The Tesla Cybertruck Is The New Edsel Given The Dislike For This Very Different Pickup Is Off The Charts Though The Vast Majority Who Own Them Do Love Them

You don’t have to go far to find hate for Tesla Cybertruck. Quora has haters, the Cybertruck forum complains about it, Cybertruck owners are being bullied, and the truck has had an impressive number of recalls, ranking it as one of the worst vehicles to own in  024. However, on that same Cybertruck forum, 94.2% of owners love their vehicles, so what’s with all the hate?

This reminds me a bit of the Ford Edsel. It was ahead of its time in that it didn’t look like anything else in the mid-50s, but a decade later, most sedans looked a lot like the Edsel. Today, there are still loyal Edsel groups that love their cars.

We Don’t Like Big Changes: Edsel To Cybertruck

As a race, we aren’t fond of changes, and I’d argue pickup truck drivers especially hate change since they’ve kept the Ford F-Series in the lead in pickup sales for decades. This last year, Ford sold around 750K F-Series pickups while Tesla sold (as of October) around 30K Cybertrucks.

Like the Edsel in its time, the Cybertruck looks different from any other pickup. Like the Edsel, it sports a unique interior with a lot of new technology inside. The Edsel introduced several innovative new features, including a speed warning, buttons for the automatic transmission on the steering wheel, a domed speedometer, double-latched doors, childproof door locks, and remote trunk opening. In the first year, Ford sold around 70K Edsels compared to the 30K number for Cybertrucks, and the Edsel was considered a failure. 

The Cybertruck has many innovative features, like a Delorean-like stainless steel body (which has turned out to be anything but stainless), a complete digital dash, steer-by-wire, 800v architecture, bidirectional charging (which is incredibly useful), an etherloop network (which eliminates the multiple networks in most other cars), gigacasting, and an advanced AI-based charging stem. It also has a cool truck bed and a powered retractable tonneau cover.

In short, both Edsel and Cybertruck were game-changers. We don’t seem to like game changers, which has reflected badly on Edsel and Cybertruck. One of the problems with a lot of innovation is that it tends to be unreliable because there isn’t yet any long-term experience with the related technology, so both the Edsel and Cybertruck have been relatively unreliable. One advantage of Cybertruck over the Edsel is that you can fix many things with remote over-the-air updates, whereas the Edsel always had to return to the dealer for warranty repairs.

And, I expect there were a lot of folks at Ford who thought the Edsel was a mistake, just as there were a lot of folks in Tesla who thought the Cybertruck was a mistake. It is interesting to note that the Edsel was also poorly timed, a mid-range luxury car during a time of austerity, and the Cybertruck came out when people were cooling on EVs (and the US Government was beginning to push back on them).

Wrapping Up: The Cybertruck Is This Generation’s Edsel

The combination of unreliable innovation, being very different from anything else, and being introduced when the initial EV hype has been dying down makes the Tesla Cybertruck very similar to the old Ford Edsel for its time.

I imagine the folks who loved both cars liked cutting-edge technology and were willing to endure the pain of having something very different. However, I expect that the hate and personal attacks from owning these cars got old pretty quickly for both owner groups.

I also expect the Cybertruck, like the Edsel, to go down in history as a cautionary tale, which I think is unnecessary. We often seem surrounded by cookie-cutter cars, and Edsel and Cybertruck try to break free from that. We need vendors to break free so that we have more interesting choices and innovative designs.

So, while I think the Cybertruck is this generation’s Edsel, I can understand why most Cybertruck owners love their cars; it is fun to stand out and be different. I hope Tesla eventually gets its Cybertruck sorted out because pickup trucks have been boring for too long.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torqu News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.