After years of delays and redesigns, the Tesla Cybertruck will hit the road this holiday season, the company says. The long-awaited luxury electric SUV will start shipping to some buyers on November 30. Full production will begin at the company’s Texas Gigafactory next year.
Q3 Shareholder Update → https://t.co/sXBSeLibSL
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Highlights
Cybertruck production remains on track for later this year, with first deliveries scheduled for November 30th at Giga Texas.
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The car’s electrical system is also being upgraded to 800 volts from Tesla’s 400V. Numerous high-end, fast, and heavy-duty EVs, like the Audi e-Tron and the GMC Hummer EV, use the 800V design. This lets EVs with bigger batteries charge faster, which cuts down on charging time, without causing the vehicle’s wiring harness to slag.
“A lot of people are excited about cyber truck,” Musk told reporters on the investment call on Wednesday. “Yes, I am. I drove the car, and it’s a great product.” I want to stress that it will be very hard to get the Cyber Truck into mass production and then make enough money for it to be profitable.
“This is normal for when you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology, or any brand new vehicle program — but especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cyber Truck,” he said.”It is going to require work to reach planned production and be cash-flow positive, at a price that people can afford.”
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Q3 Tesla production and deliveries are lower than Q2
Tesla’s production and deliveries of its current model lines are both lower this quarter, by about 7% or about 30,000 units compared to Q2. However, they are still much higher year over year, up about 100,000 units over 2022. This year, the EV carmaker has cut the prices of its cars several times. Its electrical system is being upgraded from Tesla’s 400V to 800-volts. The third time was in early October.
As an example, the Model X used to cost $120,990, but now it only costs $79,990. The prices of the models S ($74,990), Y ($52,490, down 24%), and 3 ($38,990, down 17%) have all gone down in the same way. In Q3, Tesla says its cost of goods sold per car went down to about $37,500.
Musk had said before that he would be happy to lower prices and take smaller profit margins if it meant more sales. In July, he said, “I think it does make sense to give up margins to make more cars.”
“Planned downtimes for factory upgrades led to a sequential drop in volumes, which was talked about on the most recent earnings call.” “Our volume goal of about 1.8 million vehicles in 2023 has not changed,” Tesla said in a press release in October. In Q3, the company delivered about 435,059 cars around the world.
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Tesla is investing more in AI development.
The company is also putting more money into AI development. Since Q2, it has “more than doubled” the amount of processing power it uses to train its AI systems for vehicles and the Optimus robot. Some reports indicate that Optimus is getting new hardware and learning from AI instead of “hard-coded” software.
In addition, the company said that all Hertz hires in the US and Canada will be able to use the Tesla App on their phones as key fobs. If a customer already has a Tesla profile set up, they can use the same settings for their Hertz hire.
