Tesla will have a delivery event for its long-delayed Cybertruck in the third quarter, according to CEO Elon Musk.
We are now officially in the third quarter.
Though Musk made that statement back in April during the first quarter earnings call, he restated in May that Tesla will “finally…start delivering production of Cybertrucks later this year.”
And anecdotal local reports point to Cybertruck production lines getting ready for production this month. Not to mention the increasing frequency of camo Cybertrucks spotted in the wild and, more importantly, an appearance last month in Los Angeles with Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen in the driver’s seat.
Reason for doubt?
Musk has made this sort of promise before. The pickup was once slated to begin production in late 2021. It was then pushed back to 2022, then to 2023.
And when Musk has talked about the Cybertruck at events this year, he spends a lot of time emphasizing how hard it is to manufacture:
“So the Cybertruck is a hard car to make…because it’s a such a radically new design…actually you can’t just use conventional methods of manufacturing…
Had to invent a whole new set of manufacturing techniques in order to build an exoskeleton based car instead of an endoskeleton based car…extremely non-trivial to build the Cybertruck but we’re making good progress.”
But Musk may be telling the truth this time
Musk has gotten more specific about production targets and manufacturing challenges — a good sign because his comments are more grounded in reality as Tesla gets closer to actual production.
“There will be an s-curve of production so it’ll be slow at first and then…ramping up,” he said in May.
He went on to say production may be between 250,000 and 500,000 a year — depending on demand — but he added this:
“We also needed [to] improve the the production cost efficiency…which is going to be also a very, very hard thing.”
Affordable? Probably not at first
“It’s going to be hard to make [it] affordable because it is a new car, a new manufacturing method,” Musk said in May.
Musk had originally said in 2019 that it will start at $39,000. That appears increasingly unrealistic in the initial years of production.
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