With the announcement that one of its sporty Roadsters will be heading to Mars as the payload of SpaceX’s 2018 Falcon Heavy launch, many are looking with anticipation to the new year to see what Tesla will offer. 2017 had its share of problems for the company, which faced lawsuits after the delay of its Model 3. The suits accused both the company and Musk of hiding problems causing the manufacturing delay, which Tesla chalked up to certain assembly lines taking “longer to activate than expected.”
That said, the year also featured new reveals from the company. After teasing their new line of electric transport semi trucks, preorders for the new vehicles broke expectations and forced Tesla to limit the amount of trucks per order. The company has also been teasing the Tesla Model Y, a compact SUV planned to enter production in 2018 or 2019 once the Model 3 situation is resolved.
While these vehicles are still waiting to hit the market, CEO and entrepreneur Elon Musk is already unveiling the company’s next big project: Tesla pickup trucks. Like so many of his projects, the news was casually revealed via Musk’s own Twitter account earlier this week. Musk told a respondent who jokingly asked for the company to begin work on pickup trucks that he is “dying to build” one and that he has been playing with designs for “almost 5 years.” Given the sheer number of projects the company has on the table, it’s likely that Tesla will move ahead with plans to establish another car manufacturing plant in California next year.
Musk went on to say that development of the pickup truck would begin in earnest once the Model Y is officially completed and released, which the company is now expecting to happen sometime in 2019. In April of this year, Musk also teased the possibility that a prototype truck could be revealed in as little as 18 months to two years. He also revealed some more specific design details, saying that it would have “similar total size” to Ford’s F150. More tantalizing, however, was his reveal that the hypothetical Tesla pickup might be “slightly bigger to account for a really game-changing feature.” What this feature could be is anyone’s guess, but given the company’s past innovations, it’s likely their entry into the world of pickup trucks will prove to be a new era for the class of vehicles
Dil Bole Oberoi
