Cybertruck’s Final Winter Testing
A prototype Tesla Cybertruck was spotted being unloaded from a plan at a New Zealand airport on June 18th - and with official production so close to starting, there’s really only one reason for one of Tesla’s new pickups to be there - winter testing.
The company has, of course, already tested the Cybertruck at their property in Alaska - but that was last winter, and Tesla apparently needs one final round of testing on icy, snow-covered ground before committing to production.
Of course, keen observers will have noted that it is summer up here in the northern hemisphere - and even Alaska can’t escape the annual thaw - so if Tesla wants to test on some genuine snowy conditions, they need to bring their truck to the Southern Hemisphere.
Tesla has reportedly used New Zealand’s winter testing grounds before, so it makes sense they’d use the facilities there again.
It might seem a little odd to think of the place that Peter Jackson shot Lord of the Rings as being covered in snow, but this is their winter, and being so close to the South Pole means they get their fair share of similar winter conditions as we do up in the global north - and the Southern Hemisphere Proving Grounds is an award-winning testing course that’s been used by a bunch of automotive and tire manufacturers.
More importantly, this is another sign that we’re getting closer to Cybertruck’s production.
Sure, Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk have been saying that production of their sharp-lined pickup truck would be starting sometime this summer - with an expected date for their first delivery event sometime around late August or Early September - but it’s always best to look at what has actually been happening in order to figure out if those dates are still correct or not.
And Tesla hasn’t exactly been hiding the signs that pre-production has been going very well.
We’ve seen prototypes cruising the streets, on internal tracks, castings of the frame parts - and even recently, this camo-covered version spotted in Palo Alto, California.
Auto makers sometimes use camo to hide features of a pre-production vehicle, but this seems like either a response to a joke from the community, or some testing from the in-house Cybertruck peripherals team - or, maybe both. We all know how Elon is like with embracing community memes.
Regardless, all of this has been happening right out in the open - Tesla’s not hiding anything really - which is great news for the 1.5 million Cybertruck reservation holders who are hoping the company can keep to their August/September delivery date.
So we don’t really have to take Tesla and Elon at their word - we can see how close they are to starting production. And if they’re flying a prototype across the world to finish up some routine winter-condition testing, then they have to be close.