Tesla Cybertruck debuts with oddball styling and awkward window fail

Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company’s first electric pickup truck at an event in Los Angeles, California. The thing you see in the photo is no joke. Looking like something out of a 1980s sci-fi movie, the Tesla Cybertruck will come in three versions.

Playing around as usual, Musk attempted to demonstrate its ruggedness. He had Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief of design, hit the door of the truck with a sledgehammer several times, claimed it was practically bulletproof, and showed the truck winning a tug-of-war with a Ford F150 and a drag race with a Porsche 911. However, when he tried to show how shatterproof the “armoured” glass was, things went wrong as a metal ball thrown by Holzhausen shattered both the truck’s windows. The rest of the presentation flew by rather quickly after that.

There are three versions of the truck available:

• Single motor rear-wheel drive with 400 km of range, 7,500-pound towing capacity, and 0-100 kph in 6.5 seconds, for Dhs 143,000 in the U.S.
• Dual motor all-wheel drive with 480 km of range, 10,000-pound towing capacity, and 0-100 kph in 4.5 seconds for Dhs 183,000 in the U.S.
• Triple motor all-wheel drive with 800 km of range, 14,000-pound towing capacity, and 0-100 kph in 2.9 seconds for Dhs 257,000 in the U.S.

Apparently the truck can seat a total of six adults inside its stainless-steel body. The payload has a 3,500-pound capacity, with 100 cubic feet of storage space. A 17-inch touchscreen sits in the centre of the dashboard, and not much else. It rides on air suspension and seems to have a hideaway bed cover.

The Tesla Cybertruck will go into production by late 2021, although pre-orders are already open. The fastest top model won’t be available until late 2022. Given how long it is taking the Tesla Model 3 to come to the UAE, expect these trucks to start trickling down to the GCC market sometime in 2023 if you’re still around.