Elon Musk, the Cybertruck and the times we are living in
We are living in strange times where objective reality is under attack. Due to the rise of social media, where engagement algorithms amplify our own social bubble, anyone can spread their opinions, find their audience and be applauded no matter what they say.
This social reinforcement gives courage to people with bad ideas, misinformation, conspiracy theories, personal truths or poor arguments. We are all feeling this in the state of our politics, where it looks like that half of the population went totally nuts depending on the side (or tribe) you are on. Now, very slowly, this phenomenon is invading other areas such as business and science.
The reveal of the Tesla Cybertruck, which half of the people disliked or even hated, is the most recent example of personal truths, feelings and grudges being put above objective reality. But first, let's lay down some facts.
Elon Musk is the most successful inventor and entrepreneur of modern times. He came from South Africa with no resources and ended up immigrating to Canada and, later, America. Elon learned how to code, created and sold his first game when he was 12. He founded PayPal, which he sold to amass a fortune of $180 million. He invested all his money to jumpstart SpaceX and Tesla. Most people in his place would have retired to an island and enjoy life but he had bigger plans after selling paypal.
Against all odds, Elon was able to succeed in industries previously controlled by the government (Space) or with many government ties or subsidies (automotive).
SpaceX is now ahead of any governments space programs and is landing rockets in autonomous barges in the middle of the ocean and preparing to go to the Moon and Mars; Tesla, which made Electric cars cool and successful again, is forcing the whole automotive industry to abandon fossil fuel based cars and go electric. And he didn't stop there. He founded The Boring Company, which is optimizing tunnel construction and costs; Neuralink, which is researching brain-machine interfaces to counter a possible dominance of Artificial General Intelligence and OpenAI, to research safe AGI.
Tesla is, as of 24 of November 2019, the most valuable car manufacturer in America, the 4th in the world and a leader in autonomy. SpaceX is a decade ahead of even country-states and Neuralink research, in just two years (if the papers released are correct), seems to be an order of magnitude more efficient than the existing BMI tech.
One decade ago the experts and competitors said what Elon was trying to do was impossible and that he was just an eccentric millionaire. Even today, some naysayers accuse Elon of being a fraud, a conman and eccentric. Not being able to point to SpaceX anymore (a profitable and unchallenged space company), all attention is on Tesla, which constantly bleeds money and has a negative cashflow of nine billion dollars since its inception; a strong signal, they say, that the company is doomed (there are articles about Tesla going bankrupt for a decade now).
However, against all odds and financial results, Elon was able to raise $19 billion for Tesla by surfing on the availability of cheap capital post 2008 crisis to invest in product development, technology and grow their sales exponentially. Tesla has grown from just three thousand cars delivered in 2012 to a projected 370,000 in 2019 without ever spending in marketing or paid endorsements. User satisfaction with their vehicles is at an all time high and the production of the Model Y in 2020 and the recently inaugurated factory in China will likely boost Tesla deliveries to one million cars in 2022.
This estimation does not include the advent of full autonomy, predicted by Elon to happen in 2020 (I would put it around 2022). Tesla has delivered amazing products since 2012 and has been getting more and more market-share in the luxury categories.
But, at least in America, if you want to succeed as an auto manufacturer, you must make a truck. The top 3 best selling cars are all trucks, from the Ford F-150 to the Chevrolet Silverado. All gas powered, all with high brand loyalty, all looking the same.
Then it comes the polarizing Cybertruck announcement on November 21. The new Tesla truck is unlike anything that we have ever seen. It looks like a prototype or a science fiction vision of what the future would look like in the 2000s. Some people loved it, others, like myself, hated it (at first). And those armored windows being damaged on the live demo? It sounded like heresy! Tesla must have no good engineers! They didn't rehearse the demo, etc, etc.
People started again spewing their hatred of the design and making predictions (for their own social bubble) on how Tesla will fail again, or how the car could have been designed by 4-year olds or how Elon was not to be taken seriously. Suddenly, most people I know became experts in the auto industry. Their personal truths, in their view, became objective reality. It was madness.
After digesting everything for a few days, and hearing different point of views, I want to come out with a more balanced analysis based on evidence and facts.
The first thing that I found out is that everyone is now aware and talking about the Cybertruck. Like a Kardashian, it broke the Internet. Just check Google Trends of the Tesla Cybertruck and the recently announced Ford Mach-E SUV. Would those results be achieved with a more conventional design? Likely not.
Taste is subjective, but sales are not. In the first 3-days, the Cybertruck attracted 200K pre-orders, for a car to be released in 2022. I suspect this figure will inch closer to a million as people digest the shock of the new design and start digging into the specs.
Even if you hated the design, which seems true for half of the people so far, utility seems to be way more important than design to truck owners. If it wasn't, they wouldn't keep buying trucks with a design reminiscent of the 1970s.
The Cybertruck owns the competition in terms of utility. It is as fast as a Porsche, cheaper than competitive trucks (starting at $40K), with a higher payload capacity and towing capability of up to 14,000 pounds. Battery can last up to 500 miles, can be partially recharged with solar panels and the truck offer 110v and 220v outlets that eliminate the need of generators. An air adjusted suspension is also included and the car has 16 inches clearance from the ground which makes it an excellent off-road. The reinforced stainless steel of the exoskeleton can sustain much more damage than conventional trucks. And still, you need to add all Tesla's technological superiority such as autonomy, OTA software updates, LCD touch screens, no maintenance, etc.
If you are thinking that truck owners mostly won't have Internet coverage where they live, you are wrong again. SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites will be covering all the United States by the time the Cybertruck launches.
My point in writing this article is not to predict the success or failure of Tesla's Cybertruck. It is to point out how, in the age of social media, intelligent people start to share their frustrations, prejudices or personal truths as if they were objective reality. Fewer folks are now following the evidence or the facts and this could be very, very dangerous for the age we live in. Just get a cue from our politics…
Facts and evidence, thankfully, are stubborn things, and they must always prevail.