Musk eyeing 200K Tesla electric pickup trucks per year

Tesla is looking to make 200,000 of its Cybertruck, an electric pickup truck, per year, CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday.

The company celebrated the arrival of the Cybertruck in July, years after the first prototype was revealed in 2019. The company previously said production would begin in 2021, but after delays, the first official model rolled off the assembly line this summer.

“I really cannot emphasize enough how hard production is relative to design,” Musk said on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. “The difficulty of manufacturing is proportionate to the amount of new technology that you have in a car or in the product. In this case, there’s a lot of new technology.”

Musk said on the podcast that deliveries of the truck will begin Nov. 30.

He said he expects Tesla will make about 200,000 trucks per year when the company is at “point production.” He did not say when the company expects to reach point production.

“I’m not trying to trivialize design, it’s just, what I’m trying to do is emphasize the difficulty of manufacturing, which is not understood by the public because there’s no movie about it,” Musk said. “So there’s lots of movies about the sort of wild inventor in the garage but I’m not aware of any movie about manufacturing.”

The Cybertruck has a stainless steel body that Musk says is bulletproof. The CEO also said the truck’s window was unbreakable at its initial unveiling, but after it was hit with a baseball bat in a demonstration, the window cracked. During the podcast, host Joe Rogan fired an arrow at the truck, and it left a small dent.

Musk said at an event next month they would be “emptying an entire magazine of ‘Tommy gun’” on the truck to test its durability.

The Cybertruck will join the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian Automotive’s R1T on the market for electric pickup trucks.