Cybertrucks at GigaTexas?
A drone sleuth in Texas has captured some images last Friday, of what might be two new Cybertruck bodies - sitting in an outdoor storage area near the paint shop of Tesla's Gigafactory in Texas.
The images from Joe Tegtmeyer (same tag on twitter) are very clear. The two pallets are wrapped, but definitely look like Cybertrucks in shipping frames. They're convincing enough in their shape to start making guesses, but we should be careful not to jump to any conclusions.
Does anyone remember those "cybertruck bodies" that were spotted at GigaTexas back in July 2021? Those were pretty clearly not Cybertrucks, but articles were written about them anyhow.
(Three pallets of wrapped material sit on a concrete pad. Photo by @peterdog15 on Twitter)
Now, to be fair, Tesla fans are used to digging for clues in invoices, and sifting through drone fly-overs to catch glimpses of upcoming production pieces. People are bound to get a little over-eager about a vaguely shaped package from time-to-time. And it hasn't helped that parts shortages and design issues have kept the Cybertruck delayed for a bit.
That all being said, it's definitely not impossible that these are at least parts of some Cybertrucks.
Last week, we got word of parts of the worlds largest die-casting Gigapress arriving in Houston harbour for Tesla. Some sleuthing was needed to uncover the full story there too, but there was a paper trail involved, so the Tesla fanbase is fairly certain that this is the 9000 ton Gigapress made by IDRA in Italy.
This sheds some light on our current story. This press was commissioned by Tesla for producing larger parts - and as the largest parts we know they plan to make in that factory are the frames that will hold up the truck bed on the new Cybertrucks - or even the whole body if comments from CEO Elon Musk are to be believed - it's more-or-less confirmed that this press will be for the upcoming CyberTruck production.
And speaking of that, another piece of this puzzle are the comments from Elon about when Cybertruck production will be happening. The most recent word we've gotten was back in July. Elon sat down with the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley, and while discussing the Cybertruck delays, said that he thinks production will be starting in "the middle of next year". That puts production start around nine months from now.
So what does Tesla need to get that going? Well, when they were prepping their production line at GigaTexas for the Model Y back in 2021, we got similar shots of a Model Y test body.
(Image of GigaTexas lot. A Model Y body sits on a trailer in the foreground. Photo courtesy @GailAlfarATX on Twitter.)
They obviously weren't being as careful with this one, but you can see it's on a similar type of pallet.
Test bodies are used for a whole range of things, like crash tests for instance. But they're quite frequently used to test new production equipment to help calibrate them and make sure everything is in spec for an upcoming production run.
So while it's best we hold off making any definitive claims about what's under those CyberTruck-shaped wraps, the surrounding evidence seems to point to these packages being part of Tesla's preparations for next year's CyberTruck production run. If we're really lucky, we might soon see some scrap from the Gigapress calibration runs.