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This Is Why Tesla’s Stainless Steel Cybertrucks May Be Rusting
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Haven't read the article, but I am going to say it's a bad alloy combined with salt in the air, salt on the roads combined with galvanic corrosion. I'll edit my post after I read this....
Edit: It's the deadly chromium layer not being wrapped in a $5000 clear coat.
This is such bullshit though. Deloreans were built with uncoated 304 stainless steel (think, same as in food grade stainless stuff), and with all their other issues, rust is not one of them.
If Teslas rust, they chose the wrong steel, the end.
We don't even know if they're rusting. All these articles are based off a couple pictures posted in a forum from a guy who doesn't even know what the actual issue is. These articles are just filling in the blanks with speculation.
The damn maintenance manual tells owners to carefully remove anything remotely corrosive (including, among other things, tree sap). Given Tesla knows the material is subject to rust, I think it's a bit more than just some confused owners.
Pretty sure that list applies to paint as well, and can be found in most car manuals.
I just searched the most recent manual for my model car, and it said this:
Please try to keep your criticisms of Musk fair and unbiased. Otherwise, you risk weakening your point.
Yes, but you see the difference is my car is expected to rust because it's not made of supposedly stainless steel.
So I fully expect to have to protect my car's finish. That's why it's painted. The Cybertruck doesn't even have a clear coat. One would naturally thus expect that, unlike my regular non-stainless steel car, the Cybertruck wouldn't in fact rust.
Thank you for your unsolicited advice. I'm sure next time I'll keep it in mind while having meaningless arguments with anonymous internet strangers.
Oh, I thought this was a social media platform, where people don't need to be solicited to post their comments. If you don't want responses, start a blog. If you dont want responses from me, use the block function. If you want to engage in mostly baseless complaining, expect that people might call you out in a semi-anonymous forum.
For the record, I deleted the comment you replied to because I realized I was wrong in that both Tesla and the quoted manual, above, urge the removal of tree sap and so forth immediately, something I hadn't caught in my first reading.
Having recognized that I realized I hadn't considered the more fundamental point that I called out in my other comment (that the fact that the Cybertruck finish requires the same treatment as a regular car is in fact an indictment of the quality of the Cybertruck's exterior, not a justification for it), hence the new reply.
Fair enough.
Them telling drivers to meticulously clean the vehicles doesn't necessarily mean they're afraid its going to rust. They're probably concerned with staining and junk getting embedded into the panels. In the forum post, you can actually see a little bit of staining circling some of the debris on the panels. Furthermore, iron particles can get on the panel and rust themselves even though the actual panel itself isn't rusting. This is why they make iron decontamination spray for auto detailing.
@FiskFisk33 @remotelove Yeah, I find it rather interesting, that DMC was able to built a car that had none of the issues more than 40 years ago - which means that it is a doable task. So Tesla simply ignored it.
And they were built in Ireland where rain is not exactly rare. During a time when acid rain was a thing (unlike some people claim these days, acid rain was not a hoax, it was just pretty easy to solve with things like cat converters and regulations on industry and it was solved pretty quickly)
They didn't do a clear coat like everything else ever made lol.
Except the DeLorean. Which doesn't rust at all.
Tesla's idea wasn't even bad, they just cheaped out enough to ruin it.
To clarify, it was still a very bad idea because of added mass, it just wasn't necessarily a bad idea for rust since they could have mitigated risk of rust in one of several ways.
The added mass is really bad for battery performance/range, pedestrian safety, safety of other motorists, and total greenhouse gas emissions in production (and added fuel costs for the marginal power increase, of course).
When your customer base has main character syndrome, none of that matters, go hog wild
Lulz. I was updating my post when you responded.
People don't understand that stainless steel just "stains" slower than pure iron or regular steel.
And differently depending on which stainless grade alloy. (308, 316 ,15-5 ,18-10 etc)
I can understand other more specific problems, but something like this for a car manufacturer...
That was musks selling point for production, he said by skipping the paint booth they saved X amount of time, materials and money by going with plain untreated stainless
They could have saved even more by not putting batteries in them, or motors... Man, these things coulda had a way bigger profit margin!
Say you're only running off 100 of them and charge $1,000,000. They'll all be sold. Ferrari perfected this business model long ago.
Who would have thought that their truck would need a $5000 extra to be usable outdoors? Who buys a truck to keep it indoors?