Forbes Cybertruck Hit Piece: "Musk’s Cybertruck Is Almost Here. But Will Anyone Buy The ‘Ludicrous’ Vehicle?"

[JBee]

No such thing as bad advertising.

No wonder EM doesn't bother paying for it. I mean like isn't he in the news like every other day already?

I'd like to see some stats that compare EM news verse anybody else.

Sponsored

 

[Crissa]

Yeah, it's objectively worse for the environment if you'd drive a Model Y.

Anything else tho? Definitely not.

Forbes has kinda become a print-anything nameplate.

-Crissa

 

[Diehard]

Yeah, it's objectively worse for the environment if you'd drive a Model Y.

Anything else tho? Definitely not.

When I read some of these pieces, it seems like logic and common sense has completely lost it’s place in making their case these days. How the heck this is more environmentally friendly

 

[RetiredRonTesla]

Musk’s Cybertruck Is Almost Here. But Will Anyone Buy The ‘Ludicrous’ Vehicle?

I've been lurking here since 2019 and have been enjoying all the content and discussion. I am a previous Tesla owner, have a sub-100k reservation and am excited about the prospect of taking delivery of my Cybertruck in the near future. I was surprised no one had posted this article yet. It even features ridiculous statements from a climate advocate who claims a new electric truck isn't appealing from a climate perspective and even references this site/community.... "How well it will sell isn’t certain, but one thing is: environmentalists hate it. " ... this article is ludicrous.

I didn't order a cyber truck to save the world. I ordered a cyber truck because I want something cool from the future that makes all other trucks look like a marshmallow.
Will it sell? The reservation list continues to grow they won't be able to make enough of them.

 

[BayouCityBob]

The article is really a hit piece on Electric Pickup Trucks not the CT. It is just a CT article (with obligatory sniping at the design) so it can get clicks. For example "“It's hard for me to get excited about (Cybertruck) from a climate perspective. Its benefits are murky at best if some purchasers would've otherwise bought a more modest-sized vehicle,” said transportation researcher David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center."

David is very confused and incorrect and with this sort of muddled thinking should not be an academic of any sort. (FTR, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the auto market knows, the "purchaser" of a vehicle only holds it for its initial 20% - 25% of life. The characteristics of the purchaser are largely irrelevant. The benefits depend on its lifetime use. Even if owner 1 is using it as a commuter vehicle, owners 2, 3, and 4 will almost certainly be displacing work trucks.)

 

[192.168.1.1]

“It doesn’t look like a vehicle you would want to be hit by.”

Uhh... Don't stand in the street??

 

[Lives2TruckAround]

It’s FUD 100% and I think the author has something against Tesla anyways. They turned off comments.

 

[SSonnentag]

The article is really a hit piece on Electric Pickup Trucks not the CT. It is just a CT article (with obligatory sniping at the design) so it can get clicks. For example "“It's hard for me to get excited about (Cybertruck) from a climate perspective. Its benefits are murky at best if some purchasers would've otherwise bought a more modest-sized vehicle,” said transportation researcher David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center."

David is very confused and incorrect and with this sort of muddled thinking should not be an academic of any sort. (FTR, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with the auto market knows, the "purchaser" of a vehicle only holds it for its initial 20% - 25% of life. The characteristics of the purchaser are largely irrelevant. The benefits depend on its lifetime use. Even if owner 1 is using it as a commuter vehicle, owners 2, 3, and 4 will almost certainly be displacing work trucks.)

I would be inclined to agree with you if I hadn't just looked at the last 8-10 articles this buffoon has written. He doesn't seem biased against electric vehicles unless they're produced by Tesla.

 

[Kahpernicus]

“It doesn’t look like a vehicle you would want to be hit by.”

Uhh... Don't stand in the street??

I for one want to feel the luxurious sharp edges of a RAM when I'm run over.

As I glide over the smooth windshield, my shirt wraps around the dual wipers and they toss and twist me in the air like a cirque de suleoi Acrobat.

My arm getting trapped in the open sunroof. Spinning around gazing at the clouds before I finally land on top of the tonneau cover.

Guts. Glory. RAM.

 

[HaulingAss]

I found this one amusing, because I remember my grandparents reading Forbes Magazine, when I was a kid (do they still have a print edition?). It seemed like an objective source of information about businesses for investors back then, but after reading this it appears to be more of a very biased business gossip rag or tabloid. I personally relish the idea of all the naysayers being proven incorrect and eating their hats or crows, when a couple of million Cybertrucks take to the roads.

Two decades ago, it was very rare for a reputable publication to release "hit peices", but all publications had a certain amount of built-in bias. But you knew that going into it and it was generally pretty subtle stuff that was the result of natural human biases. News stories were generally trying to inform, not spread propoganda (at least not anything that could be easily disproven or that was not subjective).

However, as the Internet became popular, print publications became less read and thus less valuable. They started to shrink in many aspects, reach, size, ad revenue, and enterprise value. At some point, an ugly inspiration was reached, namely that any given publication was more valuable for its ability to shape public opinion than it was for its ad revenue. If the owners were only willing to set aside long adhered to journalistic standards and excercise their new power over the information they fed to the people.

They had realized that monetization of their various publications was not necessarily one of direct ad revenue, but rather the economic benefits that the shaping of opinions held by the public (and of course government officials and politicians) could provide to much larger business interests under the same ownership. Because politicians and voters read the news, right? Maybe the owner of the media empire was also engaged in coal mining (in a seperate business). Maybe the owner of a media empire could provide political favors to a politician or another business owner in exchange for certain favors. Much of the economic benefit of ownership of a media empire would not even show up on the balance sheet of the media companies but would be used as a low cost "public relations" department of unrelated businesses. All of a sudden, the media companies themselves didn't need to have big profits to offer big value to their owners, even if they only broke even, it would be like "free" PR for their various other more valuable enterprises.

Thus began the journalistic race to the bottom. I called this an "ugly innovation", but it was really just the wholesale abandonment of long-adhered to and deeply held principles that allowed our media to function reasonably well and be mostly accurate and informative. Not all "fake news" is fake, but then again, not all "real news" is real. People are becoming increasingly frustrated that they don't know what to believe anymore. And this reduces the power of regular people and increases the control that billionaires have over the people. Don't get me wrong, money has always brought with it a certain amount of power and influence, but there were limits to it. The public still had substantial power to keep the billionaires somewhat in check and aligned with public interest. But, when wealthy interests control what the people actually believe about various issues that have deep public policy implications (like global warming, auto bailouts, auto emission and fleet efficiency mandates, industrial emissions, which political party has the most power, etc.) then you have what has long been refered to as fascism.

Granted, it's not the classical form of fascism that has an obvious and singular dictator representing the billionaires and their corporations, at the least the ones in the "club", it's a more insiduous form of fascism that still pretends to be a democracy. That's because when information itself is carefully controlled and manipulated for profit of a few, control is no longer with the (true) will of the (now) misinformed masses, but centralized in the hands of a few who effectively control who the people elect by shaping their world view with misleading news. And the elected officials rule for the benefit of those who weild the power of information (or they cannot be re-elected). The media is extremely important as to who weilds the power in a democracy.

The reason I consider this form of fascism more insidious than classical fascism is because it has more staying power. An actual dictator can be overthrown or voted out of power as soon as the people realise how they have been screwed over. In this form of fascism, the people cannot easily fix the problem because they can't really see it. Such is the power of misinformation.

Elon Musk's companies are disrupting the existing economic power structures, and those interests are fighting back with all they've got. Every single month that they manage to delay the various transitions to better technologies is worth billions of dollars to them. It's very profitable to slow down progress when your investments are based upon resource extraction and pollution, centralizing the control of energy, mass production and sales of yesteryear's internal combustion engines and transmissions, and generally not caring about the impacts of those businesses on the future of humanity.

Elon knows the game that is being played here, the battle for what people think they know and believe, which is exactly why he decided it was imperitive for him to control Twitter. Twitter democratizes the dissemation of current events, public policy and who we elect. It's how an idea can spread in an organic manner, without having to pay someone to publish it.

When Elon decided he needeed to buy Twitter, it was already being taken over by the billionaire fascists for their own benefit. They already had thousands of AI web bots, injecting hate and divisiveness to neutralize the power inherent in the multitudes of people making up our democracies. He knew it was critical for a public town square to exist, a platform of real people who could discuss and share ideas, that was free of influence from those who wished to actively shape public opinion using red herrings, fake news and by attacking the messenger instead of the message. Elon believes in the power of the people to determine fact from fiction and make decisions for the common good, but he knows this is doomed to failure if the information they have available is all tainted by narrow interests. And that's exactly what was happening with Twitter. It's a thorny problem, but Elon does not have a history of shunning important problems simply because the job is complex, and success is not guaranteed. He has to try.

And this is why I root for Elon to succeed, because he is fighting for logic and reason, not favoritism and corruption at the highest levels. He's rooting for the people to prevail, not for special greedy interests who compete with ane another to stroke their own egos by buying ever bigger yachts and mercenary armies. Elon is anti-war and pro humanity. He wants to do what makes the most sense when people have good and accurate information available, rather than conflicting and confusing information on topics as important to humanity as whether the continued buring of fossil fuels will cause accelerated destruction of the only home humanity has available at the moment.

He's also a realist, so he is planting the seeds that will take humanity to other worlds. He does not do this for his own benefit, he will be dead before Mars, or any other possible substitute for Earth, can save human civilization. Colonizing other worlds only matters for future generations, but it has to start somewhere if it is going to happen at all. He does it for the future potential of human consciousness.

Yet all he gets in return is a bunch of mostly lame attacks about how egotistical he is, how greedy he is, how much of a scammer he is, how unrealistic he is, how uncaring he is, etc, etc, etc. But those who are well-informed, or at least more well-informed than most people, and who know how to parse all the available information in a manner that connects all the dots and actually makes sense, knows he is none of those things, that those lies are simply the push back from powerful and wealthy interests who don't like the fact that he is on to their lies and deception, and willing to work hard to defeat the greedy and self-centered power structures that they have conspired to build (and are actually still building).

The difference between Elon and his adversaries is that Elon is truely curious about the observable universe, how we got here, and what we can learn about the nature of our existance and our very consciousness. While his adversaries are more cynical, they don't care about things like that as much as they are greedy and power-hungry, wanting to dominate others and show their peers how rich and powerful they are to feed their fragile egos.

 

[CyberSleuth]

I for one want to feel the luxurious sharp edges of a RAM when I'm run over.

As I glide over the smooth windshield, my shirt wraps around the dual wipers and they toss and twist me in the air like a cirque de suleoi Acrobat.

My arm getting trapped in the open sunroof. Spinning around gazing at the clouds before I finally land on top of the tonneau cover.

Guts. Glory. RAM.

Gold, my friend. GOLD.

 

[kev12345]

Hardcore environmentalists would still be upset if everyone rode bicycles.

2 million reservations gives some indication that people might be interested.

the real test is when GM/Ford/Ram start ramping up production of their EV trucks.

 

[pricedm]

"...I’m not moving to electric, I’m moving to Teslas."

Exactly!

 

[Foxx]

Alan Ohnsman sounds like he might be bought and paid for. I expect this turns out to be an abject disaster of an article for this journalist’s future. It stinks of corruption. There is a lot of contradictory verbiage from some of his previous writings.

 

[Crissa]

“It doesn’t look like a vehicle you would want to be hit by.”

Uhh... Don't stand in the street??

...As opposed to any other truck, tho?

Like... What truck is more being-hit-by friendly? Cybertruck has a low nose, with smooth, flat surfaces; made from materials that won't sheer. It's far more friendly to be hit by than most trucks.

I for one want to feel the luxurious sharp edges of a RAM when I'm run over.

As I glide over the smooth windshield, my shirt wraps around the dual wipers and they toss and twist me in the air like a cirque de suleoi Acrobat.

My arm getting trapped in the open sunroof. Spinning around gazing at the clouds before I finally land on top of the tonneau cover.

Guts. Glory. RAM.

Gosh darnit, you did it better x-x

-Crissa

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