Tesla Truck Demo Goes Awry as Shatterproof Windows Break
The event was shown on YouTube, with the video made private shortly after.
(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk unveiled Tesla Inc.’s eagerly awaited electric pickup truck on Thursday but it didn’t go as planned, ending with two smashed windows and the hashtag #cybertruck trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.
In the demo, Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen initially took a sledgehammer to the truck, which withstood the impact. Then it all went wrong.
Von Holzhausen took a metallic ball in his right hand, wound up and tossed it at the truck -- smashing the front driver-side window, stunning the audience and viewers live streaming the event.
“Oh my f---ing god,” Musk said, when the window broke.
“Maybe that was a little too hard,” Musk said after the ball cracked the glass. So they tried again. A second test broke a second window.
“It’s classic Tesla. It’s poetic,” said analyst Gene Munster of Loup Ventures. “I applaud the company for taking risks: this was not a boring presentation. The broken glass was unpredictable. This wasn’t practiced.”
The event was shown on YouTube, with the video made private shortly after. The heavy-duty truck retails from $39,900 and will come in three different variants.
“This obviously wasn’t a true production vehicle so Tesla gets a pass for now,” said Akshay Anand, executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book. “But if they are going to market the glass as a differentiator, they better be able to show stronger tests leading up to launch.”
--With assistance from Dana Hull.
To contact the reporters on this story: Thuy Ong in Sydney at hong35@bloomberg.net;Natnicha Chuwiruch in Bangkok at nchuwiruch@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Niluksi Koswanage at nkoswanage@bloomberg.net, Derek Wallbank, Young-Sam Cho
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