Waaahhhh I made a bad financial decision and no one wants to bail me out at a 20% loss.
Lol. Lmao even.
Aren’t you literally not allowed to resale a Tesla (RIP First Sale doctrine)
It’s a real problem to get rid of Leon Musk too. So this is intentionally.
From the article:
The Cybertruck owner listed his truck for sale for $89,000. He thinks this is a fair price […] if you added every optional extra that Tesla currently offers for the Cybertruck, given the $7,500 tax credit and the $2000 referral discount, (a brand new 2025) Cybertruck will still only cost around $86,000.
Nobody with a brain would pay more for a used vehicle. It’s not a collectible. “Founder’s edition” nowadays means “beta version” and it’s not something that’s worth more.
I can think of one way to get rid of it. Saw it on the news last week. He’s probably not going to like it.
Musk said it will be back on the road in no time. I don’t think it’s going to be quite that easy.
Just take a bulldozer and push it on the street. Still drives as reliable as before.
At least the driver was kind enough to drive it to Musk’s assistant’s place of business.
Play stupid games…
the shitposter in me wants to say that this isn’t a problem you find a solution to, its karma for doing business with the devil.
Fuck tesla in general, but this isn’t even that. It’s the cost of early adoption. The founder’s edition of basically anything is going to be more expensive and less refined than following versions. Once production picks up, nobody really cares about used first runs because it’s more of a show-off piece. He’s just realizing that the number of people who fawn over his steel box isn’t enough to justify keeping that piece of shit.
There is a Tesla dealership near my house that has a lot full of them. A ridiculous number. It seems that Tesla is struggling to get rid of them. Hard to believe that there is not a huge market for electric dumpsters sold by a conspicuous asshole.
I thought Tesla’s business model was to not have dealerships? Don’t you order Tesla’s online? Or are these second hand?
I don’t know. I assume it is either a dealership or a lot for the storage of inventory. They have multiple other Tesla models as well. It hasn’t been there long and isn’t labeled in Google maps. The photos in street view are years out of date and show buildings that were torn down.
…he has driven and sold over 40 exotic cars, and the Cybertruck is the one vehicle he is having the most trouble finding buyers for.
Not saying the Cybertruck is a good thing, personally IDGAF about it, but calling this guy merely “a cybertruck owner” is bullshit. He’s a guy who makes money buying and selling expensive vehicles, and he’s whining about a deal that hasn’t worked out for him. Poor baby.
“I can’t give this thing away.”
FTA: He’s not trying to give it away. He’s expecting last year’s used market value for it, but it’s steadily depreciating. Someone offered him 50k for it. He overpaid for a new car.
Pretty much, guy’s just being a Karen. “Broken TV from the 60’s, 500 dollars. Don’t low be me, I know what I have.”
If analyzed in purelly financial terms, buying a brand new car is almost invariably one of the worst investments there is compared to other options (if you really need a car, aim for a car which is 1 or 2 years), and if you couple that with taking a punt on a Musk product on the user side (not even the shareholders’ side but quite literally the side of the people the shareholders, most noteably Musk, want to extract money from, so pretty much the suckers’ side) AND, maybe worse, doing it as an early adopter, pretty much adds up to a guaranteed lubless shafting.
Investing in a “I’m a sucker” tattoo for one’s forehead probably has a better return.
buying a brand new car is almost invariably one of the worst investments
Because it’s not an investment. There is nothing wrong with buying a new car if you plan on keeping it. You get the original manufacturer’s warranty, no worries about a previous owner having been in an accident or not keeping up with routine maintenance, and often times you can lower your initial cost of ownership via dealer financing that’s below market rates because they’re willing to take loses there to move vehicles. Just a quick look, 2022 Toyota Corolla SE with 33k miles is selling for roughly ~$23k. A brand new 2025 Corolla SE is selling for ~$26k. If you need to finance it, you’re going to get better rates on the new vehicle vs the used. You’re getting 3 years worth of improvements and you’re getting a full manufacturer’s warranty and not just the balance of what’s outstanding on a 3 year old vehicle with 33k miles on it.
Almost every purchase for oneself is an investment, not in the Financial Investment sense of putting money expecting to get more money out but in the broader sense that we buy things because they provide some kind of value to us, which can be a utility value, tge satisfaction of an actual physical need, the pleasure one derive from using it or even just the pleasure of owning it
People don’t just buy things with no reason at all at any level, though often people buy things for the emotional reason that it gives them a jolt of pleasure to buy that thing (not exactly the smartest thing to do IMHO, but quite possibly one of the core pillars holding up present day Consumer Society).
So in that broader sense even the peace of mind you refer to as a justification for buying a new car has an actual value which can be expressed into a rough money range or, even better, the more personal “how long do I have to work to pay for the peace of mind of a new car instead of buying a 2 year old car”.
Further once you look at it that way, you start identifying which objective/need/feeling you’re trying to satisfy and figuring out other ways of satisfying it for less - for example if a car is expensive enough you can literally pay to have many possible used cars you are considering checked by a mechanic before you buy, have car histories checked, and buy an extended warranty, to get that piece mind you wish and still save up a lot of money (or, in another “currency”, a lot of days of work to earn that money).
In that broader sense, IMHO, new cars are generally a bad “investment” versus cars with a year or two because you’re paying a huge premium for a piece of mind you might get for much cheaper or might not even need because your fears are just be the product of being widely misinformed about the probability of problems in cars relative (I can tell you from a broader Engineering sense, the rates of problem in physical products in general tend to peak first when they’re new, then go down, then start going up again when they’re aged, which for something like a car would be 5+ year at least, though beware that I only know this rule as a general thing and don’t have car-specific knowledge on it beyond some vaguely remembered stuff I read over a decade ago) and of imagining the worst possible scenario in your mind about what problems a 2 year old used car can give you when the reality is that scenario in your mind is incredibly unlikely and you can buy stupidly cheap insurance to cover it.
In that broader sense, IMHO, new cars are generally a bad “investment” versus cars with a year or two because you’re paying a huge premium
That’s where I disagree with you though. There isn’t a huge premium vs a car that’s a year or two old. If you’re financing too, it could be more costly to buy a used car as you’d be paying higher rates on the financing. I agree with the sentiment that buying a used car is better but not one that’s just a year or two older. People have long been preaching that buying used is better than buying new and as a result, a lot of prices have crept up to the point that its less beneficial to buy used these days. COVID jacked up prices too and while they’ve gotten better on used cars, they still haven’t fully recovered.
That’s a good point on the financing side: a used car with about a year or two is well worth it if you have the funds to pay it outright without financing, but if you have to arrange financing yourself you’re not going to get as good rates as what the car makers can achieve thank to their bulk deals with Financial Institutions for the financing, which together with other factors (such as, as you pointed out, some cars not falling as much in price from new to used) might wipe out most of the benefit, at which point the difference might just be small enough that it’s worth the “peace of mind” value one gets from buying new.
My point is that just going direct for a new car without at least doing some legwork and seriously investigating second hand options is a bad move, since the cost of a car in terms of “how long do I have to work to pay for it” is pretty high for most people and thus its well worth it to spend many hours of one’s time doing some researching and evaluating before buying rather than going to the option that’s the most heavily pushed in advertising, because for such an expensive purchase even 10% price savings will quite likely well exceed the value of those hours (and the easiest thing to figure out upfront and with little time investment nowadays is if the used car market for the vehicles one is interested in is expensive and close to brand new prices or not, so one can quickly ditch “second hand” as an option if it turns out the market is pricing it too high).
Personally I haven’t bough a new car in more than a decade (I ditched my middle-age-crisis-mobile some years ago and switched to cycling and walking, but then again I’ve been living in urban areas in Europe so a car is not required and generally more of a hassle and money sink than anything else), but a year ago my dad got a great deal on a small second hand city car which was less than two years old (so it even had some manufacturer warranty time in it) which saved him a pretty penny, though that was in Portugal rather than the US.
My point is that just going direct for a new car without at least doing some legwork and seriously investigating second hand options is a bad move
100% agreed there.
Remember? The value of an item is what you get paid for, not what you want to get from it.
Yeah but think about all the labor that went into making his worthless dumpster truck.
I refuse to believe you can’t find a Bigger Idiot to buy your used Cybertruck.
Not for the ridiculous price he’s trying to sell it for.
“I’ve owned it for 8 months. It is depreciating like a rock. I have already lost over $20k in 8 months. I want to cut my losses and move on, but I can’t give this thing away unless I lower the price to probably $79k. Sucks.”
This right here sums up the unrealistic expectations of the average Tesla owner. Cars immediately depreciate the moment you drive them off the lot, no car is immune to this. The average new car loses 10% in the first month after buying it. It loses over 20% in the first year. For those who are playing along this track’s with exactly how much this doofus has “lost” on his truck.
Also funny that he talks about the price depreciation, while complaining about not being able to sell it. How do you want to sell a buyer on “this will depreciate quickly in price, but please pay a price notably above current market prices”
Dumb people do dumb things. News at 11.
Tesla’s have the absolute worst resale value compared to ICE, PHEV or Hybrids. Batteries degrade over time and with increased usage, so by the time you try to sell a Tesla that’s a few years old, a lot of the advertised maximum capacity has escaped from that battery and the cost of a replacement likely exceeds the value of the entire used car.
Two of my coworkers got fantastic deals on used Tesla’s because they go for so cheap on the secondary market and California is awash in them so there’s always someone somewhere trying to get rid of theirs and usually for less that what it would normally blue book for.
Though I’d say this one takes it to a whole new level because of a few extra factors:
- Pre-orders were priced for exclusivity. Iirc, Tesla was having a lot of production/inventory issues when the pre-orders were collected. I’m not sure how much the deposits were, but they’d have added some sunk cost to the situation, making it harder to walk away when it might have been clear that they would be a shitshow. No one has a deposit on anyone’s used cyber truck to add incentive to pay the rest.
- Elon’s reputation hadn’t sunk so low when pre-orders were made. Iirc, it was after the whole submarine/pedophile thing, but it seems that many didn’t see the writing on the wall from that event.
- They turned out to be pretty bad. Other Teslas have and had issues but the cyber truck has had some particularly embarrassing ones for a truck. Like not handling rain or sand well.
- It looks so unique that it doesn’t really fly under the radar. The two other very hated vehicles I can think of off-hand, the PT Cruiser and the Aztec, were ugly but still looked similar enough to other vehicles that many people didn’t know what they were or that they were so unpopular. People could buy one before they realized, and it was easier to not care what others thought. The cyber truck looks like a 90s video game truck in a time when memes reach many more people, to the point where openly laughing at cyber trucks you see in RL might be a meme.
- Cars and trucks are expensive in general, but this one is on another level. While I might be behind on inflation, the price is comparable to a mid/low-end Porsche (~80k for a boxter, ~120k for a 911 is my benchmark, though it’s old but it’s also CAD, so maybe it works today for USD). A) why would someone want that more than a Porsche? B) most people can’t afford a Porsche.
Not to mention the people Elon is pandering to these days either have trouble affording his vehicles without a dealer trying to convince a bank to take the loan, or can easily afford it but have money in part because they don’t spend it on stupid shit like a cyber truck.
All of that on top of the usual depreciation.
Not to mention the stainless steel it’s made of is not even the type that resists rusting. Did you see the state of the Cyber truck that MKBHD sold? It look like a fucking derelict prop from a post-apocalyptic movie set.
You’re right.
Top Gear did a piece about the Aston Martin Vantage. New, £170,000 (GBP). 20,000 miles later it was worth £80,000. 90k depreciation in less than a year.
The average new car loses 10% in the first month after buying it. It loses over 20% in the first year.
The theory behind this is that you’d only be selling a slightly used car if it was a lemon. The exception to the rule is resellers who already have a buyer lined up when they take possession of the vehicle.
But because Musk-o-philes are all Bitcoin brained and cannot conceive of prices ever going down, they’re routinely shocked to discover that cars are for driving and not for speculating.
Anything’s for speculating if you’re dumb enough.
No, I’m not eating $2000 worth of fast food, I’m investing. People will pay 10x that for recently deceased human organs, and I’m using my money to unlock that earning potential
