Tesla Space #58: No, the Cybertruck did NOT explode or catch fire by itself

X OF THE WEEK

“the Moon is a distraction”

FIGHTING THE FUD: THE CYBERTRUCK THAT WAS BLOWN UP

You likely saw all kinds of headlines around this. You know, the ones like “Cybertruck exploded” and “Cybertruck caught fire”. These even made it to the news of my little northeastern European country. Here’s a selection for you — and if you haven’t heard the true story, what would you think happened?

If you’re in the Tesla circles you know what actually happened. I’m here to give you the details why all the headlines above are complete bs:

First off, here’s the explosion itself on tape:

One (inside the truck) confirmed dead, seven injured per the media reports. We won’t speculate on motive or anything like that here, but instead focus on the facts:

Elon’s first public reaction:

• Turns out it was explosives — fireworks, camping fuel and gas tanks — in the truck and its bed caused the explosion, which is believed to have been detonated by the person sitting inside.

  

• The cybertruck itself helped contain the explosion blast and it held up very well (likely even saving bystanders).

• Law enforcement officials confirmed: “The fact that this was a Cybertruck really limited the damage that occurred. It had most of the blast go up through the truck and out. The front glass doors at the Trump hotel were not even broken by the blast, which they were directly in front of.”

• The Cybertruck was rented from Turo.

• Elon also says: “Cybertruck is the worst possible choice for a car bomb, as its stainless steel armor will contain the blast better than any other commercial vehicle.”

• Elon Musk has sent a team from Tesla to try and recover any footage from the exploded Cybertruck.

Regarding the misleading news headlines, Elon apparently considers suing the outlets that framed the story harmfully towards Tesla, saying “Maybe it’s time to do so”. Also, 1,767 Tesla shareholders representing more than 5.4 million shares wrote a letter asking Tesla’s Board of Directors to consider legal action against news outlets that report inaccurately on Tesla.

Meanwhile, a lot of people around are instead hailing all this as an advertisement for the Cybertruck — on how tough it is.

The thickness of the Cybertruck's steel exterior — which is roughly twice as thick as the exterior of an average car or truck — is key here, as you can see from the video of engineers talking to Sandy Munro here.

"We have two thicknesses. Our doors are 1.8 millimeters thick and all the other parts like the sails, hood, etc, are 1.4 millimeters thick. We worked hard to get the strength up on the stainless because the original we were about 2.53mm. We actually increased the strength of the HFS over time. While doing that with the ductility for forming, we're able to get that strength and bulletproof toughness with having a thinner material."

PS! In case you want to share this article of ours specifically with a friend or online, we put it up separately on our site, here:

TESLA, GLOBALLY

Tesla now sells more car parts directly online, supporting the Right to Repair.

Tesla’s Electronic Parts Catalog (EPC) now allows owners to order individual parts or complete assemblies for various vehicle parts — no Tesla Service visit or scheduled service need anymore, you can now order certain (likely expanded selection of) parts using your Tesla account. Currently for US only, but likely expanding.

TESLA 2024 SALES

In Q4 2024, Tesla delivered 495,570 vehicles and produced 459,445.
In all of 2024, Tesla delivered 1,789,226 vehicles (-1% compared to 2023),
and produced 1,789,225 vehicles.

Notably, Tesla delivered 36k more units than it produced in the 4th quarter, reducing the inventory (a good thing).

There are now over 7 million Teslas on planet Earth.

Tesla's Q4 2024 earnings call will take place on January 29th, 2025. We’ll be reporting.

We’ll also trickle in more per-country sales and wins from Tesla in the following newsletters, and Jaan is also putting together a comprehensive EV Sales global overview for his own newsletter soon, to put it all into context. So far we can say that in:

🇺🇸 USA, Tesla sold 618,000 EVs in 2024, while GM sold 114,000 and Ford 98,000. Rivian, for example, delivered 51,579 total for the year (US & Canada).

🇰🇷 South Korea, Tesla sold 29,750 vehicles and ranked as the third import automaker overall behind BMW and Mercedes. Model Y was the best-selling import model.

Compared to the only other EV maker that comes close to Tesla globally in terms of unit sales (but, importantly, not at all in terms of average price per those vehicles) — BYD — Tesla sold 1789,226 battery electric vehicles while BYD sold 1,764,992 battery electric vehicles (+12% growth over last year) globally.

In Q4, however, BYD passed Tesla by a wider margin, with 595,000 BEV sales compared to Tesla’s 495,570. We can likely expect BYD to pass Tesla in overall sales in 2025.

Tesla Energy

Tesla deployed 31.4 GWh of battery energy storage worldwide in 2024. Here’s a great view of this historically by Sawyer:

In the 4th quarter, Tesla again delivered a record 11,000MWh of energy storage, up 243% compared to previous year. Quarterly view:

Wild that all this was before the 40GWh Shanghai Megapack factory was ready, which just began trial production.

In its year-end wrap up, Tesla said the Megapack hit 22+ GWh in operation across 60+ countries, and Tesla ramped Megafactory Lathrop capacity to 40 GWh/year & manufactured the 10,000th Megapack.

Quick bites:

• Tesla reduced the referral program in the US as expected — now $500 for referring (instead of $1k), and discounts for using referral link now $500 for M3/Y and $1k for MS/X/CT. Meanwhile, Free lifetime Supercharging still applies for Model S & Foundation Series Cybertruck orders in the US.

• The $TSLA stock closed out 2024 at +62.5%, which is the fourth-best yearly gain for the share price since IPO. (link) The largest? +743% in 2020, +344% in 2013 and +102% in 2023.

• Here’s a wrap-up thread of 2024 from Tesla.

• Watch tip: here’s a 2-minute Giga Berlin 2024 recap video.

• Tesla released a Metal Key Card for the Cybertruck for $60 in its shop — not yet confirmed if it works with all Teslas, but currently only available to purchase for Cybertruck owners.

VEHICLES

The Cybertruck now qualifies for the $7,500 US federal tax credit — the AWD version with dual motor, and for some reason IRS has also already listed the not-yet-available single motor version 😉 This means that for those that qualify, Cybertruck starts at $72,490. I wonder if this will lead to a surge of orders considering the incoming administration plans to cut off the subsidies. 

Juniper inbound for Europe? A lot of European countries now see certain Model Y trims show delivery estimates into May and June 2025 — very similar of which happened when Model 3 refresh came. I know some owners that have ordered on right now for the possibility to maybe get the refreshed Model Y (although order of course shows is the ‘old’ version) for the price of the ‘old’ version. This worked with the M3 Highland introduction for some owners that saved a decent amount since Tesla, naturally, also raised the price with the refresh for the early buyers.

• Tesla Semi seen pulling tandem trailers, in two different aero versions. Triples are legal in Nevada so we might see that soon too.

• Tesla has added an interactive wiring diagram to the Service Mode Plus screen for the Cybertruck, offers the ability to search for particular connectors, and also see where the wiring runs originate and terminate. What a great resource to anyone from service to DIY mechanics to discover any fault points. 👏 

• The Cybertunnel, aka Cybertruck Birthing Tunnel exit is shaped like a Cybertruck, complete with the “lightbar” — and looks like they’re birth-testing it with the Cybertruck now

And if you’ve ever wondered how’s Cybertruck as a family vehicle, here’s a good video review focusing on that.

SUPERCHARGING & ENERGY

In Q4, Tesla:

• Opened 3.6K Supercharger stalls, +19% year-over-year network growth;

• Delivered 1.4 TWh, +24% year-over-year growth;

• Saved 620+ million liters of gasoline, offsetting 1.4+ billion kg of CO2.

And in all of 2024, Tesla:

• Opened 11k+ Supercharger stalls, reaching 65k+ Superchargers worldwide;

• Delivered 5.2+ TWh of energy, offsetting more than 5.5 billion kg of CO2 & more than 2.4 billion liters of gasoline;

• Added three new countries where you can Supercharge.

Tesla also hit 800k Powerwalls installed worldwide, and 100k of those are now enrolled in VPP programs. In 2024, Tesla launched Powerwall 3 in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, UK, Germany, Italy, Australia & New Zealand. Megapack hit 22+ GWh in operation across 60+ countries.

MUSKONOMY

SpaceX

MUST-SEE RESOURCE TIP: Get SpaceX’s 61-page 2024 progress report (go here and scroll slightly to see it). It details a lot of the current progress and also has nuggets like:

• Across all production facilities in 2024, SpaceX produced and sold 3.9 million Starlink customer kits. Now doubling Bastrop in size.

• V3 Starlink satellite (page 62): Each Starlink V3 launch on Starship is planned to add 60 Tops of capacity to the Starlink network, more than 20x the capacity added with every V2 Mini launch on Falcon 9. Each V3 satellite will have 1 Tbps of

  downlink speeds and 160 Gbps of uplink capacity.

• In 2024, Starlink Maritime connected more than 75,000 vessels, including 300+ cruise ships, serving over 10M cruise passengers annually — 30% of the global total.

• Aviation — Starlink was installed on 450 aircraft while serving over 4.6 PB of data to passenger devices, and is now on contract for installation on over 2,000 additional aircraft.

• Here’s the Falcon 9 historical launch rate, in 2024 conducting 134 Falcon launches with 89 dedicated to expanding the Starlink constellation.

Starship is scheduled to launch Flight Seven on 10th of January. Meanwhile, here’s a new 2-minute recap video of the sixth Starship flight. Under that video, SpaceX has listed all the changes with the upcoming Flight 7.

As a sidenote on new ‘competition’, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket (321 ft tall compared to Starship 397ft tall) might fly for the first time on January 8th.

(SpaceX’s) Starlink

🇮🇹 Italy is reportedly in advanced talks with SpaceX for a $1.6B deal to provide secure telecommunications for the government. Elon says: “Ready to provide Italy the most secure and advanced connectivity!”

United Airlines said on Sunday it expects to begin testing Starlink in February for in-flight internet services.

🇺🇦 Starlink is to roll out the Direct-to-Cell services in Ukraine, signed an agreement with Kyivstar.

xAI: Elon says: “…Grok 3 is coming soon. Pretraining is now complete with 10X more compute than Grok 2.”

X: It seems like X plans to launch X money in the US before getting approval in all 50 states. Linda Yaccarino’s new year greetings also mentioned X money: “2025 X will connect you in ways never thought possible. X TV, X Money, Grok and more.”