Tesla revealed new measurements for its long-delayed Cybertruck in its Q2 earnings report. The polarizing truck will be less than 19 feet long and will have a bed that’s longer than six feet, which is shorter than Ford’s best-selling F-150 Lighting, which is 19.25 feet long with a 5.5-foot bed.
“We continue to build release candidates of the Cybertruck on our final production line in Austin,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on an earnings call today. Musk claims it’s the first four-door pickup that comes in that bed and length size combination and that there’s “a lot of new technology” in the vehicle.
Tesla claims Cybertruck will “break a lot of boundaries” technologically and architecturally in its earnings press release today.
Cybertruck’s unconventional design is what makes the sizing possible. Musk’s desire to make something that would come out of a sci-fi post-apocalyptic film instead of a practical work truck pushed the company’s engineers to make something that doesn’t resemble a practical pickup truck.
“That’s one of the elements of good design, is it should feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside,” Musk said on the call. He adds that you can fit a Cybertruck in a 20-foot garage, which is becoming more of a problem nowadays for homeowners who own increasingly bloated pickup trucks.
Pickups have evolved over the years to match consumer demand for lifestyle vehicles with larger cabs and more luxury features. Ford’s first-generation F-150 was 36 percent cab and 64 percent bed; now that ratio has flipped, with the latest models 63 percent cab and 37 percent bed ratio in 2021, according to Axios. With Cybertruck’s design, Tesla is trying to draw a stark contrast to Ford’s bestselling vehicle.
Tesla is now testing Cybertruck vehicles for “final certification and validation” around the world. The automaker had just announced last weekend that the first production Cybertruck has rolled off the production line at its Gigafactory in Texas.
Musk confirmed today that the truck will begin production this year, with production-at-scale beginning in 2024. A year prior, Musk was expecting deliveries to begin at this point, but now the company says it will begin later this year, in line with an April announcement of a delivery event in the third quarter. The Cybertruck was first revealed in 2019.
Earlier this year, a report shed new light on the difficulties Tesla was experiencing getting Cybertruck to production. Unearthed internal documents from early 2022 pointed to perpetual issues that have existed since the alpha prototype, including flaws in braking, body sealing, and suspension. The stainless steel body is reportedly enormously costly to bring into mass production.
The truck reportedly is a bit smaller than the original prototype. In 2020, Musk teased that there might be a smaller version of the Cybertruck for the European market. And we’ve seen the latest steering design that blends the yoke and circle wheels together just earlier this year. Unfortunately for preorder holders, it looks like it’s too late to do anything about the humongous windshield wiper.
