Tesla delivered the first vehicles of its “Cybertruck” electric pickup truck on Thursday. Company boss Elon Musk personally handed over several of the futuristic-looking vehicles to their owners. The price range is 50 percent higher than the range Musk originally announced.
The cheapest version – with rear-wheel drive – costs $61,000, the all-wheel drive model costs $80,000. Later there will be a version called Cyberbeast with a particularly high range for around $100,000. When the Cybertruck was presented four years ago, production was expected to begin by the end of 2021 and a price range between 40,000 and 70,000. How much the first “Cybertruck” buyers paid for their cars remained unclear. “We have a car here that experts said was impossible, that it would never be built,” said Musk at the Tesla factory in Austin, Texas. In fact, the technical data falls short of what was announced: instead of the promised 500 miles (a good 800 kilometers), the best version in this regard only manages 340 miles (almost 550 kilometers). With an additional battery pack, it should last 470 miles (a good 750 kilometers). With the Cybertruck, Tesla is entering an extremely lucrative market segment in the USA. Pick-ups are among the most popular vehicles there. With 2.5 million units sold annually, pickup trucks remain the most important segment in North America. Last year, the Chevrolet Silverado was the best-selling model in the country, and in recent years it was often Ford’s F-Series. Electric pickups have been slow sellers so far. The US car giants now have their own electric pickups on offer. However, so far they are selling in small numbers. In the last quarter, GM only sold 18 Silverado EV cars – and around 143,500 vehicles of the model with combustion and hybrid drives. 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. Super-hard steel body Tesla wants to build up to 250,000 “Cybertruck” pick-ups per year – but this brand Probably not achieved before 2025, Musk recently said. The “Cybertruck” as a large stainless steel triangle looks completely different than traditional pick-ups. This was criticized or ridiculed by some car design experts. The unusual angular shape is due to the fact that the steel alloy developed especially for the “Cybertruck” is so hard that it can only be bent to a limited extent, Musk emphasized on Thursday. The “Cybertruck” does not tip over to the side because its center of gravity is so low. Tesla’s design chief Franz von Holzhausen repeated the demonstration of the strength of the “Cybertruck” windows that went wrong four years ago. On Thursday, 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.
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