Tesla Pickup truck’s latest teaser image sparks a new era of fan buzz
Tesla CEO Elon Musk again took to Twitter and posted a teaser image of the Tesla Pickup truck — the perfect time to start a new buzz of speculation and excitement among Tesla enthusiasts and potential customers of the pickup truck genre.
Since the Tesla Model Y saga came to a good finish with the latest unveiling event, the Silicon Valley-based automaker needs to keep the community engaged and this is the right move at the right time.
In the mid of last year, Elon Musk asked for ideas about the Tesla Pickup truck to his 24+ million Twitter fans and presented some of his own thoughts about the truck, this shows that Tesla did not reach the ‘concept development sketching’ stage until then.
Thousands of fans and Musk himself presented some ideas such as the standard variant of the truck will be dual-motor All-Wheel-Drive packed with crazy amounts of torque (Rivian R1T having 14,000 Nm), a dynamic suspension that adjusts with the load and power outlets that enable the use of 240V high-power tools in the field for long hours without the need of a generator.
This amount of power can be packed into a large-sized pickup truck that houses a bigger battery-pack not available in the current Tesla vehicle lineup, Rivian Automotive is offering a 180 kWh battery-pack in their top-end R1T electric pickup truck, this is by far the largest we have heard from any car manufacturer yet.
A little bit of data crawling will give us an idea of why Elon Musk and Tesla are dying to make a pickup truck as the CEO tweeted a few months ago.
The United States is heaven for pickup truck sales — if we look at the graph below that shows the climbing sales of pickup trucks vs. cars in the US market since 1980. Pickup trucks in the United States have taken over by a large margin since 2013 and car sales are declining every year from that point on.
Above: US Car and Truck Sales since 1980. Pickup truck market growing and car sales dropping since 2013. Research and data by Teslanomics.co (check out full analysis video below)
Further digging into the numbers shows that Ford’s F-Series pickup truck lineup is America’s most favorite with 909,303 units sold in 2018 alone, Tesla badly wants a piece of this lucrative market with intentions to unveil a prototype this year as Elon Musk tweeted earlier this month.
By far this year Tesla and Elon Musk have been able to hit their project timelines on time, be it the Model Y unveil, Gigafactory 3, and Model 3 deliveries in Europe and China, so we can expect that the Elon Musk’s team is working really hard to hit the timeline on the pickup truck unveil this year.
Above: US Best Selling Trucks in 2018. Ford F-Series leads the market segment by 909,330 units sold. Research and data by Teslanomics.co (check out full analysis video below)
In the recent past, Elon Musk has been referencing the Tesla Pickup truck as ‘too futuristic’ and would be a good fit for the movies like the ‘Blade Runner’ — we know ultimately the reality will overcome these fantasies, there will be out of the box features on the truck but it won’t be a total misfit as they have real competition like the Rivian R1T on track for production and delivery in 2020.
Tesla also released a Teaser photo that shows a huge Tesla pickup truck carrying a Ford F-150 on it’s back, the front fascia of this truck looked very similar to the Tesla Semi truck, the design overall did not please the enthusiasts and potential customers at all, surely this is not what Tesla is going to put into production.
Tesla Pickup Truck fits in the Blade Runner universe
In the recent past, Elon Musk has been referencing the Tesla Pickup truck as ‘too futuristic’ and would be a good fit for the movies like the ‘Blade Runner’ — we know ultimately the reality will overcome these fantasies, there will be out of the box features on the truck but it won’t be a total misfit as they have real competition like the Rivian R1T on track for production and delivery in 2020.
Tesla also released a Teaser photo that shows a huge Tesla pickup truck carrying a Ford F-150 on it’s back, the front fascia of this truck looked very similar to the Tesla Semi truck, the design overall did not please the enthusiasts and potential customers at all, surely this is not what Tesla is going to put into production.
Elon Musk is still referencing the design of the Tesla Pickup truck to be Blade Runner’ish ‘Cyberpunk’ as we can see in the above tweet, let’s look at the teaser image I lightened up a bit in Photoshop to try and see a little more, no ‘nice try’ nameplates this time.
All this teaser image shows is a light-slit stretching the entire tailgate of the Tesla Pickup, this is most probably the rear-end of the truck, some user renderings have wild imaginations and showing it on the front even.
A couple of Tesla Subreddit users used their skills in trying to unravel the mystery surrounding the latest Tesla Pickup truck teaser image.
In the first image below u/wjrichardson took the light slit and installed it on the old giant Tesla Pickup truck’s front fascia, removing the existing Tesla Semi type headlights, in the following second image u/waytomuchsparetime retrofitted the teaser image as the rear bed of a Chevrolet pickup truck.
Let us know in the comments section below what you think is the most appropriate place of the new teaser image on a Tesla Pickup truck. Follow us on Twitter / Facebook / Flipboard for constant Tesla and EV news, articles and fresh content.
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