless you plan on regular "emergency" usage of it)

2) if you're buying some portable solar panel "battery boom box" you'll likely run out and the folding solar panel it comes with is more gimmick than reliable

3) if you're buying a "real" gas/diesel generator, you have to run it + change the oil every 6 months otherwise it might not start in your emergency situation

...just buy a thing that clips to your car battery and dangles out the front hood of your car!

You already maintain your car every 3-9 months, you already (should) have at least 1/2 tank of gas at all times (especially in a weather / outage situation), you can generally idle your car for at least 2 days off a tank of gas in an emergency, and if this thing can charge your phone/battery packs, keep your fridge running (kindof?), and run a small space heater overnight...

It makes soooo much more sense to buy a $500-$1000 emergency accessory that piggybacks off the car you already maintain than trying to stand up a whole extra distribution mechanism for "survival-ish power, maybe 1-2 times over 3-4 years".

As soon as we got the adapter for our Ioniq 5, I sold generator to a neighbor. The car will run what we need for four days, which is longer than the generator and five gallon can of gas is going to last.

Despite the dealer saying the used one I bought supported it, it turned out to not be available in the trim I got. My fault obviously for believing something a car dealer said.

(I'm sure there's more to the story, and the details aren't important, but if charging a vehicle is tripping breakers for the whole campground there's something wrong.)

Our solar panels kept the fridge running, but we were heating the house with a wood stove (it was very cloudy, so we were getting maybe an hour of sun a day). If we had bidirectional house charging, we could have had warm showers + used the heat pump: We would have been able to fast-charge the car at 100-200kw in town. The house can limp through 20-30 hours on ~ 25kwh, so the charger would charge the house at a few days per hour, including losses from driving to and from town + round tripping through the battery, and also running the house heat pump.

None of the other people around here stayed online. Some propane-dependent people had no electricity for > 2 weeks (with rationing, they managed to keep their generators online for about a week, and PG&E took three weeks to fix their lines).

This was in the outskirts of Silicon Valley, so better-than-puerto-rico infrastructure, but only just.

Most people just plug an extension cord into the onboard inverter. You have to manually flip it on and plug it in, but 240V30A is plenty for an emergency. Doing it this way isn't any different from any other vehicle with an onboard inverter though.

Currently in pilot on a small fleet of electric trucks in Australia (actual trucks - prime movers for road trains) - large standard swappable battery packs that can be removed and replaced with a fork lift.

Swap time ~ 3 minutes.

You also need to have the house setup to run off a generator. You don't want the truck power feeding back into the grid. IIRC, that's usually done with a big switch near the main panel.

There is a model of Ford Lightning that has power sharing and now that resale values are way down it just might be a cost effective home battery that you can drive around during non-emergencies....

Car makers are reluctant to support this. In case of Tesla because of market segmentation.

5kWh of battery cells at the moment run around $500. The rest of the cost of production is in the power electronics (probably around another $500).

It's why you can buy 4kwh worth of battery backups from Amazon for about $2k right now. Yet the same thing sold as a home battery backup costs $5k.

Lack of competition and likely low amount of sells is what's causing the margins to be so high.

Propane generators here have the same problem.

That still doesn't explain the price gap. You can literally just get a V2H EV and use it instead of a home battery (or, you could if the ecosystem was more mature).

They want ~9k for a freaking 13.5kwh pack.

I can buy a UL certified, 16kwh, outdoor rated pack for 3.5k (ex - EG4 allweather)

I can buy just the LFP batteries themselves for the new powerwall 3 LFP version (no BMS, no shell, no certification) for $1116... https://18650battery.com/products/byd-302ah-3-2v-lifepo4-pri...

Powerwall is a scammy product. WAY too expensive for the storage it provides.

---

So the summary is: Cybertruck is using a different battery chemistry, Powerwall is a scam.

(I mean - to be clear, the Cybertruck is also a scam, but it's a different kind of scam not directly related to the battery capacity, since it's hauling around a 123kWh NCMA battery pack)

It was. Everything was pathetic. The claims of being bullet proof, being an amphibious car, being all-terrain, rugged, etc.

Sometimes it sounded like it was all for political theater.

I just bought a kit to convert to natural gas though. Most people who've done it are happy to not change bottles all the time. It won't help after an earthquake but the regular PSPS outages I get make natural gas a better fit for the moment.

I'd say Koreans are probably the closest to the Chinese, but Japanese manufacturers have fallen behind. Toyota spent too much time with hydrogen. Nissan? Honda? Mazda? None of them have a solid lineup of electric vehicles.

I appreciate Toyota's hybrids, but that is not the future and every model year that they try to delay, they are missing out on developing the technology, experience, internal expertise, and platform refinement.

California accounts for roughly 35% of all U.S. EV sales, though some estimates put its share near 40%.

Try two generations. I think it was obvious since the oil shocks that fossil fuels were not a good bedrock of the economy.

That said — let's be realistic and dispassionate.

> There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.

Inflicting job losses at that scale is not going to happen. US protectionism (a euphemism for ahem current federal initiatives) is alive and well. The legacy US auto makers have a huge domestic market and their survival is a primary motive for the US trade/tariff war. (Does the thoroughly corrupt administration face any comeuppance? That is a different discussion.)

The lack of EVs has not been a pivotal concern of voters. US voters want cheap fuel. Affordability was a fundamental concern for voters. The mid-term election result is not about loftier environmental goals.

> Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency

Yes, "an American vehicle" is known for grotesque size and high cost of maintenance. And now after two years of a despicable administration, "an American vehicle" is also a Trump-Miller-Hegseth-Bessent-Lutnick-Musk-*.arsehole symbol.

Even so, Tesla sales success is real, domestic and abroad. People who can afford them buy them.

Your source only says: “Top 5 best-selling EV brands in Europe in 2025 Volkswagen – 274.417 (+56%) Tesla – 238.765 (-27%) BMW – 193.186 (+15%) Skoda – 172.100 (+117%) Audi – 153.848 (+51%)”

They don’t do a good job at the car company part. They make nice cars, but the company part has issues. Quick example… I was very happy to drive a model 3 for many years. But the constant changes in price of their new cars destroyed any resale value mine had. Every time Tesla was having a bad quarter, the value of my car dropped. That’s not the way to get me to buy another one.

There are certainly other areas where they could improve too. But my point being - they’ve never been all that good at (or interested in) what it takes to drive long term success in selling cars. It’s just too long of a time horizon for them.

GM - $74.5B market cap (6.2M cars sold annually)

Ford - $50.2B (4.6M)

Volkswagen - $40B (9M)

BYD - $100B (4.6M)

Toyota - $256B (11.3M)

Hyundai - $57B (7.3M)

Tesla - $1.4T (1.6M)

The numbers simply don't add up.

Closest thing is like the Ioniq 9 but the cargo space really sucks.

For a polished product that ticks all the boxes, I would pay a premium for this.

Is there data to suggest they are unsafe in Austin - as in less safe than a human?

So then where are all the horrible accidents if they're not safe?

If autopilot is basically the only thing Tesla has going for it then they’ve got a risky path ahead of them.

I’d guess that it’s going to take a while to catch up because the real world data is the moat. Maybe if someone partners with Waymo but the price point will be higher.

The thing that gives me pause about buying one is: what happens if the company loses interest? Is it like “owning” a game after the company shuts down the servers?

You might be waiting a while, though... If it's not happening now, it's unlikely to ever happen.

For instance, how it detects pedestrians. Ive had instances where someone is looking to cross, the FSD either ignores them completely or it slows down a little, baits them into going forward, then resumes running them over. It detects car to car problems very well but doesn’t try to interpret pedestrian’s intent outside of the actual road.

The biggest knock on him is that he says something will happen at a certain time and then it comes later. Even the sub-$30k EV. Cybercabs cost < $30k.

What's that saying? "In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone"?

A side effect of Trump's war with Iran is that every country which doesn't have sufficient domestic oil production, which is most countries especially in Europe, has accelerated their EV transition. Buyers are grabbing every EV they can get their hands on, and yes Tesla are the leader there.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-electric-car-registratio...

"Tesla (TSLA.O), led the UK BEV market year-to-date, with registrations up 25.4% from a year earlier and a 9.53% market share South Korea's Kia (000270.KS), and China's BYD (002594.SZ), continued to compete for second place, with market shares of 6.9% and 6.8%, respectively"

The Kia model breakdown: https://www.kiapressoffice.com/releases/1975 (mostly Niro, now withdrawn, then EV6)

Depends on the year. It and the RAV4 switch places now and then.

Only when compared to their recent record lows... the broader trend is still downwards. This is disingenuous. They are losing ground to other manufacturers in Europe

Also the Teslas that Europe is buying are made in China not the US.

The countries where EVs are increasing the most are those that have access to Chinese EVs.

Huh? The cybercab with no steering wheel is only operating in Austin, in tiny premapped areas. There are 45 registered in Texas, and they have only been operating since September.

This isn’t Twitter, you’re generally expected to at least attempt to provide factual information here.

https://www.fox7austin.com/news/tesla-launches-cybercab-aust...

“Printing money hand over fist” is an interesting way to frame the dramatic drop in their margin on every vehicle sold.

Seems like your conclusions are wrong

It's a luxury vehicle that beats SUVs hands down, and most functions of urban trucks as well.

It just gets soccer mom vibes, so it's not $120,000

Many trucks are sold as not much more than vehicles to haul around some plants. But, what I would consider 'real' trucks tend to have 8' beds. My old Toyota Tundra was great at towing, had an 8' bed and was generally an all around great vehicle. It was long, but it was meant to be.

Sports cars are for the track, trucks are for hauling, and most drivers don't need either.

The Tahoe I had last was a great as I keep tools and what dry in the truck. It only had 2 rows of seating and I don’t need more passenger space in my vehicle. My wife has the city vehicle SUV that we keep clean and use for passengers. Mine is the work / utility vehicle.

When I replaced it recently , the same trim level cost twice as much as a Silverado. And they all have 3 rows now, which means I lose most that space.

It’s all about trade offs. No vehicle is a perfect all rounder. I’d prefer the Tahoe but didn’t want to pay extra for it and have to yank out the 3rd row. I could own a Corolla but it would be overly inconvenient, and probably more expensive over time, to rent a larger vehicle every time I need it.

I see people with trucks with 4ft beds (like the weird Jeep thing) and they just seem useless. Gimme an 8ft bed, ideally a bit longer! I don't need a big cab, but I have a truck to be a truck!

(Really, my 2nd gen Toyota Tacoma is pretty close to perfect 95% of the time for me, especially with a cap on the back)

I picked up a 70k mile 2011 Silverado from an Ontario government auction for $3000 and it's worked great. Tows my boat, carries my dirt bikes, and has enough room in the cab for me, my partner, and my dog between us. Who needs a backseat!

I also bought a new Chevy truck recently for less than $40k USD, mid tier trim. Other trucks can be very affordable. The trim and budget options are quite wide. Tesla was never going to get to that as it requires volume.

I think it was killed for political reasons: They repurposed the plant for AI datacenter batteries. I predict we'll have EV pickup trucks again if the 2028 election looks like the 2026 election.

Anyway, my next full sized pickup will also be a pure EV. If I can't get a Ford, then I'll get something else. (The lightning is far better at truck stuff than our late model GMC and Ram trucks were. Maybe I can get a truck from China + register in Mexico? Is that a thing?)

The new Lightning has a useless serial hybrid setup and gets 700 miles of range (who needs that?). I suspect it'll end up being like other serial hybrids, and an option to omit the gas engine will be available, and also substantially lower the price (or enable a larger battery). In the meantime, they'll tell Trump that he managed to kill EV pickup trucks.

If:

Fuel economy regulations had not been suspended and the electric vehicle credits hadn't expired I'll bet there would still be a Lightning.

Unlike the CyberTrash. The question (to me) is did Ford make a semi-rational short-term financial decision at the expense of its future competitiveness?

I think median, agriculture-excluded would be more representative.

Granted, that's still pushed up by loaded in-town trophy trucks without a spot of mud on them.

Worst thing Musk did in context of Tesla is to alienate core demographics for EVs with his politics.

Tesla projected selling 250k of these a year or $15-20b in revenue per year (20%+ of vehicle revenue for Tesla). This is a big number and would’ve added significant total vehicle sales. Instead, they’ve sold less than 70,000 total trucks over its production history. That’s why it’s a rounding error.

This is an absolute disaster and failure by any rational analysis. Its failure helped puncture “Tesla sales will continue to increase” and stock price justification storyline.

No more of a big deal than any other $2 billion loss.

The 1st gen Prius (97-01) looked utterly conventional though, just like a slightly taller Yaris due to the batteries. It was the second generation onward that looked "weird", I think due to aerodynamicsmaxxing.

I'm part of that market and was initially curious about the cybertruck but it was clear that tesla was totally unserious about building an actual 4x4 overlanding vehicle. I'm not sure EVs are even there yet for a true exploring vehicle since it's the extreme end of the range problem. There are places people go that are a couple hundred miles from the nearest supercharger, and I bet rock crawling kills the range like towing does.

The actual target market was probably a guy who spends 100k on a heavily upgraded Rubicon that never drives on dirt or gets a scratch, and happens to be a huge elon fanboy.

Tesla forecasted selling 250,000 trucks per year by 2025

Actual sales

2024 - 38,965

2025 - 20,237

2026 to date - 11,586

This includes trucks that have been “sold” to other Musk companies.

This product was a complete failure, making the Ford Edsel look like a roaring success

The Cybertruck was released when the company was selling millions of cars a year. It did pretty much nothing for their bottom line, didn’t break them into any new markers, and fell far short of expectations.

They sold 9,000 DeLorean's _total_. It was a punchline in Back to the Future, it wasn't seen as cool at all.

If you see CyberTrucks and DeLoreans as successful, I'd hate to see what you call a failure.

A sedan built by another company with similar aesthetics without completely ignoring...well basically everything from safety to build quality, would probably be on my potential list.

I have to assume that politics or sunk cost are the only reasons people keep these things because they are objectively awful vehicles.

I would argue people don't want anything new, but a different and better direction. In Europe Renault is doing really well with the Renault 5 and Twingo. People are tired of depressing, bland and angry vehicles, and the CT just doubles down on what people already hate about modern cars.

You can celebrate Tesla for trying something new while still hating the actual thing that they tried for being bad.

The problems with the cybertruck for me are (in no particular order) build quality, Elon's politics, low range, annoying bed size/shape, and size of the vehicle (too wide).

Aesthetics are personal, and you can think something ugly, but that doesn't make it objectively so. Even if it's a widely held opinion. It does perhaps make it a poor decision from a marketing standpoint.

Yes you can sort of get there with Siri and HomeKit, bug nowhere close to sophistication.

“I agree with Elon now”

Meaning now I agree, and

“that SpaceX and Tesla are the 'same' company”

With ‘same’ in quotes meaning they are not literally the same but conceptually they are the same.

FTR I do not agree they are the ‘same’ company and I think the circular relationships between Musk’s companies is kind of like a shell game.

The roadster uses Space X propulsion tech, the cybercab uses starlink, grok is in all Tesla cars, both companies share Terafab. But then Tesla also supplies batteries and cybertrucks to Space X etc.

Gas/Diesel trucks lose range when towing too, but dealing with a shorter range gas truck isn't too big of a problem on a trip beyond the extra cost. Gas stations are everywhere and it takes 5 minutes to fill up. At most gas stations, filling up while towing a trailer isn't too big of a problem. Even if your truck only had a 150 mile range while towing, it would only be a minor annoyance, and the reality is that you'll probably get at least 250 miles out of a tank.

If you're towing with an electric though, you probably are looking at less than 150 miles. Now every couple of hours you have to stop for probably an hour or so, even with a fast charger, because you're probably going to want to charge the truck to full, not 80%. You're also probably driving somewhat out of your way to hit charging stations that frequently if you're not in a very populated area.

My towing-capable gas vehicle sees at worst a 30% decrease in range from towing my camping trailer, and my towing-capable diesel vehicle sees closer to a 10% decrease in range.

A while back, I read a comment on here from someone who lived in a trailer full-time as a digital nomad. They were also dedicated to driving an EV. They towed their small trailer with their Model Y. I grant you, the Model Y is not optimized for towing the way that the Cybertruck (ostensibly) is, but they described the process of travelling between Grand Junction, Colorado, and Moab, Utah, a distance just over 110 miles. With the trailer, they had to drive to Cisco, about halfway in between, drop the trailer, drive back to Grand Junction, recharge fully, drive back again, pick up the trailer, and drive the remaining 60 or so miles to Moab, where they could recharge again. Because without the trailer, they could drive the entire 1-way distance 3 times over without recharging. With the trailer, they could not make the whole trip once.

The Tesla Semi proves that this is the issue: with an extremely large battery and high-speed charging, the Semi solves these problems.

A regular truck that can TOW 300 miles would certainly not be "terrible for towing."

Your understanding is not wrong, but quantity of torque is a minor piece of what matters, so that doesn't move the needle.

Towing lowers the range of an EV by so much that it becomes nearly useless. This is much more important with an EV than an ICE, because EV charging is less available and takes much longer.

It's understandable that you might not fully understand the magnitude of the pros and cons from your LLM prompt, those sorts of responses usually assume certain levels of experience and familiarity with the topic. It'll make more sense when you get older!

And towing requires a lot of electricity. How do you bring enough electrons?

The thing is that ICE vehicles are so inefficient to begin with, but a towed trailer needs the same amount of energy regardless of what is towing it. Imagine a trailer takes 1 unit of energy to move, and ICE truck takes 5 units to move itself, and EV truck takes 1 unit to move itself.

The ICE truck towing it would go from 5 units to 6 units, reducing the range by 16%.

The EV truck would now go from 1 unit to 2 units, reducing the range by 50%.

So the better your efficiency, the worse you are at towing. Ideally EV trucks would have such a huge battery that even when the range is reduced by 50%, it is still as long as a gas truck's range, but modern battery technology is still too sucky to achieve this.

If the charging port were on the front of the vehicle, you could pull straight in, but now your trailer is probably blocking traffic.

Of course you could disconnect and reconnect the trailer, which adds an extra 5-10 extra minutes to your 15-40 minute charge time depending on your battery level.

A 3.6L V6 can do that easily and they are dime a dozen.

The cybertruck had good enough safety ratings, but kinda just decided to not care about the aerodynamics and economy side. Which freed Elon up a lot in terms of style.

Personally, I also agree that it was refreshing to see something bold out there on the road. It's just that the final product looked just 'off' enough to make it look bad in the end.

Like, it's wheel base is about 6 inches too long and the ride height is about 6 inches too low, making it look a bit toddler-y to my eyes. The bed was also just not practicable and too small (something I see on a lot of trucks these days). The speed was good, the torque was great, the giant screen you can't feel when driving was not. The seats were uncomfortable for my build.

Overall, the car was a statement, one that just barely missed the mark to my eyes, but it did miss

That’s a platform we can all get behind.

The functional design certainly needed work.

The Cybertruck that was released did not have that, instead the panels are just normal body parts connected to a standard car frame underneath - like any other car.

To some extent you even see this in New York too. Certainly there’s a need for these vehicles in rural areas where road conditions may be poor or absent altogether and the work needs done regardless.

The cybertruck on the other hand isn’t a work vehicle, it’s bought by the same people who buy the super kitted out models and who have no interest in using it for work, let alone taking the thing off road.

Ultimately I think of it as the modern Delorean, but I don’t think it will engender the same level of good will when it ages out and becomes less common due to the increasingly negative profile of Musk and his connections to the politics in which the vehicle was created.