Musk’s smashing moment at truck event
● Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s eagerly awaited electric bakkie this week 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, wound up and tossed it at the truck — smashing a front window.
“Maybe that was a little too hard,” Musk said.
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 practised.”
The event was shown on YouTube, with the video made private shortly after. The heavy-duty truck retails from $39,900 (about R585,000) and will come in three 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.”