You should always preorder games and cars, really any tech

The largest grift ever

All of his work has been grifts from the OG X to PayPal and beyond. He just seemed enigmatic or inspired to some people for a time, enough that kool-aid was drunk. (South Africans do have a way of mesmerizing people though, must be the accent.)

That some good technology happened to pop out of it along the way had less to do with him, and more the engineers tasked with making it happen.

I was just thinking the OP article's author missed an opportunity to mention that for this quality of product delivery, Musky believes he is worthy of a $44.9B payday.

They voted to give him all that money again after a judge tried to save them. I don't even understand. No one is worth that kind of money.

The button press is actually fairly common in most cars. In most German cars (Audi, BMW, Mercedes) it used to be Back+Volume Power… but in all those cases it’d only reboot the infotainment system. Things like the speedometer were a completely seperate, more stable system.

Tesla is a lemon orchard.

quite a few models

Nearly every japanese automaker's cars for several years. Takata airbag recall was a big deal

All in all, Tesla issued four Cybertruck recalls since the car went on sale.

There was also an issue with the accelerator pedal getting stuck in trim.

Another was the font size on warning lights was too small (and hard to read,). That one “only” required an OTA update.

Most of the problems are bullshit you expect in the cheapest cars. That it’s happening on something as expensive as a cybertruck is ridiculous and laughable.

It’s all 100% avoidable bullshit that should have been caught before hitting production. The wiper motor has a known torque, the driver known specs, literally could have been avoided by reading the specs on everything involved. (Or simply not cheaping out on a wiper motor.)

Every single CT I’ve seen in the wild or “wild photos” of have had quality control issues. Like bumpers not hung level.

When you see recalls from other major automotive manufacturers, you see recalls on models that have a 250k-1M production range. Overall failures in this group is relatively low, so the recall is mostly a cover-their-ass measure to make sure all 500k of some car model is safe, even though they only had a tiny amount of incidents related.

The Cybertruck - all 11k of them - has already been recalled several times, and it’s issues which affect all of them (or almost all). Tesla being unable to roll out 11k trucks that aren’t Edsels is a huge hit to their reputation at a time when Tesla is already under fire from many different directions.

Regardless of the absurd design and the fact that owning a Cybertruck is a wholesale endorsement of Musk’s delusional narcissism, I’m confident that Tesla could have pulled this off as a quality vehicle had they tried. At least, a far less shitty version.

And this is no besmirchment on Tesla engineers, but a criticism of their management and terrible QA process (again, management). It wouldn’t surprise me at all of Tesla engineers said, “X, Y, and Z won’t work or will be crap, so we need to build it better, possibly with a redesign of certain components,” and Tesla execs (esp Elon) just responded, “Fuck it! We’ll fix it in post!”

What does it mean if it's considered a lemon?

Conspicuously consuming stupid cars and buying a TV (we all know it’ll be tuned to Fox News 24/7) - yeah sounds about right. Far right.

Billionaires pay off the right people.

A lot of cat companies have been caught faking testing and faking compliance over the years. I suspect it's not been eliminated as an option.

It looks like someone took a kid's crayon drawing of a car and built it.