> When the Cybertruck was first announced, Musk was still the darling of the left and progressive wealthy. It was daring and different and cool, and it was explicitly meant to be an experiment in making cars differently.

People still hated it when it was announced, the online discourse was largely negative surrounding it. I remember being in my tech office at the time and we were all talking about how bad it looked.

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mft_ 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Not universally. Your tech office and online spaces may have disliked it, but I also saw a lot of excitement and positivity about it, both online and IRL.

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wongarsu 12 hours ago | parent [-]

From my memory, a lot of the excitement was directed at what the design was trying to achieve: a structural body made from easy to make pressed steel panels. This was meant to enable a much cheaper car while also removing the bottlenecks plagueing Tesla's production lines at the time

None of this materialized. The truck that ended up in production was a traditional body construction, but with unpainted steel panels so it looks like the truck Musk presented. It ended up with all the drawbacks of a steel body, while still being expensive and hard to manufacture

	▲	mft_ 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that this was part of it - I referred to this twice in my original post. Once the structural body concept failed (has it ever been adequately explained why they failed?) it would have made sense to either drop the Cybertruck altogether, or pivot to a more traditional design. But ego prevailed, sadly. IMO the big missed opportunity was to follow the model 3 with a 'model 2' - a smaller, cheaper car - probably in the VW Golf / BMW 1-series class.