Tesla Cybertruck Event Transcript: Elon Musk Unveils Cybertruck

Elon Musk: (00:16)
It doesn’t look like anything else. So we’ll start off with the size, the dimensions. And the inspiration. So the functionality I’m going to describe is within a space that is less than the most popular pickup truck in the United States, the F150. So we didn’t cheat in either width, height, or length, and we’re able to achieve much greater capability in the same dimensions, same weight. Yeah. Part of this is the fundamental design change, we moved the mass to the outside. We created an exoskeleton.

Elon Musk: (01:12)
So normally the way that a truck is designed, you have a body on frame, you have a bed on frame and the body and the bed don’t do anything useful. They’re carried like cargo, like a sack of potatoes. It was the way that aircraft used to be designed, when they had biplanes, basically. The key to creating an effective monoplane was a stressed skin design. You move the stress to the outside skin. Allows you to do things that you can’t do with a body on frame. So we’re able to make the skin out of thick, ultra hard stainless steel. It’s really hard. We’re going to show you just how hard.

Elon Musk: (02:03)
So Franz has a sledgehammer. Now don’t hold back. Okay.

Speaker 2: (02:22)
Do it Franz!

Elon Musk: (02:22)
It’s a regular truck door.

Speaker 3: (02:28)
Go Franz!

Franz: (02:29)
Want me to do this?

Elon Musk: (02:29)
Do it.

Speaker 5: (02:29)
Do it Franz!

Franz: (02:29)
That’s some pretty hard stuff.

Elon Musk: (02:52)
Yeah, hit it a couple times.

Franz: (02:53)
Want me to hit it again? All right.

Elon Musk: (03:03)
Yeah, nice. Now hit the Cybertruck. Same thing. Hit it harder. Yeah. Really wind up and nail it.

Franz: (03:29)
It’s pretty strong.

Elon Musk: (03:39)
Very strong. So if you think about a truck, you want a truck that’s tough. You want a truck that’s really tough, not fake tough. You want a truck you can take a sledgehammer to. A truck that won’t scratch. It doesn’t dent. What else can we do with this truck? What if we shot it? Let’s shoot it.

Speaker 6: (04:13)
Shoot it!

Elon Musk: (04:13)
But OSHA, I mean, come on. That’s a 9mm bullet shot at the door.

Speaker 6: (04:36)
Shoot it!

Elon Musk: (04:39)
We’re in California, unfortunately. But the 9mm… It is literally bulletproof to a 9mm handgun. That’s how strong the skin is. So it’s ultra hard, cold rolled stainless steel alloy that we’ve developed. We’re going to be using the same alloy in the Starship rocket and in the Cybertruck.

Speaker 7: (05:00)
Take my money!

Elon Musk: (05:06)
Yeah, you’re welcome. So on the right, that’s like normal truck doors that may as well be made of tissue paper. That looks like a paintball. Very different. So when you say something’s built tough, that’s what we mean.

Elon Musk: (05:32)
What about the glass?

Speaker 8: (05:33)
Love you Elon!

Elon Musk: (05:33)
Seems like a vulnerability.

Speaker 9: (05:33)
Bulletproof!

Elon Musk: (05:37)
Yeah, transparent metal glass. Yeah, that’s right. Let’s show some of the tests. What can we do with this?

Speaker 6: (05:56)
Shoot it!

Elon Musk: (05:58)
All right. Let’s show the glass demo. There you go. So first this is regular glass. This is like normal glass, car glass. We’re going to show you what happens with normal car glass. Shatters immediately, with the little ball. Now we’ll show you Tesla armored glass. Nothing. Yeah, it’s kind of a small ball though. Let’s maybe do it at a bigger height with a… Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 10: (06:55)
Drop it.

Elon Musk: (06:55)
[inaudible 00:06:55] Yeah, not bad. A bigger ball. Yeah. Not bad. Franz, could you try to break this glass please?

Speaker 11: (07:47)
Franz!

Speaker 12: (07:47)
Yeah, do it!

Franz: (07:54)
Sure?

Elon Musk: (07:55)
Yeah. Oh my f***ing God. Well, maybe that was a little too hard.

Franz: (08:02)
Yeah. Should we try on the rear?

Elon Musk: (08:08)
[inaudible 00:08:08] It didn’t go through, as a plus side.

Franz: (08:14)
Let’s try the rear.

Elon Musk: (08:15)
Try that one? Really? Okay. Sure. Aw, man. It didn’t go through. All right.

Speaker 13: (08:24)
Major league contract…

Elon Musk: (08:35)
Not bad. Room for improvement. All right. Let’s see. So yeah. We didn’t actually throw everything… We threw wrenches, we threw everything. We even literally threw the kitchen sink at the glass and it didn’t break. For some weird reason it broke now. I don’t know why. Fix it in post.

Elon Musk: (09:01)
In addition, the car has an adaptive air suspension. It’s literally built… Yeah, with adaptive air suspension. So this will come standard on all the cars. I think this is actually a very important design element because if you have a… If every truck has the ability to adjust the ride height so you can go very low or very high, so you can be efficient on the highway and you can also go off-roading. It’s going to have the highest clearance of any production truck. So it would have about a 16 inch clearance. And you can adjust this on the fly. So it’s adaptive damping and adaptive ride height. These are actually extremely important for a truck. Because trucks when you only drive them, they’re either too cushy or they’re too hard. You need it to be able to adjust dynamically depending upon what the load is. If you’ve got a lot of people on board, if you’ve got a full bed in the back, it’s got to adjust accordingly.

Elon Musk: (09:57)
So yeah, let’s talk about the… We call it the Volt. Cybertruck Volt. Let’s look… Let’s demo this active. Yeah. The rear is a hundred cubic feet, six and a half foot length, bed length, up to 3,500 pounds of payload. Yeah. And it can tow… But what about a real world test? Let’s actually have a tug of war here with an F150. So you can see which one can pull which. Let’s do the tug of war video. I mean, yeah. It was uphill.

Elon Musk: (11:29)
So let’s see. On-road performance…

Speaker 14: (11:30)
Wow!

Speaker 7: (11:30)
Take my money!

Speaker 14: (11:30)
Wow.

Elon Musk: (11:52)
Now let’s see, how does this compare to a Porsche 911? Okay, we’re going to give the Porsche a little bit of a headstart. Yeah. This is a current edition Porsche. And this is the actual truck. This is not CGI. In terms of off road performance, it’s going to have the best angular approach angle, best clearance heights, best departure angle. For people that are really going off road, this is going to be great. You could basically do the Baja Rally in this thing.

Elon Musk: (12:34)
We have three ranges. So yeah. So obviously it’ll have access to all the superchargers, be capable of more than 250 kilowatts, we’ll reveal the actual number later, and it has onboard outlets for 110 and 220 volts. So you don’t need a generator. The truck literally is your generator. And, as a little plus, because it’s got an air suspension, we can tap off the air suspension so you have a pneumatic source. So you have an… Yeah. Onboard air compressor. Of course it will come with autopilot standard. Yep.

Elon Musk: (13:38)
So there’ll be three versions. But it’s going to… [crosstalk 00:13:48] That’s the price without any incentives. That’s just like the price without any incentives. But the actual economics are even better than that because the cost of electricity is much less than the cost of gasoline. So when you look at the actual cost of ownership here, it’s… You’re paying much less for electricity than you are for the gasoline. You’re paying much less for maintenance. There’s no oil changes, no smog checks, no nothing, none of that stuff. So your maintenance is low, your cost of operations are low. And so it’s actually comparable to a truck, a gasoline truck, that’s 10 to $15,000 less. Yeah.

Elon Musk: (15:10)
All right. Yeah. So you can order now if you would like. Tesla.com/cybertruck. Or I should say also, we’re going to be offering rides in this all night. Don’t mind the glass.

Elon Musk: (15:40)
Anyway, thank you guys for coming.

Speaker 8: (15:42)
Thank you Elon!

Elon Musk: (15:43)
It’s going to be a great party and you’ll love riding around in this thing. It’s great. All right, thank you. Oh wait. We have…

Speaker 10: (15:57)
One more thing! One more thing!

Speaker 7: (15:57)
Open the door!

Speaker 10: (15:57)
One more thing!

Elon Musk: (16:07)
Should we do the… Oh yeah. We also made an ATV, so… Let’s bring it out.

Speaker 11: (16:30)
No way! [crosstalk 00:16:30]

Elon Musk: (16:30)
So you can see the truck. This is what I mean by the adaptive air suspension. Nice work, by the way. So the adaptive air suspension, you can drop real low and go high on the other side with [inaudible 00:17:19] load mode. So you’ve got load mode, you’ve got a built-in ramp. You can take a ATV or dirt bike, whatever you want, and load it on the back.

Speaker 15: (17:37)
And it’s charging.

Elon Musk: (17:39)
Yes. Oh, and it’s currently plugged in and charging.

Speaker 9: (17:43)
No way!

Elon Musk: (17:43)
Yeah. If you look, the car is adjusting itself. So you can go like real tight on the freeway and you’re going to go way high off-roading. Yeah.

Speaker 10: (17:58)
Thank you.

Elon Musk: (17:58)
All right. Thank you.