Elon Musk Reveals Update On Tesla Cybertruck’s ‘Radically New Design’

At the 2023 Annual Shareholder Meeting on May 16 Musk offered updates on the Cybertruck.

The upcoming battery-electric light-duty truck announced by Tesla in 2019 is slated to start production later this year.

Updates include the following statements from the Tesla CEO:

Hard to Make ‘Radically New Design’

Musk:

“So the Cybertruck is a hard car to make…because it’s a such a radically new design…actually you can’t just use conventional methods of manufacturing…had to invent a whole new set of manufacturing techniques in order to build an exoskeleton based car instead of an endoskeleton based car…extremely non-trivial to build the Cybertruck but we’re making good progress.”

Production Targets: 250K and up

Musk:

“We’re finally going to start delivering production of Cybertrucks later this year.”

“There will be an s-curve of production so it’ll be slow at first and then…ramping up.”

“We’re likely to do probably a quarter million a year I think maybe more…again very much dependent on what the demand is like and…we also needed [to] improve the the production cost efficiency…which is going to be also a very, very hard thing…so…I’d say…a quarter million a year is a reasonable guess.”

But later in the call Musk said:

“It might be 500,000. I don’t know but we’ll make as many as people want.”

Price: Affordable?

Musk:

“It’s going to be hard to make [it] affordable because it is a new car, a new manufacturing method.”

Note that Musk had originally said in 2019 that it will start at $39,000. That appears increasingly unrealistic in the initial years of production.

Tesla RV?

Musk:

“We don’t have any plans to build an RV quite yet although I can certainly see how a Cybertruck could be converted into an RV.

“Adding a lot of…attach points to cyber truck so others can build things…[so] somebody could have a startup [to] build things that are attachments that enhance Cybertruck and turn it into a camper.”