alt Hacker NewsFrom my memory, a lot of the excitement was directed at what the design was trying to achieve: a structural body made from easy to make pressed steel panels. This was meant to enable a much cheaper car while also removing the bottlenecks plagueing Tesla's production lines at the time
None of this materialized. The truck that ended up in production was a traditional body construction, but with unpainted steel panels so it looks like the truck Musk presented. It ended up with all the drawbacks of a steel body, while still being expensive and hard to manufacture
I agree that this was part of it - I referred to this twice in my original post.
Once the structural body concept failed (has it ever been adequately explained why they failed?) it would have made sense to either drop the Cybertruck altogether, or pivot to a more traditional design. But ego prevailed, sadly.
IMO the big missed opportunity was to follow the model 3 with a 'model 2' - a smaller, cheaper car - probably in the VW Golf / BMW 1-series class.