Tesla. It’s all in the name. You think Tesla, you think innovation, technology, the future. Practically no company holds a candle to their level of electrical vehicle genius. This year will see them finally push the Tesla Cybertruck to market. From what we know about the Tesla Cybertruck, the first deliveries of the pickup will be shipping later this year. With nearly the same number of horses pulling the pickup as the 700 horsepower Tesla Model X, the Cybertruck wields a more powerful engine than most of its competition, and then some.
However, during the 2019 Tesla Cybertruck reveal, a star-struck global audience was met with shock when the truck’s sturdiness came up short when its supposedly armored glass all but shattered to pieces after having a steel ball hurled at it. Unlike other armored vehicles which are moving fortresses, the Cybertruck left the audience with a laundry list of questions regarding Musk's promises on the pickup's solidity.
The Tesla Cybertruck will set you back at least $40,000 for the bare minimum set of features, which raises the question: is it worth it? For edgy and futuristic vehicle enthusiasts, the Tesla Cybertruck is simply poetry in motion. For everyone else, we may need to draw up some pros and cons.
The Tesla Cybertruck Costs At Least $40,000
We all knew the truck would not exactly be a thrift purchase. However, with a speculated base price of $39,900 in the US, dents are be bound to manifest in wallets all over the world when people pick up their trucks from Tesla dealerships. The base price will garner you a single motor, two-wheel-drive model. There will be 2 more available models, the dual-motor version slated to start at $49,000 and the tri-motor version going for $69,900. Both pricier models will pack bigger batteries. Burning an even deeper hole in the wallet will be an extra $7,000 for anyone who opts for the self-driving features. The base model, however, is the cheapest available for any electric pickup truck from any company, and the Cybertruck, when pitted against other electric pickup trucks, provides the best value for its features across the board.
It May Be A Long Wait To Get The Cybertruck At Your Doorstep
While there is wide speculation that the first iterations of the Cybertruck will be making it to market late this year, the late 2021 release date is not etched in stone. Matter of fact, volume production according to Elon Musk is slated for 2022, and not this year, and in a recent interview, he mentioned that it would take some luck to be able to make any deliveries toward the end of 2021.
Days after the debut reveal of the Cybertruck, Tesla had already lured in over 250,000 pre-orders for the pickup, seeing as it only required a $100 commitment, and that number now soars well over half a million pre-orders. When you think about it, that is a ridiculous number of trucks that the car manufacturer needs to deliver, given that the figure does not even include the rest of Tesla’s fleet! If that figure came from Toyota, no one would bat an eyelid, but seeing as Tesla’s total production last year was a little south of 510,000 units for their entire roster of vehicles, one can only shudder at the thought of them scaling up their production even two-fold in such a short time.
The Cybertruck's Design May Be Somewhat Polarizing
The good thing is the truck’s design has been finalized. The bad thing is, the truck’s design has been finalized! That’s it. No more design changes from the company. The Cybertruck’s design can literally be described as a bunch of edges pieced together to form a polygon. Tesla went all out with differentiating Cybertruck’s visual vocabulary from anything we could have conceptualized.
Franz von Holzhausen was the lead designer for the Cybertruck, and his artistic taste is the culprit responsible for the pickup truck’s radical design. The futuristic design of the Cybertruck does not quite sit well with everyone, and it has been met with mixed reactions across the globe. The exterior design of the truck seems to have no middle ground, and you either really like it, or want to have the designers at Tesla executed!
The interior make-up of the Cybertruck is not any less shocking, with its completely minimalist design sporting the bare minimum number of buttons, a low dashboard, a steering wheel that seems to have been shipped back from the future to our present, a huge infotainment center and a ridiculously large cabin.
We do know, however, that there have been some changes to the original design that was revealed to the public in 2019, albeit very minimal changes.
Tesla Cybertruck's Performance
The futuristic truck, coming in 3 different versions does quite well for itself performance-wise. The single-motor base model will reach 60mph from rest in 6.5 seconds, making a good 250 miles per charge. The dual-motor model will be all-wheel drive, and have an acceleration of 0 – 60mph in 4.5 seconds, with a 300-mile range in between charges. The crown jewel of the Cybertruck, the tri-motor model will also be all-wheel drive, and Tesla promises to have it hitting 60mph in 2.9 seconds, with a range of 500 miles.
No truck performance description would be complete without its towing and haul, and while the figures seem a tad overblown, Tesla’s ratings for the single-motor model stand at 7,500 pounds, 10,000 pounds for the dual-motor, and 14,000 pounds for the tri-motor. The Cybertruck is slated to have a heavy-duty payload capacity of 3,500 pounds, and to add to that, Tesla has been working to give it impressive off-road performance.