Tesla Cybertruck, Elon Musk’s electric pick-up, is ready to hit the market

Billionaire Musk has scheduled at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, a “delivery event” to customers of what in countries like Mexico or in the Latin communities of the United States would be a “troca” (for truck, truck or van in English), although in a cybernetic version.

As Musk said, The car is intended to be a cross between a “Blade Runner” model and the ‘Wet Nellie’, an amphibious vehicle inspired by the Lotus Esprit, seen in “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977) of the James Bond saga. Although it also reminds us of the cars from “Mad Max Fury Road”.

The late debut comes as other automakers have delayed investments due to slow demand for electric vehicles. Tesla itself has undertaken numerous price cuts, even as its share value has remained elevated.

“This is an important launch for Musk and the Tesla brand,” Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives told AFP.

For businessman Musk, this is also an opportunity to turn the page after a new controversy in mid-November when he was accused of echoing anti-Semitic speeches from platform X (formerly Twitter), which he owns.

“We don’t believe the Tesla brand has been negatively affected, but the balance is fragile for Elon, which is walking a tightrope,” said Ives, who praised Musk’s recent trip to Israel, where he visited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In November 2019, Musk launched the prototype of the Cybertruck, angular and uniformly gray. “It’s like nothing else,” Musk said at the time, testing its resilience. The vehicle withstood several sledgehammer blows on its door without damage, but the window shattered when it was hit with a metal ball.

The vehicle’s style, which uses large flat plates of non-arching stainless steel, poses manufacturing challenges, said Art Wheaton, a transportation industries expert at Cornell University. “It looks cool, but it’s extremely difficult to manufacture successfully,” he said.

Musk has acknowledged that they have dug their “own grave with the Cybertruck”, since “it is one of those special products that only appear from time to time (…) and the special products that appear from time to time are incredibly difficult to carry to the market, achieve volume and be prosperous.

With more than a million orders, demand is not a problem, Musk said. But making it affordable will be “incredibly difficult,” he admitted. He hopes to reach production of 250,000 units by 2025.

The manufacturer enters an already occupied electric pickup market, particularly by its rival Rivian, but also by General Motors and Ford. The latter launched the F-150 Lightning last year, an electric version of its best-selling model in the United States. Although they are more conventional designs.

In 2022, the three best-selling models in the US were pickup trucks, led by Ford’s F series with more than 650,000 units sold, according to Car and Driver magazine.

The biggest question is updating the sale price, initially marked at $39,900, said Garrett Nelson of financial intelligence firm CFRA. He believes the base version will be priced at around $50,000, an amount equivalent to its peers on the market.

The Cybertruck has a range of 400km to 800km and a towing capacity of more than 6 tons, depending on the model. Nelson called the Cybertruck a “much higher risk” product compared to Tesla’s current fleet of cars, but noted that Musk “has done a good job of lowering expectations.”

Wheaton, the Cornell expert, compared it to the Chevrolet Corvette, which is not a big seller but attracts buyers to other GM vehicles.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a huge success in terms of selling large quantities,” he predicted. “It works as a kind of attention getter,” she added.