“Tesla dug its own grave with the Cybertruck“, Elon Musk said in October 2023 during the presentation of the (declining) profits of his most profitable company. It was not the first sign that Tesla’s futuristic electric truck had problems, but it was that they had already become unavoidable until for its creator, who is not usually intimidated by reality.
Now, in April 2024, five months after the first deliveries of the truck of the future, the company had to ask for the return of the 4,000 units it had already delivered. That way they can set a piece of plastic attached to the accelerator that came loose and jammed it against the bottomas several users said.
The story of the Cybertruck is a reflection of the way of working of this engineer and businessman who, in turn, is a good representative of the traits that the current economic system rewards.
blade runner
In 2019 Elon Musk publicly presented the prototype of his truck. The designers had recently developed it under the slogan of making it look like it was taken from the movie Blade Runner or the video game Halo. Musk cited several times the question that one of his sons had asked him: “Why the future doesn’t look like the future”, says Walter Isaacson in the biography of the South African published in 2023. Another requirement was that plates of the same stainless steel that another of his companies, Space X, were developed, and in this way save the work of painting them. The result was the straight lines of the Cybertruck.
Musk is known, among other things, for question every production step in your factories. He gets irritated when an employee insists that something is done a certain way but is not convinced with evidence. That’s why he forces them to eliminate every possible step in production and insists that if they don’t need to go back, at least 10 percent of them are because they didn’t eliminate enough.
In this way their companies, such as Tesla or SpaceX save a lot in production, but less than what they lose due to the whims of the owner, capable of stopping the production of a car because he doesn’t like the dashboard. Thanks to constant interruptions, costs rise and your products end up being much more expensive and less reliable than promised.
The case of the Cybertruck is quite extreme in that sense. When he presented it in 2019, he wanted to show how resistant its glass is: when one of his employees threw an iron ball at it, it broke it.. He also promised cybertrucks at $39,900. Despite everything, Musk’s personality seduces many and the truck accumulated nearly two million reservations in the following years.
Full throttle
In November 2023 Tesla launched two versions of the Cybertruck with prices ranging from $81,895, although they promised another model that would cost 62,985. The most expensive, the Cyberbeast, reaches $100,000. This 3.5-tonne mass accelerates from 0 to 97km/h in 2.6 seconds and has a supposed range of between 400-550 km, although Tesla has numerous complaints because they are usually much less. Another frequent claim is that The stainless steel developed by SpaceX rusts. The most recent truck manuals recommend removing bird poop quickly to avoid stains that painted cars don’t suffer from.
But perhaps the most problematic thing is the design itself, which, for example, will prevent the truck from being approved in Europe. The straight edges are dangerous if run over tosomeone. Furthermore, its rigid plates do not absorb the blow in the event of a crash, so the impact goes directly to the passengers and does not even give time for the airbags to open.
But the worst came when some users saw that he accelerator stuck at the bottom because a piece of plastic attached to the accelerator came loose. Now the company asked its customers to return the trucks to repair it with a screw whose need had surely been questioned.
Musk is the idol of a part of humanity that believes that things are solved with more conviction and chicanery than with knowledge, who denies accumulated knowledge and loves big, fast and furious things. Musk was rewarded for fitting that role. Even the Argentine president has it as a personal idol and took a photo with the truck in the background the week before they had to stop deliveries.
So far, Musk has managed to get around the limits of his methodology with chicanery, more promises and the money of his investors. However, those who always drive with the accelerator full, end up crashing.
