The first thought that came to my mind (as both a serious fan and skeptic of Tesla) was that things are not going as well as Musk would have us believe. For one thing, the Cybertruck – if it fulfills its latest delivery promise – will still arrive some four years after Musk’s metal ball famously shattered a supposedly bulletproof window. Since then, Tesla has changed pricing, onlookers have complained that it is poorly designed for real-life use, leaked images of the bed have shown disappointing volume, and pretty much every prototype seen on the roads has had horrendous fit-and-finish issues. Off-road, it has been beaten by rivals – rivals that were announced after the Cybertruck yet hit the road sooner.
And as if that’s all not bad enough, Musk himself has sounded sheepish and worried on recent earnings calls, backtracking on earlier promises and saying that scaling production could still take several years more.
In a nutshell, our second theory is that Musk desperately wants to drum up support after four years of broken promises, worried that more reservation holders are losing patience and, worse still, will be disenchanted when the truck finally arrives. It appears that the Cybertruck won’t be the moneymaker it would have been if it arrived on time, and Tesla is trying to stop the bleeding.
