Elon Musk’s Latest Details on the Tesla Cybertruck

The first deliveries of the Tesla Cybertruck are expected to take place later this year, and there are still a handful of unknowns about the futuristic truck. In recent weeks, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared some details about the vehicle, alongside some included in the automaker’s latest Master Plan.

Above: A Tesla Cybertruck replica (Image: Casey Murphy / EVANNEX).

In its Master Plan 3 unveiled on April 5, Tesla stated that the Cybertruck will have a 100kWh battery pack. However, it’s not clear if this refers to a base model or another specific variant, as reported by The Street. The battery pack size is the same as those of the Model S and X, Tesla’s premium-level sedan and SUV, despite the truck being a wider and heavier vehicle than these.

Cybertruck rivals in the electric pickup sector include the Rivian R1T and the Ford F-150 Lightning, which feature 135kWh and 131kWh battery packs, respectively. The Cybertruck will also include a 3,500-pound payload capacity, adjustable air suspension, and lockable exterior storage measuring about 100 cubic feet.

Final specs for the production model have not yet been shared by Tesla, although a number of sightings of pre-production Cybertrucks have been reported around the automaker’s Fremont, California plant. Additionally, it’s not clear what the Cybertruck will cost, but some predict a base sticker price as low as $40,000.

Musk also said during the recent first-quarter earnings call that Tesla is anticipating a delivery event for the Cybertruck, which will likely take place near the end of Q3. Volume production of the Cybertruck is slated for 2024. Meanwhile, Tesla is still finishing up the Cybertruck production line at Giga Texas, and the company is building Alpha versions of the truck for testing.

As for ramping up production, Musk said that the Cybertruck will follow a similar S-curve to Tesla’s other cars. Despite following a similar production ramp-up, Musk said earlier this month that the Cybertruck was a “very radical product,” adding that "it's not made in the way that other cars are made."

On April 2, Musk tweeted that he walked the Cybertruck production line at Gigafactory Texas for several hours, saying that it was “gonna be awesome” and that it “feels like the future.” Just a few days prior, Musk noted his expectation that the Cybertruck would “change the look of the roads,” echoing the later sentiment that the vehicle felt like something from the future.

The design has been polarizing, to say the least, but it’s hard to argue with the vehicle’s more than 1.5 million reservations. Leaning into a sci-fi, brutalist design, Tesla Head of Design Franz von Holzhausen has also pointed out how it was the company’s intention to make something totally new.

"We've pulled people away from their kind of normal comfort zone and brought them something that's just radically different and will be on the street radically different and, you know, if you're not used to attention might be a little tough in the beginning," von Holzhausen said in January.

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