The initial Cybertruck announcement had the three trim levels priced at $39,990, $49,990, and $69,990. This is a price increase of between $21k and $30k, across the board. The original top-level $69,990 trim also advertised a 500-mile range, which is now down to 320 miles. Were they just making shit up? If I had put a deposit down back in 2019 I'd be pretty upset.
Edit: I just looked and Musk himself has stated that there have been over 1 million preorders/deposits for this vehicle. So they collected at least $100MM of customer money based on completely made up pricing/specs. WTF.
> So they collected at least $100MM of customer money based on completely made up pricing/specs. WTF.
Correct and correct. And not every manufacturer does this, by the way. The price/specs of the EV I pre-ordered (Volkswagen) did not change much by the time I purchased it.
I'll elaborate more: yes, because with a million plus deposits at such a low absolute dollar amount, certainly a significant portion of those are going to cancel. The ~15-25% of cumulative interest, while probably not that meaningful to each individual reservation holder, will add up in aggregate, and will hopefully act to disincentivize Tesla from making false claims about its future products again.
I'd be extra pleased if the FTC issued a fine in conjunction with the above, for false advertising.
Yeah I agree. But there are a large number of people (I think 100k+) who put down a deposit between 2019 and today. I realize it's refundable but it's still a slimy thing to do.
Inflation adjusted that $35k would be over $43k nowadays so it's actually quite a lot cheaper than promised. And it comes with many features included like Autopilot, which I think was a $3k option back then.
