Elon Musk is set to unveil Tesla’s iconoclastic take on the American pickup truck on Thursday, four years after shocking the automotive world with designs for the Cybertruck. Musk has planned an event at Tesla’s Austin headquarters to commemorate the first Cybertruck deliveries to customers, whose design has been compared to a futuristic, sometimes dystopian future akin to “Blade Runner” or “Mad Max.”
Because of sluggish demand for electric vehicles, other automakers have delayed capital investments. Even as its stock price has remained high, Tesla has implemented numerous price cuts.
“This is an important launch for Musk and the Tesla brand,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives in an email to AFP.
Following accusations that the billionaire entrepreneur and his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, have promoted a growing wave of anti-Semitism, Musk has faced even more scrutiny than usual.
“We do not believe the Tesla brand has been negatively impacted, but it’s a careful balance for Elon he is trying to tightrope,” said Ives, who praised Musk’s recent trip to Israel after the latest X controversy.
Design that is difficult to implement
Musk created quite a stir in November 2019 when the prototype of the angular, uniformly gray Cybertruck piqued everyone’s interest, even if it wasn’t universally adored.
“It doesn’t look like anything else,” said Musk.
A vehicle designer performed a demonstration at the launch event to highlight the truck’s toughness. Its body was unharmed after being hit with a sledgehammer, but the window cracked when it was hit with a metal ball.
However, the vehicle’s unusual styling, which includes large flat plates of unbent stainless steel, poses manufacturing challenges, according to Art Wheaton, an expert on transportation industries at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
“It may look cool, but it’s extremely difficult to manufacture successfully,” Wheaton said.
The vehicle was originally scheduled to begin production in 2021 with a starting price of $39,900.
Musk has remained effusive about the design while attempting to limit expectations about the vehicle’s commercial potential, saying last month that “we dug our own grave with Cybertruck.”
“Cybertruck is one of those special products that comes along only once in a long while,” he said. “And special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market, to reach volume, to be prosperous.”
Demand is not an issue, according to Musk, who has received over one million Cybertruck orders. However, making it affordable will be “insanely difficult,” according to Musk, who expects to reach a production capacity of 250,000 units by 2025.
‘Attention-grabber’
Despite being less common in some areas outside the United States, pickup trucks have a distinct and dominant presence on American roads, generating m
According to Car & Driver, the three best-selling models in the United States last year were pickups, led by Ford’s F series with more than 650,000 trucks sold, followed by General Motors and Ram (Stellantis) models.
According to CFRA equity analyst Garrett Nelson, the biggest question surrounding Thursday’s event will be updated retail pricing of the vehicle, which he expects to have risen to around $50,000 due to supply chain pressures and higher material costs.
Nelson described the Cybertruck as a “much higher-risk” product than Tesla’s current fleet of vehicles.
Wheaton, the Cornell expert, is skeptical that the Cybertruck will be a big seller, owing to its “polarizing” design, but he notes that Musk “has done a good job of lowering expectations.”
However, even if Cybertruck turns out to be a niche product, Musk can still profit if it attracts customers to the brand. Wheaton compared the effect to the Chevrolet Corvette, which does not sell well but attracts buyers to other GM vehicles.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a massive success in terms of selling big numbers,” Wheaton predicted. “It works as a kind of attention-grabber.”