Yves here. We’re running this due to reader Tesla schadenfreude generally and many “Who would buy this truck?” comments on this Tesla offering.
By Julianne Geiger, a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group. Originally published at OilPrice
Ford and GM can rest easy: Tesla’s cybertruck may have a niche after all, but it won’t cut into Ford and GMs truck market, according to a new survey from automotive research site, Autolist.
According to the survey, which polled 1,100 respondents, if they had to buy GM’s upcoming electric truck, Ford’s electric F150, Rivian R1T, or the Cybertruck, which would they would choose, if all specs were similar.
Unfortunately for Tesla, the Cybertruck received the fewest votes, snagging 20% of the vote. GM’s truck came in first place, getting 29% of the vote. Ford’s EV truck was next at 27%, and Rivian—which doesn’t have near the brand name recognition that Tesla does–took home 24%.
People mostly chose GM and Ford because of brand trust and reliability, whereas respondents who chose Tesla did so due to its expected performance, efficiency, and autopilot features. Those who chose Rivian liked its exterior styling.
On the face of it, Tesla’s poor showing isn’t altogether abysmal, and GM’s and Ford’s results weren’t a knockout. But the results don’t show the whole picture.
Of those 1,100 who actually own—or have ever owned—a truck before, only 14% would choose a Cybertruck. Meanwhile, 63% of truck owners, former or current, would choose the GM or Ford version.
Where Tesla came out ahead was for those who had never owned a truck before. For that group, 25.8% would prefer Tesla’s Cybertruck—the top scorer.
This means that the Tesla Cybertruck is a favorite among people who have never before owned—and may never have the inclination to own—a truck. Autlolist referred to the survey results as “good for all four brands.”
About 250,000 Cybertrucks have been preordered so far since its comedy of errors unveiling last month. The preorders cost $100, which is fully refundable.
68 comments
Comments are closed.
Dear Yves, Oh I love the blatant shout out to reader schadenfreude ‘this is why we’re posting this’ ROFL!!!! How we all long for TSLA and UBER meltdown, gotta grab the feel-good news where we can.
Actually, polling as high as 20% among the more traditional truck designs is a pretty respectable market position: the U.S. truck market is huge with sales of ~12 million units in 2018, with implies a future Tesla addressable market of 2.4 million trucks per year once the market is mostly EVs – which is way beyond their current production capacity.
What should worry traditional U.S. truck makers like GM and Ford is the fact that non-mainstream electric trucks polled over 40% of demand: truck buyers have no problem switching to other manufacturers, if the price and specs are right.
Finally, the polarizing design of Tesla Cybertruck is entirely a result of ‘function over form’, it’s the outcome of using a novel folded stainless steel manufacturing technology that results in significant cost savings:
“How Tesla’s Cybertruck Turns Auto Manufacturing and Engineering Upside-Down (Motor Trend)”
If traditional truck makers want to address the stainless steel, highly corrosion and scratch resistant electric trucks market with a $39k entry price, they’ll have to use a similarly angular design as well.
The iPhone was initially controversial and polarizing as well due to its lack of a physical keyboard and its simplified design, but its minimalism grew on people eventually.
Having done a lot of marketing, I have to tell you (and should have added) that this sort of poll is extremely unreliable. Marketers abandoned it decades ago. There’s a strong tendency for respondents to greatly overstate their willingness to buy at all, and then to slant their responses to what they think might please the survey provider. So there is reason to think the “more cool/more environmentally responsible” Tesla might get higher acceptance than a survey than it would in real life.
I’m not longer current, but years ago, conjoint analysis was found to be a vastly better predictor of likelihood of purchase than naive “Would you buy/which would you buy” surveys. You force people into something that is a much better approximation of an actual purchase, putting them through multiple choices between different products, and also listing prices and key product attributes (ones that are generally found to be the top 3-4 aside from price in purchase decisions). Among other things, conjoint analysis generates “revealed preferences” as in what is likely to matter to buyers besides brand name.
Excellent points. New market entrants are also almost always at a disadvantage over established players, especially for a high value consumer product such as a $40k+ truck. It’s one thing to pick something based on a picture in a survey, but it’s an entirely different mental process to make a $40k+ financial decision to go the unproven path.
I’d not be surprised to see if both the Cybertruck and Rivian EV trucks had single digit percentage ‘first mover’ initial adoption rates in the U.S.
It took Tesla 10 years to reach ~4% market penetration in California, adoption rates probably won’t be much faster in the truck market either.
The design is polarizing – at first I couldn’t imagine driving it – but I have to admit that the Cybertruck’s design has grown on me, especially once I realized the functional reasons behind that design.
The folded stainless steel production method is very interesting from an engineering and marketing point of view – stainless steel Fords literally last a century with no corrosion whatsoever, and a large part of the car industry’s material waste is the scrapping of cars after just ~15 years of average useful life time.
I’d expect first EV truck adopters to be environmentally conscious liberals, as a traditional truck such as the F-150 emits hundred times the annual pollution of the Cybertruck. But who knows, consumers are fickle and fashion is fungible: a fair argument can be made that current traditional trucks are selling so well despite their obviously ugly designs.
Such surveys overlook WHY so many Americans go into indentured servitude to own a gas-guzzling pick-up that costs more than my Cadillac. I live on the coast of Central Florida – cowboy and pick-up country. Some buy them to tow their boats & RV trailers. Some actually need them for work. But I suspect that most own them for macho reasons such as to enlarge their penises (psychologically, of course).
My speculation is that most real pick-em-up owners are unlikely to be attracted to a model that says “I’m an elite libtard collich boy.” LOL
This is bullshit as even the link itself shows if one scrolls further down than the headline.
Electricity comes primarily from fossil fuels, and if we were to replace all light vehicles with EVs (the heavy duty one it is fundamentally impossible to replace with EVs) it would have to come from fossil fuels in even larger proportions. Because renewables do not scale and if the people who are supposedly concerned about the environment were in any way more scientifically literate than those who are in denial that we have a problem, that would be understood by everyone; but it isn’t.
And even in those graphs there are probably still further hidden lies — the Cybertruck is shown to generate a third of the CO2 that an F-150 does even on a primarily carbonized grid. But that almost certainly does not account for things like methane leakage (a lot of electricity generation has been converted from coal to gas in the last couple decades, and sold to the public as “cleaner”, without any consideration for the leakage issue).
Yeah, I would be especially suspicious of the results from people that don’t already own trucks. People who own trucks either USE them, and for them an untested manufacturer is not a selling point. Or, at least as commonly, for them a truck is an aspirational lifestyle choice. And the cybertruck is nothing that they aspire to
Here in Agafornia you’ll rarely see a regular Tesla, and most pickup trucks are white, the preferred color for farmers.
The high bed side walls on the Cybertruck seem to make it less useful than a regular truck.
Have you tried to put anything into an F-150 from the side? All modern trucks seem to have grown to gargantuan sizes.
You need an old type 2 with the fold down sides
https://gomotors.net/Volkswagen/Volkswagen-Type-2-Pickup/photos.html?pic=12
Thanks for the link. It’s the only one that shows the pickup part of the pickup truck. The message here seems to be the strength of triangles vs. getting stuff in and out. No wonder people who’ve never owned a truck before go for the telsa. At the very least, this limits the utility of the truck to those who are either unaware of the potential issue or who know they will never need to use the sides for loading stuff. For very specific uses, such as carrying motorcycles, this would be a non issue, perhaps even a plus. For more general use, however…
The functional point of a pickup, besides pushing snow that is, is to carry stuff that is too bulky and/or too heavy or too obnoxious (merde) to fit inside of or be carried by a passenger car. A trailer is one solution, but has it’s own set of problems.
For carrying items, which includes loading and unloading them, inches can be critical in getting an object abord that otherwise fits within the space and the carrying capacity of a given pickup. One must occasionally hoist an object over the side vs. placing it in from the back end and the means of doing so frequently has limits of height where inches count. And inches can mean a lot of frustration when some design element, such as the sloped sides of the telsa pickup altogether prevent an otherwise possible and relatively simple operation. I’ve seen other, more conventional designs that also have this issue, though less pronounced, and for me it’s an automatic red flag.
what is minimalist about a “phone” that has a flashlight and allows you to play candy crush and tracks everything you do for benefit of the mighty apple? Also the minimalist design of the iphone leads to lots of cracked screens and bricking. Maybe a flip open feature would be a good idea?
I prefer Linus’ The Great Pumpkin to the so called mighty apple. In addition to being the one and only TRUE supreme being, which eliminates the mighty apple from the get go, The Great Pumpkin knows all without having to resort to cheap material gimmicks such as
smartspy phones.This is not a truck, it is an SUV! Which is a well-established market.
Here’s moar:
reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/e9d1k1/from_0_to_60_in_2_sec_they_said_just_20_min_on/
Back to the Future, circa 1973/1979.
Why the Tesla Cybertruck Looks So Weird Wired
If it turns out that the Cybertruck doesn’t have a crumple zone, it will be very dangerous to other cars in the event of a collision.
“The model shown onstage on Thursday night didn’t have side mirrors…”
Oh, that’s just something human drivers may need.
Monitors never break down….
I don’t see how this can be. A lot of Silicon Valley CEOs thought the Tesla Cybertruck* design was great.
* Validating my theory that nobody who uses “cyber-” should be taken seriously, except William Gibson and Norbert Weiner.
He and his CIA handlers are just trolling us at this point.
Oh hell yes, we computer nerds started rolling our eyes at ‘cyber’ in the mid-90s. It is the mark of the rube.
Although not a car sort of guy, I have been trying to think of exactly what sort of niche the Tesla truck is trying to fill. From what I saw when it was unveiled, there were a lot of fan-boys who went ooh-aah all over it but from what I have read, it seems to be destined for a rich man’s toy. The sharp lines remind me of a cross between an F-117 Nighthawk fighter and a car from the 1982 film “Blade Runner” (which others have noticed) and the thing has gimmick written all over it-
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/e0b9gr/blade_runner_really_did_predict_the_future/
There is another possibility. Assuming that this is just a first generation model and not a one-off gimmick, could it be that Musk wants to grab the same sort of people who back in the 1980s turned down fuel-efficient modern cars and opted for big gas-guzzling SUVs instead because of their image? People who in the 1970s would buy a station-wagon were now buying an SUV so perhaps Musk’s reasoning is that he wants to formulate something that will eventually supplant the SUV in the market place. Just a possibility though.
Good point,kind of like the humvee, it took a certain personality to buy it
It’s for the lifted Jeep / Ford Raptor crowd. RBF wives and baseball caps.
“Kind vegan billionaires”.
say instead of using your cybertruck to haul around a load of gasoline-powered lawn care equipment you could use it to power quiet, electric mowers. if it had the capacity/reliability to handle that day after day, there would definitely be a market.
in my neck of the woods, the other reason one sees so many pickups is snow removal. there, i have some doubts that the cybertruck will prove capable.
I must admit that my first thought when I saw a photo of the cyber truck (what a terrible name) is that its reminiscent of the De Lorean. Maybe that’s deliberate.
I will give one credit to Tesla – my big criticism of the cars is that they are not nearly radical enough in design. They are basically nice sports cars with an electric drivetrain. If EV’s became mainstream they need much more than that – they need to be much lighter and less draggy in design to minimise the use of energy (and expensive batteries). BMW has been far more radical with its i3 car, which uses a lot of carbon fibre and some innovative features to reduce weight and simplify the overall design. It does look like with the cyber truck that they’ve made an attempt at least in the direction of simplifying the structural design of the truck, if not minimising the weight (now if he used alu or carbon fibre, that would have really made a difference).
Although I’m still baffled as to why US manufacturers and consumers haven’t worked out that the simplest and cheapest way to have a vehicle which bring you to work and also can haul heavy or awkward loads when needed is to have a small car with a powerful engine and a tow bar with a simple trailer parked in your garage for when you need it. If I was Musk I’d have been working on a battery powered trailer that you could just attach to your car when needed.
> the De Lorean
I believe that the stainless steel skin has the advantage of not needing a paint shop, and Tesla never has figured out how to run its paintshop properly. I believe the F117, angular look is also making the best of primitive metal-stamping capabilities.
Last weekend I was helping a friend dismantle the broken rear lock on his elderly Ford, with another friend, who used to be a production engineer, giving a running commentary on the sheer stupidity of the design – vastly overcomplicated for such an apparently simple device. No doubt there is a reason lost in Fords history for the overcomplication – something to do with supplier capacity or using existing off the shelf componentry, but even that simple exercise showed there is a lot of overcomplication in car designs, and its getting worse as they go all electronic, not better.
I believe BMW made a conscious effort to minimise the number of individual components in the i3 and gave carte blanche to the engineers to come up with new ideas – the result was a car that could be competitively priced (for a BMW) and was significantly lighter than a VW Golf.
So even if crude, I think Musk is on to something if he’s told his engineers to find some ways to simplify all aspects of his cars, even if the result seems pretty bad at first.
But he needs to act fast – all the major manufacturers are now coming out with very high performing EV’s, all cutting in to his market. Even if he was doing everything right, I think his company is doomed faced with a determined assault from the big German companies in particular. Even Mercedes now has an EV line which has had rave reviews from the car press.
BMW makes everything one component, requiring a replacement for anything that goes wrong. In the above example, a broken lock would require a new door.
As my brother is fond of saying about my old BMW motorcycle in a comical German accent, “Inconvenience package? Check!”
I think the F-117 angular look is due to computers in the mid-1970’s being able to only calculate radar signatures on 2D surfaces. By the mid-1980’s computing power had increased to allow the curved look of the B-2.
I suspect that both the paint shop capacity and the “synergy” with SpaceX’s use of the same stainless steel alloy are at work. Also, I think the target market are techdudebros who want to imagine themselves part of Musk’s fantasy of terraforming Mars with a truck that might maybe look like a Mars rover.
I think the angular look is an effort to tap into the Tom Cruz -Top Gun stealth jet fighter male fantasy. Not all big truck/compensating males wish to align with the common cowboy or burly woodsman memes. I think there also is a market for the Mad Max/Road Warrior group, but who wants to drive around being under the watchful eye of the police? Me: a smaller 25 year-old Nissan Hardbody truck with dents, and chipped and fading paint, is my appropriately invisible vehicle to fit my age group and interest in female attractiveness.
Well, the radical elements have been ugly. New cars overwhelmingly have grills and front lights that make them look like nasty leering faces. And remember the PT Cruiser? That did have find a niche market, but they are so awful I was willing to waste 15 minutes at a car rental getting a different vehicle when I found out THAT was what they wanted me to drive.
My beef is you can’t get cars in nice bright colors any more. When I was a kid, you had plenty of cars in happy colors, like robin’s egg blue, lemon yellow (a bit brighter than NYC cab yellow), perky orange, sometimes even pink or fuchsia. You even had medium browns. The first car that was sort of mine (the second family car that I got to drive a lot) was a mint-green Datsun. Now you have dull conformist colors: white, bland beiges, lots of greys, and black. Even a staid navy blue is rare.
That’s very true about colours – I vaguely remember reading some time ago that the reason car colours are so dull now is the belief that silver/red cars have better resale values. Mind you, my sister had an old ’64 beetle entirely in duck egg green (interior included), and people used to just walk up to her at parking areas and offer to buy it off her on the spot.
And I agree about the PT Cruiser, I could never understand how anyone wouldn’t feel embarrassed to be seen in it, its just aggressively ugly. But I guess there is a niche market for unusual cars, such as the Cube. Its one thing I always find interesting in traveling, in that some countries the preference is for more subtle Euro/Japanese style car styling, others go for US big loud grill type designs. Hyundai seem to market their ‘US’ styled cars at home, but their euro-styled ones in Japan so far as I can see. The Japanese have lots of loud styled cars for sale in the US that they don’t sell in Europe or elsewhere.
‘you can’t get cars in nice bright colors any more’.
Yeah, I was researching that point a few months ago and found a few good links talking about this point. Here in Oz they are mostly, whites, greys, silvers, etc. too-
https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/a-brief-history-of-car-colors-and-why-are-we-so-boring-now/
https://blog.consumerguide.com/boring-car-colors/
OMG great links. The thing *I* noticed right off in the first link was the top picture. Not the variety in colors, though, but the variety in the vehicles themselves.
That’s also pretty lost today…different looking cars are available but pretty much top end and a small segment of the daily commuters for sure. Midsize SUV after midsize SUV…
I love my “midnight blue” Chrysler with the tan interior.
There are few things I loathe in a car more than a black interior, having roasted inside such cars before air conditioning became widely available …
In France, they called the PT Cruiser, ‘le car Jimmy Cagney’, but then again they thought Jerry Lewis was a comedy genius.
>like robin’s egg blue
The coolest car ever, except for maybe the Ford GT, was the one my friend had in high school. It was a 61-or-so AMC Rambler. No I am not kidding. No it was not souped up, it had the ol’ dependable inline 6. It didn’t have a custom interior, it didn’t have anything it didn’t roll off the factory line with.
What it did roll off the factory line with was a convertible top and robin’s egg blue paint. The complete insouciance of a plan Jane, no-second-look base car sporting that paint and a drop top just was so in-your-face that you could park it next to a line of Ferrari’s and still get all the attention.
Good memories.
Thank you ADC. I just have to say a good thing about Rambler. My first car was a Rambler station wagon. I used to drop the spare behind the driver seat, drop the back wheel of my Sachs 125 into the spare tire compartment and cock the front wheel to the side over the half up tailgate with a few ropes. Then, it was off to motocross. One favorite was in Santee, out past the Santee water reclamation facility, east of San Diego. The dirt road out went right past the settling ponds, all rocks and ruts. That Rambler handled that drive at high speed time and again and again. The thing never broke, and I tried to break it. But of course, that was in the days when American companies took pride in their manufacturing prowess.
A 1966 Ford Falcon Ranchero and then a 1956 Ford F100 worked for hauling my TM400/Maico 125/Greeves Griffon/Bultaco Sherpa T around in the early 1970s. They were vehicles that could be maintained by the owner, but then again they were vehicles that HAD to be regularly serviced/worked on.
Nice bikes!
PT cruiser’s are sought after in the demolition derby market-
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2019/09/pt-cruiser-the-ugliest-car-ever-made-finds-new-life-at-upstate-new-york-demolition-derbies.html
When you look at the front end of those PT Cruisers, they seem to have been inspired by a 1939-1940 Cadillac-
https://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/cars-for-sale/cadillac/fleetwood/2044816.html
I can’t find the link, but years ago the great Alexander Cockburn (who loved big, heavy American-made clunkers) wrote about the cultural significance of the change from Detroit’s bright, cheery palettes to the bland lack of variety we see now, and was already underway decades ago.
Ths same tendency is evident in pop music, which was far brighter and cheerier in that era than now. No more Dancing In The Streets…
Dodge pickups come in those colors, I have neighbors who have yellow, lime green, and of course red(mine).
My mother came here from Japan in 1956. She was impressed that my dad’s dad drove a salmon-colored Nash Rambler. He would pick her up when he was in town and take her on drives.
>New cars overwhelmingly have grills and front lights that make them look like nasty leering faces.
Hear, hear. Required aggression seems to be part of The Plan.
no thanks
With such a polarizing design, I think it’s pretty obvious that Tesla was not going after GM or Ford. And why should they? Truck owners are notoriously brand loyal. It would be a waste of time to market something that looked like every other truck out there. As for the Rivian, you don’t mention whether the survey included price information. Rivian is by its own description a niche product, and its 100k price is not a great value proposition. Tesla may sell 250k trucks. Or maybe not. But they will make money on each one. And they won’t be cutting into the truck market, as much as expanding it. Besides, the real action for Tesla isn’t the Cybertruck. The Model Y is a crossover, and i think it is likely to disrupt that market the same way that the Model 3 has remade the premium sedan market.
Anytime you write anything that contradicts Lord Elon the Wonderful and Good, you get lots of comments exactly like this. Business buzz-words innovated together into value proposition soup.
“Besides, the real action for Tesla isn’t the Cybertruck. The Model Y is a crossover, and i think it is likely to disrupt that market the same way that the Model 3 has remade the premium sedan market.”
What does that mean? Put a number and a date on sales*. 250k in what year? Because 250k a year would require a production increase of over 50% from this year.
*sales means cars actually delivered and bought, by a customer.
Thanks for being so nasty, in response to a sincere post. There is no reasonable way to predict how many units Tesla will sell of the truck, so forgive me for not being so foolish as to make such a prediction. The Model 3 has significantly cut into BMW and Mercedes sales. If you want to see the numbers, they are out there. The crossover segment of the market is bigger than the sedan segment, so it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to suspect that the Model Y will make similar inroads.
Elon? Well, Elon is what he is. Probably just a matter of time before he personally crashes and burns. And yes, he is the face of Tesla. But he won’t be forever.
Tone policing is the only thing you left out of the above. I’m glad you were able to get it in there.
So, on a post about a survey that purports to show that the truck would be last, you then take the opportunity to add some spin and PR for tesla, while completely dismissing the title and content of the post you are commenting on. What do you offer for backup?
“There is no reasonable way to predict how many units Tesla will sell of the truck, so forgive me for not being so foolish as to make such a prediction.’
You are your very own definition of reasonable.
I get it. You don’t like Tesla, and you don’t like what I have to say about it. So what? Enjoy your life.
You call me nasty, then tell me to enjoy my life? I think you’re being disingenuous.
I didn’t call you nasty. What you *said* was nasty. I don’t know you, so I have no idea if you act nasty all the time, or just online. And I want everyone to enjoy their life. Why wouldn’t I?
“There is no reasonable way to predict how many units Tesla will sell of the truck”
Zero. Because the company won’t exist in 2021.
The real action for Tesla is going to be in court when they’re finally held to account for their “auto-pilot” feature that can’t tell the difference between semi-trailer and open road.
^^This^^
I really dunno what Musk is doing, he generally appears as much clueless as we are and I expect that to be true in this case. But it does make some sense to not just make “another truck”. Unfortunately, this is simultaneously both I believe the biggest pick-me-up truck market in the world and I am sure the most conservative vehicle market in the world. I mean they finally brought back the Ford Ranger because a truck 85% of the size of a “standard” pickup had been considered less barely a niche product.
And I really think that applying the Cybertruck ideas to something Ranger-sized in the European and Asian market would be the way to go big. But I guess you gotta impress Americans for some reason….
As an aside: the side-loading thing that people keep bringing up confuses me. I am well short of 6′. I was a casual weightlifter in my younger days. I have no hope of loading anything of decent heft over the side of a standard post roughly 2015 F150/Ram/Silverado/Titan/Whatever* without risking bashing the side up and I don’t think anybody under 6′ (and many truck owners are women, nowadays) can. Note that except for the Titan, and only for a short distance, do the side rails even extend beyond the doors.
If you are throwing your backpack over the side that doesn’t really count as truck use, does it? What can you do with a 40lb bag of cement is more to the point.
*two out of that list I currently own
Benchmark: after a roofing job three of us are loading trashed shingles into the truck. The armloads of junk are not heavy, but they’re bulky and awkward, and a big problem is to keep them from falling all over the place before you get them over the side. We just swarmed around and threw our armloads wherever there was room. With high sides, and particularly sides that get progressively higher toward the front of the bed, the practical way to fill the bed is have two carrying and one left in the truck bed to shift the stuff to the front as people push it across the gate. Lengthens the job by 50%.
Musk is a grifter. The point is to keep the scam going as long as possible so he can continue to pay off the mortgages on his five mansions.
Where do you put the ladder? Will it carry 4’x8′ plywood or wall board? Can you tie stuff down if it’s big or could shift? Can you get a cap for it? Or a tool box?
Trucks are for trucking — hauling and carting stuff, like for farming or building trades, or for plowing. You can haul a trailer but it’s a nuisance for parking or backing up and it’s better if your stuff will fit in the bed. It’s a tool for working.
++ Good points. This “truck” is very limited. The cool factor – such as it is – dominates.
Its CG is obviously, absurdly high. Near-useless except for the grooviness™ factor
with the soft-handed set.
Agree completely, though, as with Teslas, this “truck” is purely a status symbol.
Musk is a culture/meme generating engine in the worst kind of way.
‘Round my parts, trucks are for jacking up and rolling coal down the highway at 90 miles per hour. Oh, and for hanging plastic scrotums off the hitch receiver.
I laughed so hard at the stupidity of that truck, Musk really is a fool when it comes to this and his wanting to colonize space.