In a year or two they'll all look like this and the drivers will discuss who has the nicest patina
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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They wanted a mad max car.
I know what my evening plans are when I find one 
:calvin-peeing:
Slices of balogna, not just for sandwiches any more
Bleach is an excellent oxidizer!
The problem is the type of stainless steel they're using would rust even faster with a normal clear coat. Elon mentioned maybe offering a tungsten carbide coating option which should be rust-resistant, but it would likely be VERY expensive and prone to cracking
Yeah, they're just using a 300 series stainless steel, probably 302 or 304. It's 18/8 or 18/10 steel and is basically the same stuff that your silverware or kitchen sink may be made from. It turns out that when stuff sticks to stainless steel or it stays damp for a long time, it will in fact tarnish. Cars are of course famous for being located in damp environments such as outside, and getting things stuck to them.
Putting a clear coat or a carbide coating on it won't really help forever as they will eventually chip. Tungsten carbide is much more brittle, so you're right, it will crack. It's a really dumb choice for a car and seems like one Elon came up with after seeing a drill bit commercial that said tungsten carbide was stronger than stainless steel.
Literally this whole car was designed by the dumbest fucking guy on earth, idk why anyone thought that any single part of it wouldn't be the absolute worst.
30X stainless steel! he puts X in fucking everything!
Yeah, total nonsense, they're just trying to pretend it's some magical proprietary blend, but that's not how stainless steel works. They claim it has superior properties to 304 but from independent testing, it's inferior if any different. The only apparent mechanical advantages it has are when compared to a much thinner panel, which is a nonsense comparison.
The entire point of stainless steel (note that it isn't called rustless steel) is that you can wash rust off of its surface.
What's kinda funny is that there was this era of marketing where everything was called some version of The eXXtreme MaXX PowerBlast eXXtra and Elon Musk definitely lived through this and as a 30-something year old man, no less.
While the rest of the world moved on from this phase obviously he never quite managed to.
It was called Generation X. He is one. I am actually too, but windows XP put me off of X modifiers for good.
So I get different grades of stainless, and that stainless still rusts and all that but what's the problem with a clearcoat? besides elon's ego that is...
It will eventually chip and might make things worse when it does, but that applies to clearcoat on any car to some extent. It still seems preferable to having them rust in normal ass weather when they're a month old or less
The entire point of using unpainted stainless steel on the cyber truck was because the DeLorean used it. 
Why did the DeLorean use it, other than for stainless steel's superior flux dispersal properties making it the only choice for a car-based time machine in 1985? It's durable and really easy to clean, so basically a surface you never have to worry about other than just simply washing it every day or two, something people tooootally would do. The DeLorean had absolutely absurd priorities for 1981, wanting to be a fast and sporty but also highly fuel efficient car that required as little maintenance as possible. It failed on all of these fronts, of course. It was largely regarded as a joke or a flop, and the choice of a DeLorean for Back to the Future, especially paired with Doc's comment, "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?" was intended to be a joke about Doc's lack of understanding of style. People did laugh at his dumb car choice in 1985's theatres.
The DeLorean was an early 80s bazingamobile that failed at everything so hard it took one of the most celebrated car designers of the time, John DeLorean, out of the industry completely (and embroiled him in cocaine trafficking, the most 1980s crime ever.) History rhymes, so I can't wait to watch how this absolutely destroys the last remaining true believers in Elon.
yeah I kinda figured it was just elon's ego/bazinganess
it finally takes him out either literally or out of the spotlight
Amazing that people thought "ah yes, all you have to do is wash it twice a week or more and not let it get too wet for too long" was lower maintenance than a paint job
Yeah, it was really one of those things where the boss man says it must happen so, therefore it must happen, even if he's blatantly wrong and it's a terrible idea.
John DeLorean was basically the Musk of the early 80s car manufacturer scene, but actually had some engineering chops which is why his meteoric rise wasn't just purely based around a reality distortion field or having a shitload of money to do whatever he wanted, but gradually became a problem of both of those over time.
The actual DeLorean car was a great example of the sunk cost fallacy and the bad idea creep that's basically guaranteed to arise from cultivating that sort of cult of personality. It was supposed to release in the mid/late 70s, and be an affordable car that was class-revolutionising for the best fuel economy, speed, acceleration, safety, and ease of ownership. (Any of that sound familiar?)
Instead, the car came out several years later than it should have, was marketed with the dumbest campaign of all time (gold plated cars), and achieved none of its intended goals: it instead trailed behind the competition in every single category.
What's super funny is that over on R*ddit there are people claiming that stainless steel never rusts and how some dude has had a piece of stainless steel sitting out in the elements for years and how it looks the same as the first day it got put there.
Of course it depends on the properties of the stainless steel used, but nobody could bear to tolerate this fact.
I've seen superficial rust on stainless steel stuff like kitchen sinks before. Did it rust through like a piece of iron sitting in the rain? Of course not. But that's not the problem we're talking about here.
Not to drop a bazinga on this (I dropped out early, never paid enough attention in science class etc. and I'm no engineer) but I was wondering if it wouldn't be somehow practical to hook up a sacrifical anode to the panels. Yeah, it would add some extra cost and weight but Tesla would probably be able to bill people for their 5-yearly Flux Defibrillator™ replacement for the low price of $799 and Musk fanboys would look at the bill and be like "Yeah, I could tell there was some flux interference happening in the past couple of months..." and everybody would be happy and the CyberFukk wouldn't look like a rolling rust bucket. (But I'm probably completely overestimating how simple it would be so don't listen to what I have just said.)
There was one person in the mix who trusted the process though and was giving out armchair advice for how you could preserve the patina that would develop over time and all I could think about was how the "patina" in reality would be these roughly circular blotches of varying diameters like the panels were sporting cigarette burns and coffee cup stains all over the place.
I just can't get over how you can have a collection of the most divergent delusional thinking all happily coexisting in the same place where the overwhelming consensus is that there is actually no problem with the panels discolouring and rusting at all yet having someone else saying that it would look totally cool to have splotchy rust covering the body of their cybertruck and how they are looking forward to it.
Sacrificial anodes basically don't work on cars, and what little benefit they have experimentally shown in that use case is both very minimal and extremely situational.
The problem is that an electrical current has to flow directly from the sacrificial anode to the cathode body panels through the corrosive liquid, in addition to a physical connection through the frame. The very specific scenario in which they've shown to be effective in cars is when driving through large amounts of high-salinity water, like a really deep melty puddle on a salted road, where a significant portion of the car is actively wet. This is something that only really happens for a few moments at most, and only occasionally happens during a limited time period in only a portion of the world.
It's also less effective than simply using a phosphate underbody coating, so... Not really going to work.
Well at least you proved me right about not paying attention in science class lol
Given what you've said, I think there's a reasonable chance that Elon Musk and his team will respond to RustGate in 2024/2025 by offering a sacrifical anode as a "marine-grade" optional extra to get people who lack science literacy like me hyped up to shell out even more cash while Elon Musk can wink and nod to the camera over his ridiculous claims of how the Bladerunner's favourite car can also function as a boat "for short periods".
The problem is the type of stainless steel they're using would rust even faster with a normal clear coat.
what? why?
Polished stainless steel doesn't take clear coat well without a primer, which would ruin the aesthetic of the car because primers aren't clear. Even worse, Tesla is using a proprietary steel that is particularly bad at adhering a clear coat. Clear coat would flake easily. Increased surface area from flaking results in faster rusting
I mean, presumably you could go for a non-clear finish. Car painting actually involves quite a lot of different layers to protect the car (currently looking at things to do in the garage).
If you really wanted to, there are some silly chrome themed paints out there, which I'm sure would chip easily, but cheaper to replace than stainless panels with silly tolerances.
Wouldn't a layer of clear epoxy do it?
Just a guess: Probably too finnicky to do as well the thickness it'd be at would make ripples in the sheet work even more obvious.
Epoxy holds well if the surface you're sticking it to is rough. It wouldn't adhere to polished steel very well
Might as well get it wrapped. At least you can change the color.
It's not just rust, it's cyber rust
We have reached the point in capitalism where basically where the "premium" products aren't even as well put together as cheap ones from decades ago. Not like this is shocking coming from Tesla Motors, but even the newest and top-spec iPhone's are having staining issues (at least those can keep water out so that is nice). Can't even do your own repairs without getting permission and losing unrelated features if not buying their parts. Low-end or high-end is meant to just be completely junked and replaced. And somehow still get applauded for combating environmental damages.
Its very funny that there is now a market for tech related high-end products that bilk rich folks. Makes me think of those new 4k apple ar headsets as well.
What's really funny about this is that the original DeLoreans are still not rusted. Which means Elon cheaped out on the steel grade. They say it uses "300 series" rather than a specific one like 316, which the later DeLorean models had.
congrats Tesla for developing a stainless steel that stains!!
stain less not stain proof
the stains were also stainless steeless stains that obviously were able to stain the stainless steel
Alright unpopular opinion, but that would actually make them look kinda cool.
it could look cool but it mostly won't
I'm just imagining how bad one of these is gonna look after a winter in the salt belt
If they can even get a charge in below freezing weather.
Its stain-less not stain-never.
Remember when the bazinga brain demanded perfect, to the millimeter, levels of precision with the design? I'd hate to have my rust bucket's dimensions make an eyesore.
Yep. To hundredths of a mil, his big engineering brain not even realising then that heat causes major expansion/contraction. So engineering joins to super big high precision will actually cause more problems than it solves.
To 10 microns, or about 100 times more precise than the mm
I wonder how many microns of difference rust makes on the surface of a cyber truck
Un-su-stain-able 
This is such a Homer car, well done Elon.