The Cybertruck is powerful, and it can tow more than 250 miles in a day or two weeks: Musk tells Investors Day in Austin
Musk said at the Investor Day that there was no demand for the Cybertruck. But landing even 15 percent of the reservationists seems optimistic because the vehicle is running late and isn’t global—Cybertruck won’t be for sale outside of the US, Canada, and Mexico for some time, and doesn’t appear to meet safety regulations in the European Union and Australia anyway.
250 miles per charge is a crucial figure for the Cybertruck and Cyberbeast models. Compare that to plug-powered competitors including the Rivian R1T (which gets 270 to 350 miles a charge) and the Ford F-150 Lightning (which gets between 230 and 320 miles), and that’s not as impressive as some were hoping.
The Cybertruck is powerful, though, as Musk emphasized during the Austin event, which included footage of the truck’s premium model outpacing a Porsche 911—while towing another Porsche 911.
The base model, which has a single-motor and is rear-wheel, will go from 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds. The all-wheel drive middle model, available next year, can hit 60 mph in 4.1 seconds. The premium pick, also due in 2024, will be able to hit top speeds of 130 miles per hour, go 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds, and tow a fairly beastly 11,000 pounds—more than the Ford F-150 Lightning, and about on par with the Rivian R1T.
The look-at-me e-candy truck is cheaper than the $37,900 base model: Tesla has polarized, but its design is polarizing
In 2019, Tesla and Musk launched a thousand memes when the carmaker’s head of design, Franz von Holzhausen, tried to prove the strength of the Cybertruck’s windows by throwing a metal ball at it. The glass shattered. It went a bit easier on its truck today. Von Holzhausen went after the windows with a baseball. The Cybertruck survived.
The price bump will also be a drag on demand. The vehicles picked up by the 10 or so customers yesterday—likely to be “manufacturing unit” one-offs rather than true retail models, and which will be tethered to Tesla for some time—was $10,000 more expensive than the $39,900 base model promised in November 2019. The world has changed since with a number of competitors selling traditionally-shaped products.
Ford sneaked in ahead of the pack with the F-150 Lightning, a battery-powered version of the truck that has dominated the pickup segment for decades. GM will soon roll out its electric Chevrolet, while Stellantis is putting the finishing touches on its RAM 1500 REV. Extroverts wanting a look-at-me e-candy truck can buy Rivian’s $73,000 R1T.
“Just 15 percent of those preorders would equal the annual unit sales of Toyota,” says Boston University Questrom School of Business professor Tim Simcoe. “But Tesla faces the challenges of scaling up production and achieving a sufficient flow of paying customers.”
The electric pickup could make the world’s richest man even more rich because of its Blade Runner–inspired design. If half of all the deposits stack up, there would be $65 billion in revenue, up from $42 billion four years ago.
Stupid. Divisive. Expansive. The Hummer shouldn’t have sold in numbers, but it did. Might Elon Musk pull off a similar trick with the stainless steel Cybertruck?
So as you can see, Tesla stuck close to some of these numbers, but others turned out way different than we were expecting. It can’t carry the same amount of stuff as originally planned. It will be more expensive than we were told. It retains its polarizing design. And arguably, thanks to Musk’s antics in the last few years, it has become polarizing for entirely new reasons.
The price tag is heftier on the Cybertruck because of better range estimates. And like the other versions, the production model is slightly shorter and a little more compact than what was first announced in 2019.
The production versions of the truck are almost all the same as what they were four years ago. The price, range, and performance have all shifted dramatically — and probably not in the direction most customers would prefer.
The performance oriented Cyberbeast trim is what we have the most details on. It is a possibility that this version will have three electric motors, as promised in 2019.
The torque appears to be the number that has changed most significantly since 2019. Tesla was originally promising around 1,000 lb-ft, but now the company says the Cyberbeast trim can put out an eye-watering 10,296 lb-ft. That could be due to the active torque vectoring that Musk announced at the event Thursday.