I spotted probably the only cybertruck in Taiwan the other day. It was waiting to turn on a busy road, and people were jogging over to take a picture of it. "Woah cool! Awesome! Handsome!" Lots of stuff like that being said.
People share ai slop cat pictures on Facebook.
There's HN commenters, there's the subset of HN commenters smugly criticizing all the very obvious flaws of things like this... And then there's just the entire rest of the world which simply does not give a shit.
Everyone then complains that the automakers aren't making what they want... But the blame isn't with the manufacturers, the blame rests with consumers and how mindlessly apathetic they are to... basically everything.
This is not apathy in my opinion. This is rational. Cars are just tools. Metal boxes to enable mobility. Car people have turned them into this cult of personality that I think is batshit insane. It's not just cars mind you, we do this with watches, shoes, you name it and it's all very peculiar, but cars are my pet peeve because they are so obviously wasteful and dangerous. Not just directly like killing 40k per year in the US alone, but also through obvious geopolitics.
People want to move around and they want to smile smugly and think they are better than others. Those two things are pretty much universal. I say we separate those issues. You can move around all you want but smiling smugly you do in some other way than in your "car". We'll have really good public transport and you'll assert your dominance in some other fashion. I personally recommend we reintroduce dueling to the death.
By the way I don't know anybody that would buy a new car every two year to keep up with the Joneses and I live in a pretty "Jonesy" place. That's a bit hyperbolic at least in my neck of the woods (Netherlands). Most people here keep their cars until they become unreliable.
So the rest of the world not caring doesn't matter as the audience for this is probably a million people at best
The cybercar turned out to be a massive failure though. So, it kind of mattered?