Long waiting list
Musk hands over the first “Cybertruck”
December 1, 2023, 12:59 a.m
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Electric pickups have been on the US market for a long time – but hardly anyone buys them. This could change now. Around two years later than planned, Tesla is bringing its “Cybertruck” onto the market. Demand for the angular electric monster is high, but buyers need patience.
Tesla has begun the long-awaited delivery of the “Cybertruck”. Company boss Elon Musk personally handed over several of the futuristic-looking electric pickups to the first buyers. When the Cybertruck was presented four years ago, there was talk of production starting by the end of 2021. The price range promised was between $40,000 and $70,000. The cheapest version now costs 61,000 dollars (around 56,000 euros). The most powerful variant, “Cyberbeast,” is said to be available starting at $100,000. It is unclear how much the first “Cybertruck” buyers paid for their cars. Regardless of the price, demand is high: So far, a million buyers have put themselves on the waiting list with a deposit of $100.
With the Cybertruck, Tesla is entering an extremely lucrative market segment in the USA. Pickups are among the most popular vehicles there. Last year, the Chevrolet Silverado was the best-selling model in the country; in previous years it was often Ford’s F-Series. The US car giants now have their own electric pickups on offer, but there is little demand for them. In the last quarter, GM sold just 18 Silverado EV cars – and around 143,500 vehicles of the model with combustion and hybrid drives.
Difficult series production
The major manufacturers attribute this not only to initial bottlenecks in production, but also to a currently fundamentally lower interest in the more expensive electric vehicles. Tesla wants to build up to 250,000 “Cybertruck” pickups per year – but Musk assumes that this mark will probably not be reached before 2025. “We dug our own grave with Cybertruck,” he said recently, given the enormous challenges in series production.
The “Cybertruck” as a large stainless steel triangle looks completely different than traditional pickups. This was criticized or ridiculed by some car design experts. The unusual angular shape is because the steel alloy developed especially for the “Cybertruck” is so hard that it can only be bent to a limited extent, Musk emphasized at the Tesla factory in Austin, Texas. Tesla’s design chief Franz von Holzhausen repeated the demonstration of the strength of the “Cybertrucks” windows that went wrong four years ago. This time a steel ball he threw actually bounced off the target. At that time the windows showed cracks. Tesla also previously demonstrated how the body withstood bullets from a Thompson submachine gun. However, experts then emphasized that the Tommy Guns were designed more than 100 years ago – and the vehicle would be more vulnerable with more modern weapons.