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On the latest earnings conference call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly said that if the company tried to build the Cybertruck today, it would. ” literally cost a million dollars a piece ‘mainly because it can’t build enough 4680 battery cells. The Cybertruck (along with the Semi) will likely be pushed back to 2022, although nothing official has been announced about it.
There is clearly buyer interest in the Cybertruck, as it has racked up over a million pre-orders, so there is also motivation on Tesla’s side to try and stick to the announced schedule and bring it to market. In the meantime, Tesla is focusing on ramping up production of the Model Y at its Giga Texas plant under construction in Austin, while also completing the plant itself.
The plan is to have the same facility produce the Cybertruck as well, but for now, if the company were to start low-volume production, the unit cost would be far too high. Tesla surely won’t ditch the Cybertruck entirely, as Musk himself has said it will be the company’s best product, but the Model Y with its wider appeal is still more important than the Pickup or Semi – The Cybertruck is in an Alpha stage right now and Musk is hoping to see it arrive in beta in 2021.
Even so, the biggest hurdle is providing enough 4680 cells. These will end up being used in the Model Y (aside from the Cybertruck and Semi), as part of a structural battery that would end up being cheaper and lighter as well, but the company is struggling to produce them because , in Musk’s own words,
There’s a huge amount of innovation that we’re putting into this 4680 cell. And so it’s not just some kind of minor state-of-the-art improvement. And we went through that on the factory sale date, really dozens, half a dozen major upgrades, and dozens of small upgrades.
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