Elon Musk warned that Tesla would need to be “lucky” in order to deliver some Cybertruck electric pickups this year.
Volume deliveries of the Tesla Cybertruck are not coming until 2022.
When Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019, the automaker said that production would start in 2021.
This was always an ambitious goal considering all the innovations that Tesla needed to achieve to bring the vehicle, which is built on an exoskeleton, to production.
Recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned that there will be challenges to bring the Cybertruck to production on time since it requires new manufacturing methods.
The CEO continues to set the stage for a potential delay in the timeline.
Yesterday, in a conference call following the release of Tesla’s Q4 2020 earnings, Musk said that if Tesla is “lucky,” they could do “a few deliveries” at the end of the year:
If we get lucky, we’ll be able to do a few deliveries toward the end of this year, but I expect volume productions to begin in 2022.
The CEO commented on the status of bringing the vehicle to production:
We finished almost all of the Cybertruck engineering. So we’re no longer iterating at the design center level or design level. We’ve got the designs fixed. We will soon order the equipment necessary to make the Cybertruck work. We’re actually going to be using even bigger Tesla machines for the rear body of Cybertruck because we’ve got, obviously, it’s a bigger vehicle and you’ve got a long truck bed. So we’ll be using an 8,000-ton casting press for the rear body casting as opposed to 6,000-ton for Model Y.
Tesla has been ordering a lot of big casting machines lately and we recently reported on them taking delivery of one at Gigafactory Texas, where they plan to build the Cybertruck.
However, that machine is expected to be used for the Model Y.
Electrek’s Take
Last time we discussed the Cybertruck timeline on the Electrek podcast, we predicted that 2021 would be almost impossible.
This seems to confirm it.
If Tesla is still in the process of ordering equipment less than 12 months from the planned start of production, it sounds extremely unlikely that they can stick to the timeline – even if we are talking about just a few units.
If you have a Cybertruck on order, I think you should adjust your expectation to around Q2 2022 just to be safe.
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