Tesla delivered the first “Cybertrucks”.

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. “We have a car here that experts said was impossible, that it would never be built,” Musk said at the Tesla factory in Austin, Texas. The cheapest version costs $61,000 – and the most expensive version costs $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.

Up to 250,000 Cybertrucks per year

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 offer their own electric pickups. However, they have so far sold 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.

Tesla wants to build up to 250,000 “Cybertruck” pickups per year – but probably won’t reach that mark before 2025, Musk recently said. 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 on Thursday. The “Cybertruck” doesn’t 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 “Cybertrucks” 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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