Tesla’s rival to the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T is taking shape, even if it’s not quite production-ready yet.
A video of what’s thought to be a pre-production Cybertruck from Tesla’s latest Investor Day shows how the ute has evolved from the angular concept revealed back in 2019.
The biggest changes appear inside, where the aircraft-style yoke steering wheel has been replaced with a (slightly) more conventional oval-shaped unit featuring a flat top to match its flat bottom.
According to Electrek, the centre console has been updated to feature more storage than before. It’s not clear if it still serves as a jump seat, whether Tesla has abandoned plans to offer three seats up front, or if there’ll be more than one seating option.
Touches such as the triangular side mirrors, glass roof, and modified bumpers appear to line up with another test mule spied recently by Twitter page What’s Inside.
Volume production timing for the Cybertruck was outlined by Elon Musk in a January quarterly investor session. At the moment production at Tesla’s factory in Texas is expected to kick off during the middle of 2023, before ramping up in 2024.
The Cybertruck at its reveal in 2019
Mr Musk has already warned reservation holders their finished vehicles may look different to the prototype shown off in 2019. At its reveal, Tesla said the Cybertruck would enter production in 2021.
“Cybertruck pricing was unveiled in 2019 and the reservation was $99, so you know a lot has changed since then,” said Mr Musk. “The specs and the pricing will be different.”
“I hate to sort of give a little bit of bad news but I think there’s no way to sort have anticipated quite the inflation that we’ve seen and the various issues but what I can say is that the Cybertruck will be one hell of a product and it’s going to be like a damn fine machine.”
Specifications were removed from Tesla’s website late in 2021, and pricing was removed from the US site.
Before the update, which affected all global Tesla sites, the Cybertruck page listed three variants: a single-motor rear-wheel drive model, and dual- and tri-motor all-wheel drive models.
Payload was a claimed 1600kg across the range, with the tri-motor AWD offering a claimed 800km of range, 6.4t towing capacity, and a rapid 2.9-second sprint to 60mph (96.6km/h).
