Millions Await Tesla Cybertruck Event

The Cybertruck delivery event is supposed to happen in September.

CEO Elon Musk said in April that the “Cybertruck handover” will “hopefully be around the end of Q3 this year.”

And in July, he said that “demand is so — so far, off the hook, you can’t even see the hook.”

With the end of the quarter a couple of days away, millions with reservations are waiting. Reports claim that those reservations, which have been piling up after years of delays, now have reached two million.

Anticipation is whetted every day on Twitter/X and TikTok by Tesla enthusiasts who provide a constant diet of Cybertruck Release Candidate sightings around the U.S.

So, how near is the start of actual Cybertruck commercial production?

Musk added a qualifier in July saying “the production ramp will move as fast as the slowest…elements of the entire supply chain…there’s like 10,000 unique parts and processes in the Cybertruck…So, always very difficult to predict the ramp initially.”

He did say, however, that deliveries will start this year with “high volume” next year.

Conversion is key

With the years of waiting for the start of production presumably coming to end sometime soon, the question becomes how many will convert those reservations to purchases.

“I would think the conversion rate for vehicles like this is pretty high,” Natalie Neff, Editor, Autoweek, told me in an email.

Neff said that the longer a reservation holder waits, ironically, the more tolerant they can get, citing a friend who preordered a Rivian R1S SUV and waited two years for delivery.

“And that was for a Rivian. Tesla fans are a whole different breed. They’re rabid, they’re diehards and are pretty quick to turn apologist for Tesla when things don’t go as planned,” she said.

She continued. “And those who’ve put in preorders have been waiting a long time now, going on four years, making it increasingly harder for those who have stuck around this long to throw in the towel.”

If true, that’s very good news for Tesla’s bottom line.

Even if it’s ugly it doesn’t matter

A raging debate on Reddit — to this day — is whether the Cybertruck is unspeakably ugly or not.

But the growing consensus is that aesthetics, in the end, don’t matter in the case of the Cybertruck.

“If I had to choose one of the 46 brands on the U.S. market right now that would offer a design such as the Cybertruck has, I would probably pick Tesla,” said Thomas Libby, an analyst at S&P Global Mobility.

“In my opinion Musk loves to be the outsider, the challenger, the risk-taker, the unconventional, and this model fits all that,” Libby said.

Autoweek’s Neff says that buyers don’t need to be lectured on what it looks like.

“I mean, it’s been clear since it was initially unveiled that it looks the way it does,” said Neff. “That’s a huge part of its appeal,” she said.