“This is simply normal.”
Coming Due
There’s fewer than six weeks until Tesla’s long-delayed Cybertrucks will allegedly start being delivered — and already, CEO Elon Musk is trying to set the bar low.
“We dug our own grave with the Cybertruck,” Musk said during Tesla’s Q3 quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, per Insider.
In the call, the multi-hyphenate billionaire said that the trucks would start being delivered on November 30, but that he wants to “temper expectations” about the futuristic-looking electric pickup all the same.
“I do want to emphasize that there will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with the Cybertruck and then making the Cybertruck cashflow positive,” he said. “This is simply normal.”
Normalcy aside, this is far from Tesla’s first struggle with the Cybertruck, which has officially been in the works since 2019, and unofficially been teased by the CEO for more than a decade.
Overdue Notice
Between then and now, there’s obviously been a lot going on — COVID, Musk having a bunch more children and buying Twitter, et cetera — but as long as the Cybertruck has been out there, it’s been nearly synonymous with its ballooning waitlist and repeatedly pushed delivery deadlines.
Over the past year, a steady drip of leaks and unauthorized photos have shown the world what the Cybertruck is really going to look like. Spoiler alert: nearly everything we’ve seen so far has done the opposite of inspiring confidence, from its single gigantic windshield wiper to its “ninja death star” hubcap that has, at least once, flown off the car and up into the air while driving down the freeway.
The Process
As Musk suggested during this most recent earnings call, some of these design flaws are to be expected.
“When you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand new vehicle program, especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you’re trying to solve at scale,” the CEO said on the earnings call.
One would think that with all the delays, however, the prototypes at least would look better and stop being spotted broken down with the scheduled November 30 delivery date looming.
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