Today, after four years of waiting, Tesla will announce the start of deliveries of Cybertruck electric pickups. It is obvious that their production will not become truly massive even by the end of next year, and there are at least several reasons for this: stainless steel body panels, 4680 batteries, and a new electrical architecture with a voltage of 800 V.
As experts interviewed by Bloomberg explain, by Elon Musk's will, Tesla has endowed the Cybertruck electric pickup with features that the target audience has not traditionally been interested in. Clumsy body shapes that sacrifice practicality and visibility, combined with difficult-to-machine stainless steel panels and unusually high dynamic abilities for a pickup truck, are not the features that potential buyers are used to appreciating in cars of this category. In fact, Musk got too carried away with the idea of making a pickup truck unlike any other, and this has seriously delayed the launch of the vehicle and may slow down the pace of production expansion.
What features may be extra?
Some of the features of the Tesla Cybertruck are of questionable value, given that they are implemented as half-measures. First, the presence of bulletproof windows could not be justified at the presentation of the car in November 2019, as they broke on the first prototype after being hit by a metal bullet. Secondly, the stainless steel outer panels of the side doors, although they have recently demonstrated relative resistance to arrows from a bow and bullets from a Thompson submachine gun, do not turn the pickup into an armored vehicle. The ability of the Tesla Cybertruck to float on water, which was announced some time ago, must also be tested in practice. The Chinese electric SUV Yangwang U8, which does float on water, costs much more than $100,000, so it is obvious that it will be more difficult to get such a feature at lower production costs.
Q3 Tesla finance report
At a recent quarterly earnings conference, Elon Musk admitted that Tesla's Texas facility will initially be able to produce no more than 125,000 Cybertruck electric pickups per year, and that this volume will be doubled only in 2025 under favorable circumstances. The head of the company, in an internal newsletter, as previously reported, pointed out the need to comply with tolerances on the geometric dimensions of Cybertruck parts in hundredths of a millimeter. At the same time, stainless steel body panels are difficult to machine, and uneven gaps between them are ubiquitous on the showroom models of the pickup, which will have to be eliminated as mass production is established. While with the Model 3 and Model Y, the company sought to simplify the design of electric vehicles as much as possible, with the Model X and Cybertruck, many solutions had to be implemented by trial and error, as there was simply no place to borrow ready-made ones.
Batteries included
The use of traction batteries based on 4680 battery cells, which were introduced back in 2020, also poses a certain threat to the scaling of Cybertruck production. Only recently, the circulation of cells of this type has exceeded 10 million copies, and the Model Y crossover produced in Texas also claims to use them, not to mention Cybertruck. It's just that while Tesla Model Y has an alternative in the form of old 2170 cells, Cybertruck simply does not, and the pickup's production volumes will depend entirely on Tesla's ability to produce 4680 cells in the required quantities. It was expected that 4680 cells would also be used by Semi electric trucks, but they are still doing without them, although they would benefit from such a migration.
What about competitors?
Porsche, Hyundai, and Lucid are already using 800V architecture in their electric vehicles, Tesla could be considered a laggard in this area, but it will certainly migrate all of its electric vehicles and compatible charging infrastructure to it in the future. At the very least, the ability to replenish the traction battery charge faster, which is provided by the transition to 800 V, is an important argument for such a migration. However, at the stage of launching mass production of Cybertrucks, this feature of the onboard network will create additional difficulties for Tesla.
Conclusion
Today, we have to find out to what extent Tesla has managed to keep the retail price of Cybertruck pickups within reasonable limits, because all of the above difficulties inevitably increase the company's costs and the cost of each vehicle produced. The limited production run during the first two years on the market will slow down the return on investment, and for end customers, it also threatens to raise retail prices, as shortages inevitably generate speculation.