Elon Musk’s CyberTruck is a weird FU to Tesla haters

Los Angeles, November 2019.

That’s the time and location of the 1980s movie Blade Runner. It also marks when and where Tesla CEO Elon Musk declared fuck it to automakers the world over.

On Thursday night, Musk revealed the first electric pickup from Tesla. Officially named the CyberTruck, the vehicle looks like an angular pile of metal that would fit right in with Rick Deckard and Roy Batt. It’s a doozy.

Starting at $39,900 with 250 miles of range (and going up to 500 miles), the truck is supposed to be a beast with 7,500 pounds of towing capacity and still able to pull off 0 to 60 mph in under 6.5 seconds. And it has Autopilot, Tesla’s signature semi-autonomous driver assistance system.

Musk first teased the truck in 2013 and early this year promised it’d be coming soon. Over the years he’s hinted at what a Tesla pickup truck would look like. Most hints referenced cyberpunk and the dystopian film Blade Runner with a description like “an armored personnel carrier from the future.” 

It’s certainly something we’ve never seen in a truck.

“Trucks have been the same for a very long time like 100 years, we wanted to try something different,” Musk teased at the start of the event at the Tesla Design Studio on the SpaceX campus in Southern California. That was an understatement. 

While Tesla fans have made renderings and guesses of what the car would look like, nothing could prepare us for this.

Hours before the truck unveiling, Musk tantalized anxious Tesla fans with tweets about the truck.

Pre-orders are now open on the Tesla website, but the truck won’t start production until late 2021. 

This story is developing.