Cybertruck Deliveries Loom
We finally have some solid news on when the Cybertruck should begin deliveries - and it’s very soon.
On September 14th, Youtuber MuddyRuttzz posted a video of his time out on the offroad testing track at Hollister Hills, California. While he was out there, he came across a pair of Cybertrucks marked as release candidates - and lucky for us, the drivers were chatty.
Aside from showing off the Cybertruck’s lift capabilities via the air suspension, the drivers mentioned that the first deliveries of this vehicle should be taking place in October.
Now all of us should be wary of any news about the Cybertruck by now - most of what we know had to be parsed from a lot of different rumours before we got any sort of confirmation. But the news does come from a Tesla employee - and one that’s trusted enough to take a Cybertruck release candidate from Texas to California without one of those new security escorts - so the credibility is high here.
But luckily we have another bit of evidence to factor in here.
On September 25th - just 11 days after the MuddyRuttzz video - prolific drone pilot and Tesla watcher Joe Tegtmeyer posted a video going over a couple of updates for GigaTexas. In it, he mentions that workers were beginning to return to the site after being mostly gone for the last three weeks - a small production shut down that Joe’s sources have said was to calibrate the Cybertruck production lines.
And this is something that is also supported by sightings of what the Tesla folks call Master Candidates - pre production models that are considered the final version of the truck that will likely make it to production itself - something supported by reports that reservation holders are seeing changes in the online studio.
On their own, these pieces of information are shaky. Together they give us a pretty good reason to suspect October as the start of real production ramp-up for the Cybertruck.
Okay, so we know that October is the month Tesla starts sending out the first Cybertrucks - but we also know that the company has over two million pre-orders for the thing. How fast are they going to be able to catch up with those numbers?
Well, a hiring spree is a good place to start.
On September 19th, a rare appearance by Tesla’s Director of manufacturing at GigaTexas - Jason Shawhan - gave us some details on the company’s plans for the location. At the State of Manufacturing conference and expo held in Austin, Shawhan’s keynote speech laid out how Giga Texas had gone from just over twelve-thousand employees at the end of 2022, up to today’s numbers of around twenty-thousand.
But the facility isn’t finished growing. According to Shawhan, Tesla is anticipating tripling the current employee count to sixty-thousand members by the time Cybertruck’s production finishes its ramp-up - which should be sometime in the next two years or so, if CEO Elon Musk is accurate with his estimations.
Because Shawhan was specifically tying that sixty-thousand number to Cybertruck’s production scaling, we can probably assume the bulk of those new workers will be working on that project - or at least on areas that will affect that production.
And this actually matches well with what Elon said during the Investor Call back in April.
When asked about Cybertruck production, Musk said that he believed the ramp-up would be very strong during 2024, and that the company would be making the truck in “high numbers''. But when asked about more specific numbers, Elon said that ramp-up would be moving as fast as the slowest elements of the supply chain.
It’s hard to say what that would be in the Cybertruck’s case - a lot of its components are unique by even Tesla standards - but it’s more than likely that the bottleneck for Cybertruck production will be the 4680 battery cell, which the vehicle is rumoured to run on.
Tesla has done a lot of work on its battery production infrastructure this year - including starting the construction of their own lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas - but they still need help from battery producers like CATL and Panasonic to shore up their numbers - so it stands to reason that’s where any slowdowns will occur for the Cybertruck.
Aside from that though, we’ll have to wait and see. It won’t take long for production numbers to become available, and at the very least 2024’s shareholders meeting will be full of hard data. Until then, it looks like some folks are going to be getting their Cybertrucks in time for the holidays.