The steel exoskeleton idea didn't survive to production. The production truck has a mix of aluminum castings and welded steel unibody, with the stainless panels just acting as the skin. Maybe they bring some structural rigidity, but not like the origami plan that was originally discussed.

The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.

It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.

Painted piece of plastic gonna be cheaper than sheet of stainless steel. Stainless is significantly more expensive than typical materials used on car, which would be normal steel or plastic depending on panel.

Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).

Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper

"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about

Speaking out of my ass here, but I would not be surprised if it's much cheaper to paint cheap stamped steel, compared to using more expensive stainless steel that's treated to remove all surface marring/scarring from the stamping process. Those panels don't come out all brushed from the metal presses...

I don't think the poor sales is primarily due to the cost - it's just a design with limited appeal.

A folded stainless exoskeleton without paint has the potential to make low volume car manufacturing much cheaper.

A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.

Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.

Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.

This idea was never going to work out. In my opinion Slate have got a far more sensible approach with their replaceable body panels.

I live in the UK so I'll likely never be able to get one, but I'd love a car I can just buy new panels for and wrap them with minimal tools.

Same. Initially I was optimistic about the Cybertruck because I though “flat metal panels and no paint is going to make both manufacturing and repairs so much easier and cheaper”.

I think they are mostly not doing paint going forward. CyberCab also doesn't use paint, but uses cheaper materials than stainless steel.

That original process was what should have led to lower prices. Instead, they couldn't do it and had to resort to gluing steel panels onto a body-on-frame design which is much more expensive. They still managed to keep it just as hideous, so kudos there I guess.

I doubt that replacing painted regular steel with fancy stainless steel is going to be cheap. Paint is expensive, but so is stainless steel. I also can't imagine the "origami" technique to be cheaper than stamping, the reason they suggested that is because their fancy stainless steel can't be stamped. And in the end, Tesla couldn't even do it, so they glued the parts on...

I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.

In that way the Slate pickup seems to be the truck Cybertruck promised to be

> originally they were talking about

Elon talks about a lot of things. Consider if you might be part of the media ecosystem that enables that strategy.

They were also talking about how it could become a boat. All the hype in the world eventually has to meet reality.

Elon promised a lot but delivered almost nothing when it comes to the Cybertruck.

> And originally they were talking about basically building it like origami from a sheet of steel.

It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.

At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.

The original wasn't what shipped. From what I read the cheaper easier process wasn't, which isn't unusual.

It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.