Cybertruck Frame Spotted?

Tesla decided to give us all a Valentine’s Day present last week, in the form of a goofy dating show spoof featuring their robots.

The video - which was posted to the company’s LinkedIn page on the 14th - was cute, but the real gift was hidden in the handful of frames that the gigantic robot arm called “Joey 2000” was being featured in.

The footage is a little blurry and has some filters over it, but Joey seems to be some sort of manipulation armature - one of the robots responsible for manoeuvring large, partially fabricated vehicle pieces from station-to-station.

And attached to this arm is a frame that’s generating a lot of questions about whether this might be a shot of a prototype Cybertruck chassis or not.

Again, there’s only about 10 seconds where this piece is on screen, and we don’t get the best look at it, but there are some things we can see.

First off, the frame seems a little too big for any other Tesla vehicle - but it’s hard to tell without a reference point nearby. But there does seem to be some casted parts on this frame - which lends some credit to this maybe being a mockup of the new Cybertruck frame.

But there’s some things about this frame that look close to other models - so the next step is to compare this frame with some other Tesla vehicles, and we can start eliminating variables.

This is a shot of the Model S chassis from a Tesla showroom. Strip the wheels and mechanical parts off this image and you can definitely see the resemblance. We still can’t account for that casted part near on the frame in the video though.

Another point is the arm itself, which is clearly branded with the Kuka emblem - and astute Tesla fans are quick to note that there aren’t any of these large Kuka robotic arms at the Austin gigafactory where the Cybertruck production line is being built. They do have some smaller arms for their Model Y line, but reportedly nothing like this big one in the Valentine’s Day video. That doesn’t rule out much of course - we don’t know everything Tesla is up to.

There’s just too much we don’t know for us to make a definitive call here. We don’t know if that frame is actually just a Model X or S, we don’t know if it’s a test frame for a Cybertruck or another project we don’t know about, and we don’t even know what factory this is in. There’s just too many things this could be. We can’t say for sure.

Likely the reason this is getting so much traction right now is that we know Tesla is deep in pre-production for the Cybertruck. They’ve said that they are aiming to start production this summer, so it’s natural that everyone is looking for any peek of Cybertruck parts - no matter how flimsy.

That’s actually the only thing we can say for sure - that everyone is hyped to see the Cybertruck rolling off an assembly line. And while it might lead the community to rabidly tear apart a goofy holiday video just to catch a glimpse of what might be a Cybertruck - all we really have to do is wait. If Tesla can hold to its production schedule, we should be seeing a verifiable vehicle in just a few months.