Those look a lot like the rust spots my stainless steel table knives get in the dishwasher (or used to get, before I started hand-washing them) - it's like a little bubble of rust that you can remove with Barkeeper's Friend or similar, but it leaves a tiny black pit that will rust again when exposed to the same environment.
I don't know if it's an inclusion in the steel that's rusting, or if the act of rusting creates the pit in the regular steel that's then susceptible to rusting again.
Introducing Tesla Edition Car Keepers Friend. It’s buffs out those stubborn Cybertruck stains!
Couldn’t Tesla could clear coat their panels like every manufacturer ever? I feel like this company is forever struggling to solve kind of obvious shortfalls of its own making.
They made a truck that can’t get dirty. "But we told you in the manual." How precious. How insane.
Of course I could be leaping to conclusions and it turns out to be rail dust. That’s still possible I guess, to be fair. But most manufacturers actually watch their cars before they sell it.
Well, from the article it seems that Tesla is aware of this.
> Just picked up my Cybertruck today. The advisor specifically mentioned the cybertrucks develop orange rust marks in the rain and that required the vehicle to be buffed out. I know I heard the story of never take out your Delorean in the rain but I just never read anything about rust and Cybertrucks.
I honestly can't imagine what they were thinking, shipping this turkey.
They were thinking the guy at the top is a rockstar and everything he says must be correct; otherwise, the board wouldn't have approved his insane pay package... right?
I was told by someone on this very board that Tesla attracts the best automotive engineers and designers, because they don't have the bureaucracy and red tape that increases go-to-market time.
> I honestly can't imagine what they were thinking, shipping this turkey.
What's bizarre is they could've just clear coated it.
They surely didn't omit this to save costs, since the thing is a luxury item.
The only answer I can imagine is that omitting the clearcoat was supposed to be a flex about how it doesn't need any lame paint like the plebe cars use, which makes it especially funny if you have to go in for routine buffing to remove the discoloration and get it back to its original appearance.
I can't find anything more than hearsay about this, but I've now encountered the idea several times that Tesla chose or developed an unusual alloy to mitigate oilcanning, a phenomenon where large, flat pieces of sheet metal tend to cup or bow.
> According to matmatch.com, “The Cybertruck exoskeleton is made from Tesla’s own stainless steel alloy, referred to as the Ultra-hard 30X Cold-rolled Stainless Steel. While the blend is proprietary, Elon mentioned during the product launch that the exoskeleton material of the vehicle is the same as the SpaceX Starship shell.”
There are many different stainless alloys. The ones that don't rust make for terrible knifes - it isn't possible to get them sharp. Of course if this is a butter knife you don't need much an edge and so they might be sharp enough.
I wouldn't be surprised if the rust resistant stainless alloys have other properties that are not desireable in a truck.
You can get just about anything decently hard to be sharp, any stainless can be sharpened. I've sharpened Teflon enough to cut paper before. Getting it to stay sharp is the hard part.
>The ones that don't rust make for terrible knifes
LC200N and Vanax are steels that are used on corrosive resistant knives, and they make great blades. Magnacut is a newer steel that also displays very good corrosion resistance and has very good knife qualities.
> I don't know if it's an inclusion in the steel that's rusting, or if the act of rusting creates the pit in the regular steel that's then susceptible to rusting again.
Well, they call it stainless and not stainfree steel for a reason. /s
I was under the impression that stainless steel didn't rust, albeit obviously depending upon the grade. Like my kitchen sink is made of stainless steel and doesn't have a clearcoat. Has never rusted and won't over decades.
And to be clear, I think the CT is an incredibly ugly monstrosity that is Tesla's jump the shark moment, so I'm not saying this defensively.
The most rust-resistant grades of stainless steel have lower tensile strength and hardness, and work-harden in a way that makes forming them a bit more expensive.
For example, your kitchen sink might be made out of 304 or 316 stainless steel - but your kitchen knives are more likely to use 440C which is less corrosion-resistant, but will hold an edge a lot better.
It also helps that you're not whacking road salt into your kitchen sink at 70mph.
If you leave wet steel wool in a stainless-steel sink, the sink will "catch" rust, too.
Regurgitated advice from metalworkers I learned from:
If you're using a grinding wheel or brush to buff stainless, make sure the tool hasn't been used on regular steel or iron, and that the part of the tool that contacts the stainless is itself neither rusting nor rustable, because even a speck of iron will "seed" rust in stainless.
Thanks that's interesting. I've seen this exact thing happen with stainless steel eating utensils (commonly called "silverware" in the US for historical reasons despite being stainless steel). In a storage unit, I found some very rusty spoons and forks that were in a box with other rusty things. The conclusion I left with was "stainless steel can indeed rust" but I didn't know why, so this is nice to know!
If you really want to blow your mind, your "porcelain" bathtub can also rust.
Learned this the hard way when a cat started pissing in the tub. Between that and using bleach for cleaning, the enamel was eroded down to the metal casting. Then, rust.
Advice online will say no, that red shit is calcium and mineral buildup. That mostly happens in toilets. Unless you bought a tub in plastic or fiberglass, it may well be actual rust, especially if it reoccurs very quickly. Treat it accordingly before it drains through your floor.
Roads are among the worst conditions for corrosion. If you left your sink outside where it could be affected by salty sea spray, road salt or calcium chloride, with these chemicals sitting on the metal over time, it would also develop rust spots.
The Doha airport features a stainless steel roof; standard architectural stainless steel would be far too vulnerable to corrosion in this setting. They had to specify a duplex stainless steel with a special finish, and even so it requires regular cleaning and rust removal:
Any ground water will have more minerals than wain water. For example, the water delivered to my house has 450-550 mg/l TDS. A quick search shows that is about 10x higher than rain water [1].
My kitchen sink also doesn't get salted during the winter, the roads do. I wonder if someone at Tesla forgot that some areas rely heavily on salt to keep the roads ice free during the winter.
It's probably not rainwater that's causing the rust. It's the water from the pavement, which does have higher mineral content, and might have corrosive substances, such as salt.
Don't follow the argument, I don't have a car for almost 10 years but when I did I used to clean it every 4-8 weeks, my kitchen's sink gets cleaned every week at least once.
Your sink isn't exposed to UV light, dust, mud, extreme temperature changes, etc. I don't know either way if any of those would have an effect, but it's not at all a clear analogy between a kitchen sink and an automobile.
Maybe my grill is a better comparison. UV light: check. Dust: check. Extreme temp changes: check, and more than a car to boot. Salt: check, there are giant crystals of kosher salt all over it.
You know what I think is the culprit, there must be fragments of regular steel/iron debris on roads that get kicked up and form rust spots like wet steel wool would. Rust is terribly penetrating and can easily stain SS or even porcelain.
Still, a few rust spots aside, I don't think these cars will be rusting out like a 1980's Civic.
It's pointless noise. Twenty other readers likely also laughed to themselves about the line, upvoted and moved on. The commenter will know if their joke was appreciated with upvotes. Nobody needed an extra comment from the peanut gallery.
HN polices noise very hard, because the alternative is half the site is just the first comment thread from reddit that continuously circle jerks the same damn jokes.
I didn't mean that it "staining less" is the correct formal definition, only that thinking of it as "stain less" rather than "stainless" is a more useful definition to keep in mind, as all steel will stain eventually the right conditions.
There are dozen of alloys and also many different way to process them. I have no clue what they used, as I did not find any real specification sheet. But it looks more like a purity problem than the "wrong" alloy, but many alloys will rust, in different ways.
I have no experience in such large object as I work on micro mechanic. I would love to have an expert share a more informed comment.
oh yeah, it does. its just pretty stubborn about it. I have the same sink in my shop, and because there are acids and iron dust in play we get spotting all the time.
the main thing you need to do with stainless is 'passivate' it by putting it in an acid solution that removes as much of the iron from the surface layer as you can, leaving just the chromium and other alloyed elements. particularly on any welds you may have made.
There are grades of stainless steel and specifying the optimum grade for a specific application is an ordinary engineering problem of cost, performance, availability, and anticipated fabrication methods.
Stainless is fairly reactive. The only reason it can appear to be corrosion resistant is "passivation", a surface treatment. If you pierce the passivated layer on a stainless item, it will promptly corrode.
Well the passivization is corrosion. Stainless steel is covered by rusted chromium, which prevents further rust. If you scratch it, you should get another layer of passivization.
They Cybertruck's problem (oversimplifying here, there's a bit more chemistry going on) is that it has too low of a chromium content (as a cost cutting measure). There isn't enough chromium to protect the underlying steel from the conditions it's being exposed to. Or, to put it another way, the steel is corroding faster than the chromium rust/passivization layer can form.
How about HN users that took actual Engineering and specialised in material sciences and are familar with the austenitic stainless steel family?
Meh, forget all that - are you stating that the steel cladding on current Cybertrucks is not showing pitting and corrosion despite claims to the contrary?
Many kinds of stainless steel alloys are totally immune to corrosion under a normal conditions. For example, everything used in the food industry are a such grade. Some of it doesn't rust even at temperatures much higher than 100degC in a much more corrosive atmosphere, than water vapors.
What are "normal conditions"? Because for instance plenty of stainless steel alloys are very much not totally immune to the accelerated corrosion caused by saltwater...and think of how many people live and drive beside seas and oceans.
Don't ask me how I know but if something like a fork grows mould on it in a dishwasher then you run the dishwasher it goes rusty in that spot. I've never found out why this is despite seeing it reproduced on several occasions (again, don't ask for details please).
> I was under the impression that stainless steel didn't rust, albeit obviously depending upon the grade. Like my kitchen sink is made of stainless steel and doesn't have a clearcoat. Has never rusted and won't over decades.
Is your kitchen sink installed outside where it can rain, snow, etc?
To the extent that a truck parked outside does? No, not really. Consider the that a kitchen is typically climate controlled so lower RH means the water left in the sink will evaporate quickly.
It’s not just water either, being outside exposed material to sunlight, dirt, dust, acid rain, temperature extremes, road salt, etc.
A kitchen sink isn't usually exposed to road salt. It's also probably made with a different grade of stainless steel.
(As others have noted, it looks like Tesla intentionally chose a less-resistant alloy for price reasons. This would be consistent with other consumer complaints about their build quality.)
A kitchen is a climate controlled space. The water left in a sink evaporates quickly. There is no acid rain or road salt in a kitchen, etc. Being outside is damaging to materials, moreso than just water exposure.
The average kitchen sink sees a far more challenging environment than you seem to believe. My kitchen sink sees acids, bases, salts of all sorts, and just about every manner of abuse. Boiling, freezing, and rapid changes in between.
It has nothing to do with environment. As others have mentioned, most kitchen sinks, like good "silverware", have a higher chromium content. The CT seems to have a low grade SS.
The (in)famous Delorean clearly used a better grade of stainless steel. There were no problems with Deloreans rusting, with people having said vehicles many decades later will zero body rust. That was specifically the #1 noted feature of the car.
> The average kitchen sink sees a far more challenging environment than you seem to believe. My kitchen sink sees acids, bases, salts of all sorts, and just about every manner of abuse. Boiling, freezing, and rapid changes in between.
Does your sink get coated in salt for weeks at a time? In areas where road salt is used, cars certainly do.
Cars parked outside will often still be wet after a nighttime rain, while water in a climate controlled kitchen sink rapidly evaporates. If your kitchen sink is still wet the morning after washing dishes, you’ve got bigger (mold) problems to deal with.
Even 316 ‘marine grade’ stainless will pit and rust, given enough time outside. I’ve seen it plenty, metal NEMA 4X enclosures rated for outdoor use are made from 304/316 SS, and those eventually rust.
> I was under the impression that stainless steel didn't rust
Nope. "Stainless" steels are just resistant. They're not magically impossible to tarnish, if you want a metal which will not tarnish you need pure (not Jewellery grade) Gold or Platinum.
One thing about your sink: You probably clean it. That's all Tesla advises for these cars. Drove to the store to buy groceries? Now clean your Cybertruck. Took kids to soccer practice? Now clean your Cybertruck. A "weekly" trip to a car wash which might turn out to happen once a month isn't good enough, these vehicles will stain permanently if left.
And that's fine for Elon, he can assign a junior assistant to go wash his Cybertruck. Do you have a junior assistant? No? Then maybe the Cybertruck isn't for you.
> if you want a metal which will not tarnish you need pure (not Jewellery grade) Gold or Platinum
That’s taking things a bit far. These don’t oxidise but there are other metals that won’t corrode (in normal conditions) because they form a protective passive layer like titanium, chromium or aluminium. Stainless steel behaves like that and some grade are almost impossible to corrode under normal conditions. Getting the right steel for the kind of conditions a car would see is not a new problem and we’ve had good solutions for decades. There were stainless steel train carriages in the 1960s, for example. These were pristine after much more than a couple of months and were not washed every other day.
> One thing about your sink: You probably clean it.
The kitchen sink is a good example. It should not rust if you leave water in it for a month, even though a stainless steel knife might get pitted after a couple of times in a dishwasher. The alloys are not the same, and the conditions are different. The knife requires some mechanical properties whilst corrosion resistance is more important for the sink. The number of times you wash your sink does not matter.
All the train cars I can think of were painted, except for some bulk carriers, and usually the bulk carriers I've seen were brown with rust (is that what Cybertruck customers were looking for?) except for the parts covered in graffiti (i.e. paint although not methodically applied). The Cybertruck deliberately isn't painted, presumably this makes it look more "Cyber".
And passenger trains are washed pretty often, it might be as infrequently as once or twice a week (?), but they get washed, that's why they have automated train washing, the train driver just drives through at a slow pace and the machine does the work.
I live next to an ocean, I reckon if "We can use just a steel grade which avoids corrosion" was even an option some the vessels here would just be made of that steel, instead of painted, and yet every single metal vessel I've seen here (the sailing boats and speedboats are often fibreglass) was painted. So if the right grade of steel exists apparently you can't use it to make boats.
> usually the bulk carriers I've seen were brown with rust
Most of the time it’s dust but yes, eventually they rust. It’s also most of the time not stainless steel, because it does not have the right mechanical properties and would be way too expensive for no good reason, considering that they are coated and painted anyway. They also take insane amounts of abuse and it takes decades and a complete lack of maintenance for rust to appear. There really is absolutely no excuse for this in a months-old cars, this is not a case of “duh, everything corrodes”.
> The Cybertruck deliberately isn't painted, presumably this makes it look more "Cyber".
Which is doubly stupid because there are plenty of surface coatings that would give the same look or something equally sci-fi. But then Elon does not know a thing about materials, so it’s not surprising.
> And passenger trains are washed pretty often, it might be as infrequently as once or twice a week (?), but they get washed, that's why they have automated train washing, the train driver just drives through at a slow pace and the machine does the work.
I guarantee you that they do not do it once a week, at least not in most of the world. You can tell by the layers of dust that accumulate.
> live next to an ocean, I reckon if "We can use just a steel grade which avoids corrosion" was even an option some the vessels here would just be made of that steel, instead of painted, and yet every single metal vessel I've seen here (the sailing boats and speedboats are often fibreglass) was painted.
Because, as I said, stainless steel can have fantastic corrosion resistance, but terrible properties otherwise. A ship’s hull needs strong structural integrity, which a sheet of stainless steel is not going to provide. It also needs to be reasonably cheap, which, again, is not the strong suit of high quality stainless steel.
So instead a better alloy is used, and protection is provided by coatings. Just like in cars that were not designed by a maniac.
> So if the right grade of steel exists apparently you can't use it to make boats.
That’s exactly the point. But we don’t use them for ships for other reason than “corrosion resistance is a myth”. If they wanted to use a decent stainless steel in the cybertruck, they could have done it. But they did not, so they made compromises, which results in panels that are too stiff to be adjusted properly, huge gaps, and bad durability.
Proper stainless steal doesn't rust. It's not even coated.
Source: Worked as a mechanical engineer designing industrial meat grinders and cutters. Folks throw in bones, meat, ice, salt and then heat it and grind it to a pulp but it never rusts.
Thank you for bringing your experience to the thread!
How many "improper" varieties of stainless steel are there? Are the fully stainless steels that will not rust under any circumstances exceptionally expensive compared to their less-than-ideal counterparts?
I would assume given my experience with "stainless" steel sinks must mean they're less than ideal quality which is not a shocking surprise.
Depends on the stainless alloy used. Meat grinders would be designed to stand up to salt - they use 304 or 316. Cybertruck's aren't, because they use a 301, which is less corrosion resistant. Meanwhile, 316 will gladly rust if put in a strong enough salt solution for long enough.
Why would a car body not be designed to stand up to salt? You know they put that stuff on roads right? Driving it in winter in much of these here United States (let alone Canada) is equivalent to bathing it in a saline solution and whipping salt nuggets at it. That would be quite the oversight.
All cars are "designed to stand up to salt", including the cybertruck, just in different ways.
Most auto manufacturers use mild steels which are highly susceptible to rust, but mitigate rust by using various types of coatings. This has significant drawbacks because coatings can be compromised by wear, causing the underlying steel to fail to corrosion.
As my engineering professor always said, if you're willing to spend a few million dollars on a car, you can get one that will last a lifetime!
Yes, including the cybertruck. Tesla chose 301 stainless to mitigate rust. It is not a perfect choice. Neither are coatings on mild steel. All cars are designed to resist corrosion but can and will under the right (wrong?) circumstances. There is no perfect material that does everything. All have pros-and-cons.
It does happen with other cars. At my last job, the guy in the cubical next to me had a brand new car that had rust issues fixed under warranty. And traditional automakers don't warranty rust until the hole goes entirely through the body panel (i.e. rust perforation).
Remember, most traditional automakers are using steel with little to no corrosion resistance at all, and are relying on fragile coatings to do the work instead. This is not without its own drawbacks.
I think most body panels have been hot-dip galvanized electroplated then painted since the 80s instead of just exposed without even a clear coat. That should last at least 5-10 years even in the worst North American conditions before you see rust. Unless you imported yourself something low-end originally destined for India or China.
The car you linked to on reddit was a 2018 Grand Cherokee, which is ~7 years old now (5 years old when posted), so it would be expected -- and something you can just touch up. Note that in the comments they suggested it might even be covered under the new-vehicle limited warranty had it occurred in the first 3 years. Which makes sense, I'd consider that to be a material defect within that period of the NVLW.
Note that Tesla will sell you a cybertruck clear coat paint job for $5000. Probably a good investment.
That's true, no other car company would build a car body that can't stand up to normal outdoor conditions. Perhaps there is a reason every other car in the world is painted...
> Proper stainless steal doesn't rust. It's not even coated.
No. Stainless steel comes in many varieties and levels of corrosion resistance. In order to get increased corrosion resistance you trade other mechanical properties. Every choice of steel balances the level of corrosion resistance with the tradeoffs of loss of other properties.
There is no truly corrosion proof steel, just various grades of resistance.
If you kept the truck in your kitchen it probably wouldn’t rust, but if you scratched your dishwasher and subjected it to water and salt I bet it would.
But it is being exposed to harsh cleaning agents all the time. The wear might be different, but let’s not pretend they’re sitting there in the middle of a kitchen unused.
Your claim was also, explicitly:
> but if you scratched your dishwasher and subjected it to water and salt I bet it would.
That is literally what happens every day. All the time.
Dishwashers work by spraying high pressure jets of water filled with abrasives. Water which is usually also full of organic compounds of many varieties.
DeLoreans were raw stainless without a clearcoat. I wonder if they suffered from rust too. Even if they didn't, the Cybertruck is at least nominally supposed to be a "tough" "work vehicle" "man" type thing, not a sports car (although I'm sure many will have an easier life than a DeLorean).
There are additional treatments you can apply to stainless steel to make it more resistant to rusting. There's the passivation process that forms a very corrosion resistant (nearly impervious) film on the surface by depleting the iron in the top layers. It's expensive to do well though and the best methods produce some fairly toxic byproducts because it's done with nitric acid to get the best results.
Nitric acid is just faster, the passivation layer isn't better than you get with plain old citrc acid.
Passivation isn't really enough for a car though, they basically get sand blasted while driving on the road, and every little pit is an area where the material would have to repassivate without rusting. SS301 isn't nearly as good at that game as some other alloys.
From the bolted quote in the article: "I know I heard the story of never take out your Delorean in the rain but I just never read anything about rust and Cybertrucks."
> The leather iPhone case is made from natural leather. Its appearance will change as you use it. It might acquire a patina and might change color due to the oils from your skin and direct sunlight, further enhancing the natural look.
(I have one. Most of my "patina" is bits peeling off; I regret the purchase.)
Not to blindly defend Apple here (it sounds like the case is shoddy), but I think there's a distinction here: they're trying to preempt people returning the case because of a normal leather patina, not because it's falling apart.
Yeah, the latest Apple leather cases are thinly-veneered crap. The cases used to be great, and would actually develop a patina. The current generation is as described: chunks just fall off.
correct. the previous two generations of leather cases were the cheapest leather i've ever seen for iPhones outside or PPU leather. The cases before that were much higher quality.
I've owned several. (and am sad I'll never buy another)
Aside from hard drops, I've never had that experience. My current one has worn down a bit where my finger usually rests on the back, but the leather is fully intact.
Any chance you may have gotten ahold of a fake one? I've seen several online which have very convincing packaging, like this eBay listing:
On the other hand, I have a cheap Apexel leather-backed case for my old iPhone X.
Black plastic (polyurethane, maybe?), metal top panel across the top the height of the camera bulge, and a padded red leather back.
I bought it used on eBay (because I needed a case with a 17mm accessory lens mount to quickly test a lens). It arrived with a scratch, and then over the course of my owning it began to resemble more and more a lovely beaten up leather sofa.
I have never owned a phone case even half as good, and were it not for MagSafe I'd be hunting one down for my current 12. It's superbly comfortable to hold, and the way it shows wear is unlike anything else I've seen. Super cool.
The microweave case I got with the 15 Pro is also of poor quality. Started peeling off within a month. Also, it’s just a poor design. My skin oil and other stuff gets caught in the fabric. So I need to scrub it periodically.
These cases are bad. It does not mean that leather objects developing patina is bullshit. Same for metals. Patina is actually something that can be desirable.
Properties: Excellent corrosion resistance, good formability, non-magnetic (may become slightly magnetic after cold working).
Common Uses: Kitchen equipment, food processing equipment, architectural trim, and general hardware.
Properties: Superior corrosion resistance to 304 in harsh environments, excellent formability, non-magnetic.
Common Uses: Chemical processing equipment, medical devices, marine applications, and any environment where greater corrosion resistance is required.
430 Stainless Steel:
Composition: Approximately 17% Chromium, no Nickel.
Properties: Good corrosion resistance, strong magnetism, lower cost than 300 series.
Common Uses: Domestic appliances, automotive trim, and interior architectural features.
Tesla says they use some proprietary type thats in the 301 series.
I know from personal experience that some types of stainless steel will develop rust spots under certain circumstances - I have some stainless steel table knives that will rust in the dishwasher, and a couple of stainless steel soap dispensers that rusted through entirely, so this doesn't surprise me a lot.
The real question I have is, is this thing actually supposed to be a serious vehicle that you can drive around and keep outside and expect it not to rust/fall apart/whatever? It doesn't seem to be very well-designed, I just sort of assumed it was a meme product like the Boring Company flamethrower that they were selling a few years back. Something that you buy because you have a lot of disposable money and want to show other people you're in on the joke, that's not supposed to really be used for whatever thing it ostensibly does. It seems like if it was supposed to be a real truck, it would be, well, good.
They poured a lot of engineering resources in it. And it has some interesting stuff. But, yes, I am not sure how they expected this to be a wide success.
I would not buy a Tesla today. I used to dream about the Roadster 2.0, but I don't like the direction they've gone in design of the car. I'm hoping the Corvette EV impresses, because that's likely going to be my next car.
Won't the oil seep into plastic parts and damage them? How about the glass getting greasy? My mill gets fairly icky just from metal and wood chips, I don't want to imagine what street goo + oil would be like.
Anyway the way to fuck up stainless steel is to rub some non stainless steel on it which breaks down the passivation layer. This is why you can buy stainless tools (eg Wiha makes driver bits in stainless)to use on fasteners so they won't be contaminated.
A new way to deface a cyber truck would probably be to find a way to invisibly contaminate its surface with regular steel so it doesn't show up until it begins to rust in the pattern you've chosen for your defacement.
The posted probablem may just be little ferrous particles of road grime settling onto the surface and breaking the passivation layer.
I wonder if DeLoreans suffer from this problem too?
> A new way to deface a cyber truck would probably be to find a way to invisibly contaminate its surface with regular steel so it doesn't show up until it begins to rust in the pattern you've chosen for your defacement.
The most important question is how common this is and how severe the average case is. If it only affects one car in 20 then the main effect will be bad PR for Tesla rather than a noticeable diminishment of owner enjoyment.
I suspect its fairly rare tbh, it being common would likely have been raised years ago and a fix (including coating) implemented.
It was pretty openly touted as coat-less stainless steel from the announcement. Their hubris would have never allowed them to add a clear coat.
They still haven’t added rain sensors or proper blind spot monitors because of hubris, and those have been common complaints for years. What makes you believe this would be different?
What even is this answer? People are complaining about it right now. The owner’s manual explicitly states it’s a potential issue. By all accounts this is a known and actively occurring problem.
What, exactly, is there to “find out soon enough”?
Per TFA, the official maintenance documentation says
"To prevent damage to the exterior, immediately remove corrosive substances (such as grease, oil, bird droppings, tree resin, dead insects, tar spots, road salt, industrial fallout, etc.)."
which inidcates that it is a known concern. Essentially nobody who uses CT as an actual vehicle is going immediately remove every little substance that gets on it.
Assuming that Tesla would never let a common issue make it into production seems counter to basically the entire history of the company.
The company that went for cheaper non-automotive touchscreens and then when they started failing under warranty made everyone's car run the air-conditioner to prevent them from delaminating at huge energy cost to the consumers.
There's different grades of SS containing different amounts of things like chromium and molybdenum for corrosion resistance, though I'd argue the "stainless" aspect is basically bullshit for SS items that rust while adhering to their intended use. I have a few large stainless steel kettles that I've done some wacky things with, and neither has any detectable amount of corrosion after years of abuse. Not even anything like the relatively minor corrosion spots seen in the photos.
For a SS electric truck that's marketed as being not only rugged but "badass", it's embarrassing that we're already hearing about rust. It seems L. Ron Musk decided to sell a half-assed product so critics can't as easily point to it as a total failure.
That’s the right way to think about it - it comes in different grades based on the expected level of exposure to things like strong acids or bases but it’s not magic. You can especially see this in appliances where stainless steel was marketed as a premium product but the cheaper lines (or cheaply-made / expensively-marketed) are much less durable than the painted metal they used to use.
Darkroom chemicals versus natural environment? (Though maybe it's pollution or trace elements in organic materials causing the rust / pitting on the CT?).
Darkroom chemicals have varying pH, both acid and alkaline, there’s various salts involved, and there’s a decent amount of metal-on-metal contact in development tanks (you load the film onto a metal reel, and the metal reel goes into a metal tank, and they rub against each other).
Fair, 90% of my darkroom experience was a stat cam and we used plastic tubs and rubber(ized?) rollers. They always stained but since I wasn't using metal...
Hate to say it, but it's a terrible solution. To keep your INDESTRUCTIBLE WORK TRUCK from corrosion in less than 6 months of ownership you have to clean it immediately if it even touches the wild and unrecommended environment of the OUTSIDE.
It is bad user ownership if its expected and advertised as such, chefs knives are sold as fragile and requiring regular maintenance. Tesla advertises this as bullet proof, amphibian, workhorse, f150 breakfast eater jesus truck.
>There's also a absolute ton of stainless alloys, no idea which one they selected for the exterior panels.
301, a less expensive option with very poor corrosion resistance compared to other stainless steels! 304, which is more corrosion resistant, is used for unpainted train cars, and those aren't even exposed to road salt!
From the Society of Automotive Engineers article: "'Tesla’s strategy with this truck is very interesting," observed Dr. David Matlock, professor emeritus at the Colorado School of Mines’ Advanced Steel Processing and Products Research Center. Reviewing Musk’s public comments on Cybertruck online, Matlock surmises that the material is 'very likely a modified version of the lean-alloyed austenitic 301 alloy.'"
Two other things line up for me: the rate of rust is right and I think if they were using 304 they'd want to advertise it as 304, not 30X.
I don't think we should say "it's 301" based on the "surmising" of a 3rd party who didn't look at the steel itself but rather "reviewed musk's public comments".
He could very well be right, but that is definitely speculation rather than fact.
Well I haven't done the depth of research he has, but I believe a key piece of evidence is that in the initial Cybertruck announcement Musk said the Cybertruck uses the same steel as Starship. At that time, Starship prototypes were using 301.
Beet Juice is the best de-icer. Its just expensive.
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Beet juice is better because it doesnt kill the FN trees + flora...
Source, grew up in Lake Tahoe - Salting the roads killed the ice AND the trees on the side of the road.
Also, my grandfather and great grandfather on my stepdads side were beet farmers in Idaho.... and yes - beet juice is WAY better for the environment, but you have to do all that farming first. Then Juicing, then trucking then....
> CDOT uses a variety of products to treat Colorado highways during a winter storm. All snow removal products contain salt with added corrosion inhibitors used to prevent or remove the buildup of ice and snow on roads and minimize the impact on vehicles.
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> CDOT makes an anti-icing brine mix in-house at a rate of 42 cents per gallon. This product is applied hours before a snowstorm or ice storm and will appear as white stripes on the roadway once dry.
> Unlike other anti-icing products used throughout the country, CDOT's brine mix contains a corrosion inhibitor, which helps prevent damage on both vehicles and infrastructure. Once snow begins to fall, or the temperature drops below freezing, crews will stop using the anti-icer and switch over to de-icers.
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> Solid de-icers are used for ant-icing and de-icing on roadways during winter weather conditions. CDOT uses two types of solid de-icers:
> Ice slicer — made of granular salt and magnesium chloride.
> Sand or sand/salt mixture — mainly used in high elevations and the eastern plains where more extreme cold temperatures exist, and more traction is needed.
It's an iPhone: beautiful (eye of the beholder and all that) when new, but everyone will know you need to wrap it and cover it up for regular daily use.
I’m careful with my iPhones (which mostly means not throwing them around and setting them face down on flat surfaces) and have never put them in cases. No problem.
https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/rust-spot...