In the second part of an interview with Automotive News’ Daily Drive podcast, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed new details about the upcoming Cybertruck, as well as the potential for future Gigafactory expansion in the US.
Tesla Cybertruck
When Musk revealed the Cybertruck to the world in November 2019, a collective gasp was heard around the world due to its edgy, futuristic design. For some, it was almost as if he didn’t talk to any existing pickup truck owners to see what they wanted in a Tesla truck.
Turns out Musk didn’t, as he said in the interview the company did zero customer research, and didn’t really care what customers wanted in a truck.
“Customer research?” he said as he burst into laughter.”We just made a car we thought was awesome and looks super weird. I just wanted to make a futuristic battle tank – something that looks like it could come out of Blade Runner or Aliens or something like that but was also highly functional.”
Musk’s approach appears to have paid off in spades, as reservation estimates show there could be as many as 1,000,000 Cybertrucks already accounted for.
Even if only 50% of those reservations convert into actual orders, that is a several-year long waiting list, and a bucket load of money coming Tesla’s way.
Musk also revealed they have a backup plan, just in case the Cybertruck does turn into a sales failure (which it won’t).
“It can be a better sports car than a Porsche 911, a better truck than an F-150, and it’s armoured and looks sort of kick-ass from the future. That was the goal, recognizing this could be a complete failure. But I wasn’t super worried about that because if it turns out nobody wants to buy a weird-looking truck, we’ll build a normal truck, no problem. There’s lots of normal trucks out there that look pretty much the same; you can hardly tell the difference. And sure, we could just do some copycat truck; that’s easy. So that’s our fallback strategy,” Musk said.
Gigafactory expansion
Currently Tesla is building a new Gigafactory in Berlin, with construction already well underway and the first buildings starting to take shape.
The automaker also recently broke ground on its latest factory in the US, Giga Texas. That site was only announced last month, with construction beginning even before it became official.
In the interview, Musk said a potential third Gigafactory in the US could happen before 2025. “This is literally a spur of the moment rough guess, probably we’d start construction in four years-ish,” Musk said. “That’s just like my sort of stream-of-consciousness guess.”
You can listen to the complete interview below. The first part of the interview, released last week, can be found here.
h/t [Business Insider]
