Tesla wants to reinvent the pickup with the $39,900 Cybertruck

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  Tesla sent over some better images of the Cybertruck, and I updated the delivery information below. [credit: Tesla ]

On Thursday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed his company’s take on that most quintessentially American of automobiles, the pickup truck. “Trucks have been basically the same for 100 years. We want to do something different,” Musk told a rapturous audience. He wasn’t underselling things. It’s called the Cybertruck, and it looks like a cross between the Aston Martin Bulldog, a wedge-shaped concept from the early 1980s, and that cool APC you remember from Aliens.

“We moved the mass to the outside,” Musk said, referring to the fact that the Cybertruck has a stainless steel monocoque construction, like the Model 3. Criticizing the body-on-frame construction technique used for almost heavy trucks on sale, Musk told attendees that “the body and the bed don’t do anything useful,” before launching into a lengthy demonstration of people hitting or shooting body panels and glass from the Cybertruck to prove the toughness of the exterior.

The shape is highly unconventional, but the size could have been picked by a focus group—almost exactly as wide and tall as a Ford F-150, and about exactly as long as some of the four-seat versions of America’s favorite pickup. At the rear, the 6.5-foot (2m) bed—called the Cybertruck Vault here, has a lockable aerodynamic cover that gives the vehicle 100 cubic feet (2,831L) of protected cargo storage. The Vault will also support loads of up to 3,500lbs (1,588kg).