Back in the late 70s, a buddy of mine said that, “if it’s only about transportation, we would all be driving around in wooden powered Peoples machines“.
Basically what they had behind the Iron Curtain. As soon as the Soviet empire fell apart, most of those old cars were abandoned in favor of better cars from somewhere else.
But in developed countries, the segment for basic transportation with no thought to the look is in the company car market (non-executive). For trucks, companies buy fleets of pickups pretty close to the base model available from the Big 3. For cars it's usually a basic sedan or probably basic CUV today.
Back when I was in high school and college I spent a lot of time at my sister's in Bakersfield, CA. You saw a lot of Chevy Impalas and Ford Crown Victorias around town. My sister got assigned one from time to time when she was on call to run out to oil wells being drilled (she's a petroleum Geologist). When she had a company car she was asked on several occasions (which company?) without any questions about whether she worked for an oil company. That was a given.
When I needed a car I ended up buying a cheap Impala that had been a company car.
Now that I comprehend this post in its entirety, I see what you mean, I think.
Happy to say that time will tell on all your points...and for the record I think the opposite.
Above $30k, cars are still utility, functional and mainstream. When you get into the >$70k range I start to agree. Regardless, once Robotaxi's are in service it simply won't matter as you'll be paying less than a urban bus ride/mile to get where you are going.
Base CTs will be Robotaxi's eventually, but they will most likely come last. And it depends on solving FSD so there's that.
Just like the Model Y, once the chip issue and battery constraints are gone, I believe CT will ramp to way over 1M/yr.
If robo-taxies ever happen. FSD without a driver could end up being one of those things like fusion power and flying cars, always just around the corner. FSD has been that sort of promise for several years now.
I think regulators will never approve FSD without a driver always watching and able to take over because the software will never be able to handle every edge condition. Commercial airliners have been mostly flying themselves for decades. When I was at Boeing in the late 1980s there was a joke that the next generation flight deck had one pilot and a dog. The pilot's job was to feed the dog and the dog's job was to bite the pilot if they touched anything.
Flying a commercial airliner today is a pretty boring job. 99% of the time it involves watching the computer fly the plane. Driving with FSD may turn into that and get no further. Without the ability to eliminate the driver robo-taxis are a never going to become a big thing.
As for the CT, I think it might be the AMD Pacer of trucks. The Pacer had amazingly high sales at first and AMC couldn't make enough the first year. Sales started dropping after that and it was discontinued only a couple of years later. There are still enthusiasts today keeping the last remaining cars running, but it turned out to have a niche following. Some people really loved it, but that was a limited market. Once that market was saturated, they had trouble selling more of them.
Sandy Munro has said he does not see the CT competing with the Big 3's truck market, where he sees a squeeze is with Jeep. He thinks the CT will be a compelling alternative to Jeep's line up. Rivian is already in that space with a truck that is more conventional looking.
Personally I find the CT pretty ugly. i wish Tesla had done something more aimed at the conventional truck market. If they had done that, the CT would be a big seller. The Ford F150 Lightning will probably sell as many as Ford can make because even if end consumers think it's not macho enough, fleet buyers, who buy at least 50% of trucks, go on cost of ownership as the #1 criteria and any truck that is cheaper to keep is going to the top of the list. The F150 Lightning also has another thing that fleet buyers are looking for: compatibility with all the utility beds made for full sized pick ups. The fact you can pull off (or order without) the standard bed and drop any utility bed made for an F150 on there is a big selling point for corporate and government sales.
Once work people get used to using an electric truck at work, they will want one for themselves and will likely go for a Ford too. Tesla's only sales point for the CT over other brands of truck is the supercharger network. With Tesla's poor service center capacities and squirrelly CEO, corporate buyers will likely pass on Tesla even if they are priced competitively and they don't need a custom bed. Brand loyalty within the truck market is very strong and a company needs a very compelling truck to win people over to a new brand.
Sandy Munro has said that the bulk of reservations of the CT are people who never owned a truck before. He expects a lot of them are going to be dismayed at how big the thing is and the used market might get flooded with lightly used CTs after a year or so.