“More useful than a truck” and “faster than a sports car”: This is how Tesla boss Musk praised the Cybertruck at the start of sales. However, the top model “Cyberbeast” costs $100,000.
It is the first new Tesla model in almost four years: two years late, the US electric car pioneer started selling its futuristic-looking Cybertruck yesterday. Company boss Elon Musk handed over the first electric pickup trucks to buyers at a celebration at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Expensive, more expensive, Cybertruck
The starting price is just under 61,000 dollars (almost 56,000 euros). All-wheel drive versions start at $80,000. For the most powerful variant, “Cyberbeast,” customers even have to shell out $100,000. As a reminder: Tesla originally targeted a starting price of $39,900 when it presented the vehicle in 2019. The price range should be up to $70,000.
Welcome in the future
When introducing the Cybertruck, Tesla boss Musk, in his usual manner, was not sparing with superlatives: “I think this is our best product,” said Musk. “I think that’s the unique thing on the road. Finally the future will look like the future.” In fact, the gray Cybertruck with its angular shapes is reminiscent of a mixture of a tank and a stealth bomber and of science fiction films such as “Blade Runner” or “Mad Max”.
The Cybertruck is “more useful than a truck” and “faster than a sports car,” Musk explained in a video in which the Cybertruck first tows a Porsche 911 and then beats another gasoline-powered 911 in a short race. “Basically, it’s an incredibly useful truck. It’s not just a showpiece like me.”
Tesla’s chief designer no longer dares
Meanwhile, Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen seems to have learned from the mishap when the vehicle was presented in 2019. At that time, he wanted to demonstrate how unbreakable the vehicle’s armored glass was by throwing a steel ball on the Cybertruck’s window. But this fragmented and caused a lot of ridicule on social networks.
Yesterday, von Holzhausen repeated the test – but he chose a baseball as the object to throw and only executed his throw very half-heartedly. With success: this time the side windows remained undamaged.
That went wrong: throwing a steel ball caused the Cybertruck’s windows to shatter in 2019.
Fiercely competitive pickup truck market
With the Cybertruck, Tesla is entering the highly competitive pick-up market in the USA. Last year, according to Car & Driver magazine, the three best-selling cars in the United States were pickup models, led by Ford’s F-Series with more than 650,000 sold.
As an electric pickup, the Cybertruck competes with Ford’s $50,000 F-150 Lightning, Rivian Automotive’s R1T with a starting price of $73,000, and General Motors’ larger and more powerful $96,000-plus Hummer EV.
Doubts about Cybertruck success
Will the Cybertruck be the next success for Tesla? Experts are skeptical. They point to the high production costs – so it is questionable whether the model will be financially worthwhile for Tesla. Musk himself said a few months ago that the company had “dug its own grave” with the model because the unusual vehicle required so many new production processes.
Currently only small numbers of the Cybertruck are being produced. Start-up difficulties had delayed production several times. Musk himself recently had to admit that Tesla would probably not reach the target of building up to 250,000 Cybertrucks per year before 2025.
There’s also the obvious: the Cybertruck looks completely different than traditional pickup trucks. This was criticized and sometimes even laughed at by some car design experts. Now the Cybertruck has to prove itself on the market: Do American pickup buyers want a vehicle with such an unusual shape or do they prefer classic pickups? In any case, the stock market is skeptical: Tesla shares temporarily fell by around two percent in after-hours US trading.