It doesn't matter if it's ugly, it doesn't matter that the cyber truck is ugly, it doesn't matter if either are good cars.

I spotted probably the only cybertruck in Taiwan the other day. It was waiting to turn on a busy road, and people were jogging over to take a picture of it. "Woah cool! Awesome! Handsome!" Lots of stuff like that being said.

People share ai slop cat pictures on Facebook.

There's HN commenters, there's the subset of HN commenters smugly criticizing all the very obvious flaws of things like this... And then there's just the entire rest of the world which simply does not give a shit.

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King-Aaron 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have this observation with the influx of soulless SUVs on the road. Every car group you see are always screaming out for manual, rear drive sports cars at an affordable price, but the majority of consumers just want a cube of car that has wheels and can go places. And they buy a new cube every year or two to keep up with the Joneses.

Everyone then complains that the automakers aren't making what they want... But the blame isn't with the manufacturers, the blame rests with consumers and how mindlessly apathetic they are to... basically everything.

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carsareok 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm one of those people that doesn't care for cars. They are equipment to me. I like "getting places", yes. But I don't like "personality" in my tools. Cattle, not pets. I don't want to drive around looking smug in my 650k shit bucket. Cars are an enormously wasteful, idiotic drain on the world, but the calculus is such that I am "forced" to own one. I find the idea that each of us is owning and maintaining our very own special little box that exudes "personality" preposterous and I'll bet the farm that future generations will think we were mental.

This is not apathy in my opinion. This is rational. Cars are just tools. Metal boxes to enable mobility. Car people have turned them into this cult of personality that I think is batshit insane. It's not just cars mind you, we do this with watches, shoes, you name it and it's all very peculiar, but cars are my pet peeve because they are so obviously wasteful and dangerous. Not just directly like killing 40k per year in the US alone, but also through obvious geopolitics.

People want to move around and they want to smile smugly and think they are better than others. Those two things are pretty much universal. I say we separate those issues. You can move around all you want but smiling smugly you do in some other way than in your "car". We'll have really good public transport and you'll assert your dominance in some other fashion. I personally recommend we reintroduce dueling to the death.

By the way I don't know anybody that would buy a new car every two year to keep up with the Joneses and I live in a pretty "Jonesy" place. That's a bit hyperbolic at least in my neck of the woods (Netherlands). Most people here keep their cars until they become unreliable.

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komali2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Seems like chicken and egg. Buyers buy what's for sale, I feel like "the consumer" and "the market" are blamed for decisions made by people within these companies. We treat these people as forces of nature: "if the market tells them to make suv cubes, they'll make SUV cubes, they have no choice, their hands are tied!" But that presumes 1. that they're correctly interpreting consumer desire, 2. that consumer desire can even be determined at all from the market, 3. that consumer desire isn't being smeared into an averaging amalgamation that looks ugly and stupid to everyone.

	▲	King-Aaron 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do think about this a lot. Kind of like newspapers saying 'bad news sells', while they are also the ones deciding what news will be consumed.

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Ekaros an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Difference is that cybertruck is in the purposefully ugly category. Even if it could have been done lot better. This one is not supposed to be ugly. If you want ugly you need to properly lean into it. Cybertruck at least attempted that.

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sssilver 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Cybertruck isn't ugly. It's gorgeous. You may not like its particular aesthetic, however that doesn't make it ugly. It's executed extremely well for the aesthetic it's going for.

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hvb2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When you're putting down this much for a car, you have options... I don't think this will be on the top of the list.

So the rest of the world not caring doesn't matter as the audience for this is probably a million people at best

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csomar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It doesn't matter if it's ugly, it doesn't matter that the cyber truck is ugly, it doesn't matter if either are good cars.

The cybercar turned out to be a massive failure though. So, it kind of mattered?

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__m 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

subset of hn commenters? The cybertruck is widely ridiculed, also in taiwan.