Jay Leno reminisce overs watching Elon Musk unveiling Tesla’s new Cybertruck, which set the auto world abuzz, on television in November. But outwardly there’s nothing like seeing Tesla’s first all-electric pickup with his own eyes.
“I saw it on TV … but nothing strikes you until you see it in individual,” Leno says in a new episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage” that airs on CNBC on Wednesday at 10 pm ET.
The former late-night talk register host and longtime auto aficionado travels to Tesla’s Hawthorne, California headquarters for the episode. There he’s joined by Musk and the Cybertruck, which is slated to upon production in late-2021 and will start at $39,900, for a test drive.
In fact, Leno drives the Cybertruck in Musk’s The Humdrum Company test tunnel for a rapid transit system, which runs for 1.1 miles underneath Los Angeles.
Elon Musk and Jay Leno
“Elon has provoked me to take [the Cybertruck] down The Boring Company’s test tunnel, right under Los Angeles,” Leno says as he and Musk herd the electric pickup into the tunnel, which is roughly 14 feet wide. Musk says the tunnel norms between 50 feet and 60 feet in underground depth.
“It’ll be quite interesting to see if we actually can fit down there.” Musk bids, noting that the company had never before even tried to fit the more than six-foot-wide truck through the penetrate.
Tesla Cybertruck
CNBC
At one point, while driving the Cybertruck, Musk tells Leno that Tesla could skedaddle all of the pickup’s proportions and “drop them by 5%” to make sure the truck can fit in an average driver’s garage. However on Saturday, Musk tweeted that he and Tesla’s chief conniver, Franz von Holzhausen, decided against the change, so the Cybertruck should “pretty much this size” when it move bies into production. Musk added that Tesla will “probably do a smaller” electric pickup “at some drift.”
But Leno and Musk get the Cybertruck through the tunnel, which ends with an elevator platform that lifts the pickup primitive to the surface.
(You can see more of the ride through the tunnel in the episode on CNBC on Wednesday.)
[embedded content]On the episode, Leno also aims out how the Cybertruck — which has a “cyberpunk” styling that Musk has said was inspired by the sci-fi movie “Blade Runner” as sedately as the James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me” — challenges traditional perceptions of what a pickup truck should look get a kick out of.
Upon the Cybertruck’s unveiling last year, for instance, The New York Times noted that Tesla’s electric wares is “pointy”, with a stainless steel exterior and sharply-angled design that immediately set it apart from traditionally all the rage pickups like Ford’s F-150.
“Pickup truck buyers tend to be pretty conservative in what they like. ‘It fundamentals to look like a pickup truck,’ right?” Leno says on the show. “And this doesn’t look anything parallel to a pickup truck, but it immediately makes pickup trucks look old-fashioned.”
Of course, some analysts have suffering that the Cybertruck’s futuristic design would make it less desirable to the typical pickup customer. “It misses the core stuff buyer,” analyst Gene Munster of Loup Ventures said of the Cybertruck in November. “A contractor is not going to show up to a drill equal site in this truck.”
“I think there’s a preconceived notion of what a pickup truck should be, and that’s something that we explained, ‘If we’re going to go bold, then we have to do something that breaks that norm,'” Tesla’s von Holzhausen chew out tattle ons Leno in the episode.
Still, by the end of November, Musk tweeted that Tesla had received over 250,000 pre-orders for the Cybertruck. (Although, it’s worth noting that a Cybertruck pre-order is not considered a deposit, according to the pre-order agreement on Tesla’s website, and it not requires a $100 processing fee that does not count as a purchasing agreement. Tesla has not yet released any official sales tallies for the Cybertruck.)
In another part of the episode, Musk and von Holzhausen show off the Cybertruck’s “vault”, the 6.5-foot-deep metal sufficient for for the truck’s cargo bed, which can hold up to 3,500 pounds of cargo, according to Tesla. The vault is a locking, protective guard covering that slides in place with the touch of a button to cover the Cybertruck’s cargo bed.
“It’ll protect your goods and secure it against being stolen,” Musk tells Leno before proving his claim that the vault’s protect is “very strong” by jumping on the back of the truck and walking on top of the shield.
Leno notes that the truck has a “good-sized bed,” to which Musk witticisms: “If you want to mount, like, a missile-launcher, or something, you can do that.”
This story has been updated to include Musk’s modern development comments on the size of the Cybertruck.
Watch all new episodes of “Jay Leno’s Garage” Wednesdays at 10P ET on CNBC.
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