On November 21st, 2019, Elon Musk stood in front of a large crowd and unveiled the prototype for the futuristic Tesla truck that he dubbed the “Cybertruck.”
We are coming up on four years since then, and Tesla finally set a date for the first truck to roll off the assembly line at the company’s Gigafactory Texas facility near Austin.
However, on the company’s Q3 earnings call, Musk lowered expectations on how quickly the truck production would be scaled up.
The headline of the earnings call came from Musk himself who said, “We dug our own grave,” referring to the overcomplex design of the truck.
The stainless steel outer body is incredibly hard to work with, and the all-electric nature has many groundbreaking tech features, all of which are difficult to scale.
Musk believes that the Gigafactory Texas plant will be able to produce 125,000 trucks in 2024 and double that in 2025.
The company claims to have over a million pre-orders for the vehicle despite the fact that the final price for it has still not been set.
The original price tag was estimated at $40,000 but with the issues with production, that number is likely to rise.
After the earnings call, Tesla stock dropped by 15% in part due to the Cybertruck announcement but mostly due to the company’s 44% drop in quarterly profit.
Investors have stated that they have grown concerned that Musk’s attention has been too focused on his Twitter (X) takeover to pay close enough attention to Tesla.
Leave a Reply