That truck is brilliant.
The frame IS the body. That's a cost savings. No curved parts means you can use steel, (the cheapest metal) ship flat and laser cut/score to origami all the parts into place. Shape-stamping is expensive. Flat is cheap. This is going to cost a fraction of that of his competitors in terms of manufacturing.
Consider:
The electricals are pretty much solid state in his cars; robots have a hard time feeding the
kilometers worth of wire, (flexible is unpredictable) throughout traditional cars, and so it's hard to get away from employing assembly line workers. The Tesla design does it differently, with kilometers less wiring (paradoxical for an electric vehicle, one would think), and far more efficiently assembled. He can do the whole thing, (or much more of it) with robots.
One of the most expensive aspects of car manufacture is the paint job at the end. This thing isn't painted, so that whole step is cut out. (There's probably going to be a robust aftermarket to color these things, perhaps with vinyl wraps?).
The engines, batteries and drive train are standard issue, and once the basic science and engineering is done, are far less complicated in terms of moving parts and assembly than standard automobiles. (Consider an electric motor versus a gasoline engine. One of them is super-scalable, you can hold in your hand and costs a penny to manufacture. The other you can't and needs to take into account caustic fluid management and labor intensive construction. Gasoline engines are not cheap.) Tesla cars are rather like those "Swatches" from the 90's. Same basic design with different wrappers. Built cheap, built well, and everybody wanted one. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Tesla actually hit their
very customer friendly price point on this truck out of the gate.
I further don't doubt for a second that he's pre-sold a stack of them, hitting that 140,000 unit pre-order. Heck, I'm not even a car guy, and I kinda want one.
(Carl Benjamin expresses the sentiment well:)
I think we need to face the facts: Elon Musk is taking over the world and without major, aggressive,
nasty intervention, nobody is going to be able to stop him.
The more I watch him, the more I suspect he's being given a free ride by the 4D Matrix. (Heck, he's working with an enthusiastic China to manufacture his cars and batteries). -I can't even get a smallish idea off the ground without all the Type B Influences (or was it Type A? Gurdjieffian lore, anyway. You know the ones.) activating to unconsciously throw themselves into my path in blind missions of sabotage. Elon seems to have had somebody rig all the stop lights to only show "Green" along his highway of life.
I think this may simply be reality sculpting of some kind. You don't get
that many brilliant ideas and the ability to implement them unless you're Julias Ceasar, or you're having a lizard whisper in your brain. And the 5G network thing suggests to me that he's not working on the side of the angels.
Still.., I'm not bitter about it. I find him amusing and even kind of inspiring to observe; (even with 4D assists, he's a genius and has the will power of a Ceasar) and I really don't think he's an evil guy on a personal level. More like a kind of Useful Savant. But I do think he's dangerous and I don't trust the world he's building. That 5G network he's building is going to make everybody's life miserable. Or rather, will render them incapable of noticing.
