Pre-orders for Tesla Inc's out of this world Cybertruck electric vehicle played out just as top honcho Elon Musk predicted: 250,000 buyers less than a week after its roll-out.
Tesla's cut-price $100 deposit has encouraged the flood of reservations to place a reservation and a steady drumbeat of Silicon Valley billionaire promotion to his millions of social media followers.
On Tuesday night, Musk tweeted "250k" in an apparent reference to the number of orders. On Wednesday, the organization did not immediately disclose this number.
Ford Motor Co executive Sunny Madra even proposed a war tug between the Cybertruck and a comparable Ford F-150 pick-up by confronting Musk from his Twitter account.
At last week's Cybertruck release, Musk revealed a Tesla car clip capturing a war tug and dragging up a Ford truck. He said that next week he'd be happy to hold another contest.
On Wednesday, one online bookmaker had Tesla as the favorite to win a contest at 5-2 odds. On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla's shares were up marginally, but still down about 7 percent since last Thursday's vehicle launch.
"As America's best-selling vehicle for 42 years, we've still concentrated on satisfying our truck buyers. We're looking forward to our all-new F-150 hybrid launching next year" said the company spokesperson.
Tesla released reservations shortly after the launch, enabling potential buyers to book three truck models valued at $39,900, $49,900 and $69,900. It is planning to begin truck production around late-2021.
The reservation price compares to the $1,000 charged by the company to book a Model 3 in the months following its much-hyped three-year-long launch.
"The $100 vehicle reservation is the company admitting preorders are meaningless," Roth Capital market strategist Craig Irwin disclosed.
Tesla claimed it had 455,000 reservations for the Model 3 in 2017 before it started selling and by the second quarter of this year it had sold 275,000 cars.
Gordon Johnson, an analyst at GLJ Research, said the Cybertruck would probably have a much lower rate of conversion to orders of actual purchases.
Musk's tweets have suggested that the company will use new designs and techniques to construct the Cybertruck, which is made of stainless the steel used in rockets.
The unique and angular futuristic design of the Cybertruck has divided public opinion, with some market observers saying that it had no chance to draw in the kind of mass appeal that made pickup trucks the best-selling vehicles in the American automotive industry.
