Tesla’s first pick-up truck will be larger than an F-150 and will have a game-changing feature (TSLA)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that the company will begin production of its first electric pick-up truck after it begins building the Model Y SUV, which is expected to go into production in late 2019 or early 2020.
But there is a good chance that Tesla will give a sneak peek of the pick-up truck in 2018 or 2019.
Musk said he is ‘dying’ to build the truck, though. So there’s a chance the timeline could be expedited.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted at when the company would build its all-electric pick-up truck.
“I promise that we will make a pickup truck right after Model Y. Have had the core design/engineering elements in my mind for almost 5 years. Am dying to build it,” Musk said.
Elon Musk/Twitter
While Tesla won’t begin to make the truck for a few more years, there’s a good chance we could get a sneak peek of the vehicle as soon as next year.
In April, Musk said to expect the company to reveal the pick-up truck in 18 to 24 months, which means the company could unveil it anytime between October 2018 and April 2019.
Given that Tesla generally reveals its cars a year before it actually begins production, Musk’s timeline of when the company will begin making the pick-up makes sense.
Musk also said via Twitter Tuesday that the truck would likely be a little larger than an F150 and that it may have a ‘game-changing’ feature, but he did not share any details about what that feature might be.
Elon Musk/Twitter
Musk, of course, has been talking about building a pick-up truck for a while.
In 2013, he told Business Insider that Tesla planned to build a truck, but he said that it would likely be five years before the company would get to it. And in July 2016, he reiterated in his Master Plan Part Deux that the company was working on vehicles to address all segments, including pick-ups.
Pick-up trucks aren’t the only new segment Tesla is pushing into.
In November, Tesla also revealed its first electric semi-truck for commercial use. The vehicle has 500 miles of range per charge, can go from 0-60 mph in five seconds without a trailer attached, and will go into production in 2019.
Musk teased the idea of a pickup in November during the reveal of the electric semi truck and the surprise announcement of the next-generation Roadster sports car. He showed a rendering of a truck that looks like the Tesla semi with a pickup bed big enough to swallow a Ford F-150 SuperCrew, though it left many people with more questions than answers (perhaps the actual pickup will look something more like this?). He added in Tuesday’s Twitter thread that the new truck might be bigger than an F-150 “to account for a really game-changing (I think) feature I’d like to add.”
Electrek writes that Musk in a Tesla owners event in 2013 discussed his idea for a Tesla truck:
One of the things that I think should be present in trucks is something like an air suspension that dynamically adjusts the load and sorta keeps the angle of the truck correct and the ride height even and adjust the dampening in real-time. Because the challenge you have with any vehicle where there’s a big potential difference between the minimum and maximum load is that the suspension is always wrong and usually wrong by a lot.
As for the Model Y, Musk most recently told investors and analysts it would be based on the Model 3 platform in order to bring it to market faster and meet the demand for SUVs. He had previously suggested the Model Y could arrive in 2019, or not for “a few years.”
While neither the Model Y or pickup are technically new ideas, they add major commitments and costs to an already daunting to-do list for Tesla. To recap, that now includes fixing production bottlenecks and ramping production of the all-important Model 3, developing a production version of the semi and figuring out where to build it, doing the same with the Roadster, maybe opening a factory in China, and now launching a new Model Y crossover and pickup truck — all, presumably, in the next couple of years. Oh, and becoming profitable. (Can’t forget that.)
In addition to the new models, Musk on Tuesday promised “major browser upgrades coming to all cars in a few months” and “Vastly better maps/nav coming soon,” among other things. As of this writing, he was still posting responses to Twitter users.
