In a nutshell: After what has been a very long wait for those eager to own one, the first deliveries of Tesla's Cybertruck are set for November 30. The 'Cybertruck delivery event' will take place at the company's Texas Gigafactoy, where we can expect to see a few customers given their electric vehicles around two years later than expected.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the Cybertruck delivery event announcement via a post on X/Twitter.
– Cybertruck (@cybertruck) October 18, 2023
The Cybertruck was first announced way back in November 2019. Since then, it's been delayed several times, with the pandemic causing a slew of problems – as it did for all automakers. It led to Tesla missing the Cybertruck's initial preproduction target in 2021.
Tesla had said it would deliver the first Cybertrucks to customers in the summer of 2023. That was later changed to the third quarter, but both those deadlines passed. However, it seems the promise of limited production beginning in the summer was true - the first production model rolled off the assembly line in June.
Precisely how many customers will get their Cybertrucks at the event next month is unclear. Don't expect a huge number, though. Musk said during a Q3 earnings call that ramping up production of the truck will be extremely difficult, and while Tesla is targeting 250,000 Cybertrucks per year, that won't become a reality until after 2024.
The Cybertruck is costing Tesla plenty of money. Company expenses were up 43% year-on-year in Q3 to $2.4 billion partly due to the new EV. Musk added that it will take about 18 months before the Cybertruck is cashflow positive.
"We dug our own grave with Cybertruck," Musk told analysts. "Special products that come along only once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market, to reach volume, to be prosperous."
The billionaire said Tesla is prepared to drop stickers and QR codes from its car parts if it saves a bit of money.
Tesla's quarterly earnings report was worse than expected, missing both earnings and sales expectations for the quarter. Profit excluding some items dropped to 66 cents per share, missing analysts estimated 74 cents. And while revenue did rise to $23.4 billion, Wall Street was expecting $24.06 billion.
Like seemingly every other company in the world, Tesla is increasing its spending on AI development. The automaker is working on its Dojo supercomputer, designed to process the vast amounts of data gathered from the company's vehicles, which is used to train the self-driving AI software.