With it's bulletproof shell
lightning, fast acceleration and head turning looks,
the Cyber Truck is well on the road to becoming
an auto icon.
It's huge, it's angular, it's boxy,
it doesn't even have paint on it.
It's just raw stainless steel.
It's a radical new design for pickup trucks,
but it's also run into trouble,
perhaps too much for a six figure price tag.
Pre-orders for the electric truck are through the roof,
but it's unclear if the vehicle will ever turn a
profit
or if it'll do more damage than good to the
Tesla brand.
We took a look behind the stainless steel panels of
the
$100,000 Cyber Truck to see how much bang owners are
getting for their buck.
The first pickup truck rolled out of a Ford factory
in
1925, and since the 1940s,
the design has mostly stayed the same.
A cab in the front and a flatbed at the
back.
Pickups account for one in five vehicle sales in the
US.
It's a market that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been
eyeing since 2012.
When the cyber truck was unveiled to the world in
November 2019,
it was a game changer,
even with its broken window.
Oh
my God. Well, maybe that was a little too hard.
All cars basically look the same.
You have a hatchback, you have a sedan,
you have a full size SUV in the suburbs.
And this is the first thing I've seen in my
7 plus years of covering the automotive industry that actually
looks different and is exciting.
So whether you love or hate it,
I think there's a little bit of people paying attention
to something new on the roads.
What stands out is the cyber truck's exoskeleton of stainless
steel,
something not seen since the days of the DeLorean.
Each panel is formed using a technique called air bending,
which uses air at very high pressure to shape the
tough steel.
It's also bulletproof
up to a point.
I am very satisfied with how bullet resistant the cyber
truck is.
It works on 9 mil 22.
Anything faster than that and there's going to be a
hole.
I don't know how many trucks on average get shot
at every year,
but I guess for the right person who has
$100,000 to spend on a truck,
blood proof is certainly something they're looking for.
Tesla has kept the research and development costs of the
cyber truck under wraps,
but company wide R&D spending shot up in
2023. The electric vehicle was the first to be built
at Tesla's brand new Gigafactory in Texas,
which must said cost more than $10 billion to build.
It's a whole new line to build vehicles on.
You've got the stamping press to build the whole new
design and get that huge rolls of steel.
Just every single bit of it seems like a very
expensive input.
It's not like he could take something from the Model
3 line,
the Model S, the Model X line,
and put it on this truck.
It's all very custom built and very expensive to make.
The release of the cyber truck was delayed by four
years
because of supply chain issues and the company making changes
to the truck along the way.
Some thought it was so ambitious it would never see
the light of day.
Even Elon Musk wasn't optimistic.
I mean, we dug our own grave with Cyber Cyber
Truck,
you know, You know, Cyber truck's one of those really
special products that comes
along only once in a long while.
And and special products that come along once in a
long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market,
to reach volume, to to be prosperous.
When the Cyber Truck finally did hit US streets,
the price of the triple motor cyber beast,
Tesla's top range model, had gone up from
61,000 to $100,000. There's a few things in there.
Materials costs have got way higher and I think Elon
is in a tricky situation with margins too.
Another change since the 2019 launch event is the vehicle's
range.
At the time, Tesla boasted a range of 500 plus
miles,
far better than any other EV on the market at
the time.
Today, Cybertruck has a maximum range of
440 miles. When using a battery range extender sold separately
without one, that reduces to
320 miles. However, owners are saying they're not getting anywhere
near that range.
But what's been grabbing the most headlines isn't how far
it can drive,
but how fast. 3/2
one For their $100,000, Owners of the Cyberbeast have a
pickup capable of doing zero to
60 mph in 2.6 seconds.
According to Tesla, that's as fast as high end sports
cars.
Tesla promotional videos show a cybertruck out accelerating a Porsche
9/11
while towing a Porsche 9/11.
It's
got about 845 horsepower, it has torque vectoring at the
rear,
and it's absurd. When YouTube Marcus Brownlee got behind the
wheel,
he was impressed by the power.
Holy, come on,
as I'm in the driver's seat.
That's going to be this new 18 1/2 inch touchscreen
in the center,
Biggest ever in a Tesla.
It's also the biggest ever.
Car performance and gadgets aside,
owners and onlookers have noticed that not everything is quite
going to plan.
Yes, it climbs steep valleys,
but viral videos show Tesla's cyber trucks getting stuck in
the snow.
Others reveal large gaps between the stainless steel panels.
Like, even just this huge front piece here
has a little bit of,
like, wavering. It's not quite a perfect flat line,
and Pharrell Williams demonstrated that parking can be a little
tricky,
too. It's certainly not a good look for the Cyber
truck to be struggling to do truck stuff in the
very first months after it got launched.
Keep going.
It's no surprise that such a heavy,
fast, angular truck is a concern for pedestrian safety experts
too.
Advocates are really worried that it's just another really unsafe
vehicle on American roads that are known for being super
deadly to begin with.
In fact, the cyber trucks sharp edges don't pass current
European safety regulations
and its weight is also a problem.
At over 4 tons, it's too heavy for a standard
EU driving license,
requiring owners to get a truck license instead.
There's also concerns over the cyber trucks environmental footprint.
Yes, it's emissions free on the road,
but it's massive battery pack requires metals like lithium,
graphite, and nickel, all of which come from complex supply
chains with a track record of human and environmental exploitation.
The delayed launch of the Cyber truck means it's entering
an already crowded EV pickup market,
having to compete with the likes of Ford's electric
F-150, Rivian's R1T,
and the GMC Hummer. Meanwhile,
Tesla has competition when it comes to global sales.
Chinese company BOID overtook Tesla for the first time,
selling more cars in the last quarter of
2023. If pre-orders are anything to go by,
the cyber truck may yet prove a hit.
By March 2024, a reservations tracker estimated the number of
pre-orders at over
2.2 million. It's really hard to say if all these
pre-orders for the Cyber Truck are actually going to materialize.
There's a huge difference in sending a refundable $250 and
then shelling out 100,000 more for a truck.
It'll be really interesting to watch out.
Elon talks about the demand going forward.
If you sell the higher margin cyber truck first,
it's going to make it a lot easier to make
new ones and keep selling them.
If you were to sell the bare bones truck with
a tiny margin,
that's not going to leave you much room for error
and it's not going to turn around the profits that
investors expect.
At this point, to turn a profit must needs as
many pre-orders at the top range cyber piece as possible
to convert to sales.
I think if you asked a lot of Tesla investors
it's been a huge distraction.
But like many of must businesses like SpaceX,
Starlink and X, formerly Twitter,
controversy may well be part of the business plan.
The Cyber Truck was able to give Tesla a ton
of earned media and like basically free advertising,
so it keeps the brand fresh.
It reminds people Tesla still exists even as a ton
of competitors from all over the world that hit the
market.
It's likely the Cyber Truck will keep turning heads and
making headlines,
especially while engineers push the boundaries of what qualifies as
a pickup.