Tesla’s long-awaited Cybertruck is moving ever closer to its public debut.
As Tesla makes headway on its all-electric pickup, CEO Elon Musk recently boasted about taking a production candidate for a test drive around the company’s manufacturing facility in Texas.
“Just drove the production candidate Cybertruck at Tesla Giga Texas!” Musk said in a post shared on social media.
Teslerati reported that about 100 Cybertrucks have rolled off the line thus far. The company reportedly expects to hold a delivery event in the near future.
Tesla has now built 100 Cybertrucks at Giga Texas. Here’s some being loaded onto transport trailers.
— Matthew Donegan-Ryan (@MatthewDR) August 26, 2023
Tesla’s progress on the Cybertruck has been slow since the vehicle was first unveiled back in 2019.
While Musk has attributed some of the delays to supply chain issues involving source components, other reasons include the unforeseen pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and Tesla’s needing additional time to address design flaws and engineering kinks.
Despite the multi-year delay, Musk announced last month that the first Cybertruck had rolled off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas.
“First Cybertruck built at Giga Texas!” Tesla said on social media in July, as reported by The Dallas Express. “Congrats Tesla Team!” he added in a separate post, with an attached photo of the EV pickup surrounded by about 100 Tesla crew members.
Although Tesla is moving closer to full production of its Cybertruck, Raj Rajkumar, Carnegie Mellon University professor of engineering, suggested the delays have cost Tesla vital time and diminished its competitive advantage.
“Tesla thinks they can solve any problem and don’t have to learn from anyone else and then they get stuck in a corner,” Rajkumar told The New York Times in February. “The first-mover advantage that Tesla could have leveraged has completely gone away. It’s a massive opportunity lost.”
Some of the automotive manufacturers that beat Tesla to the punch, despite starting production much later, include General Motors with the GMC Hummer, Ford with the F-150 Lightning, Lordstown Motors with the Endurance, and Rivian with its R1T, among others.
Tesla expects annual production of around 250,000 Cybertrucks, Musk said during a shareholder meeting in May.
