Cybertruck Production Begins!
Right on schedule, the Tesla Twitter account announced the first Cybertruck constructed at their gigafactory in Austin, Texas, with a picture showing the team happily surrounding the stainless-steel pickup, on July 15th.
This truck is the first ever to have been fabricated from start-to-finish using the production line that Tesla has been busy installing and testing at GigaTexas for the last couple of months.
Earlier in the year, Elon had confidently claimed that production of the highly anticipated truck would begin sometime this summer, with a planned “first delivery event” for sometime in late August or early September.
And during the intervening time, tesla watchers have seen parts and prototypes being driven and tested - and it was abundantly clear that the company was experiencing little - if any - setbacks with their fresh efforts at getting their stainless-steel pickup truck out into the world.
We ourselves have remarked more than once, that it looked like Tesla was barely trying to hide their progress - a sure sign that things were going well. In fact, over the course of the three days before the Tesla Twitter account posted their announcement, a couple of leaked shots from inside the factory showed a number of Cybertruck frames inside a general assembly area of GigaTexas.
Tesla fans were extremely hyped for the upcoming production run. And that showed in the pre-order numbers.
At last estimate, some industry experts figured that there could be as many as 1 point 7 million Cybertruck pre-orders - which is a wild number to reach before even the first production model was revealed, but Tesla has been pretty good at ramping interest back up after the delays.
The vehicle was announced in 2019, and back then Elon had said that it would begin production by 2021 - not knowing that a deadly world-stopping pandemic was right around the corner. But once shipping lanes started opening back up, and the world started to slowly return to normal, the Tesla team jumped back into action planning out the Cyberturck’s production run.
And with that work came some changes for the Cybertruck. You don’t design a vehicle in 2019 and then let it stagnate for four years. And Tesla’s Investor Day on March 1st showed off an entirely new method of manufacturing that they were designing - all of their vehicles would be changing, so of course the Cybertruck would as well.
And that brings us to the 15th, with the first production model of the Cybertruck.
It’s important to note here that Tesla still has a lot of work to do before getting production fully up-and-running. They will likely be able to keep to their schedule and hold a delivery event for the first few Cybertruck customers sometime in late August or so - but each of those vehicles will have to be carefully monitored as they go through the new manufacturing line. Tweaks and changes could still happen to both the design - and the line itself in order to make production smoother.
But we should be seeing more Cybertrucks coming out of GigaTexas over the next few weeks.