Tesla starts telling some Cybertruck orders to ‘prepare for delivery’

A number of Cybertruck order holders have started getting “prepare for delivery” emails today, suggesting that Tesla might be getting Cybertrucks out to the public a little sooner than we expected.

Tesla held its first Cybertruck delivery event late last month to deliver the first Cybertrucks, though there were only a small number delivered on the day. Those deliveries seemed to largely go to VIPs, such as Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian.

At that time, it wasn’t clear how soon we would start seeing wider public deliveries of the Cybertruck. It could have been weeks or it could have been months.

In the case of the Model 3, for example, Tesla held one big delivery event in July where it mostly delivered vehicles to employees, and it took several months before the general public started to receive cars. We got one of the first cars delivered to the public a full five months later, in late December. And the same happened with the Tesla Semi, which we’ve really seen no movement on over the course of the last year.

But in the last few days, some Cybertruck reservation holders have gotten emails inviting them to configure, with “prepare for delivery” emails going out to several today. Several have posted about it on cybertruckownersclub after getting the email.

Most of these seem to be orders for the fully-optioned, limited edition, $120k “Foundation Series”. In the past, Tesla has sold other limited-edition early versions of several of its cars (Roadster, S and X), naming them “Founders” or “Signature” series. The company stopped this practice for the Model 3, but it’s back for the Cybertruck.

The “prepare for delivery” email doesn’t necessarily mean that trucks are coming right away, as in the past Tesla has made people wait for up to a few months after that notification. But cybertruckownersclub has also assembled a spreadsheet tracking submitted Cybertruck orders, with some purportedly showing delivery dates beginning as early as December.

Those with December dates are in Texas and in California, where Tesla says Foundation Series deliveries have already begun. However, we’ve seen no evidence of these deliveries yet, outside of the initial delivery event. Deliveries to other states won’t start until 2024.

So it sounds like Tesla will try to do an end-of-quarter delivery rush to get some highly-optioned Cybertrucks into owners’ hands before the end of the fiscal quarter and year. Tesla is no stranger to these end-of-quarter delivery rushes, and there is often quite a bit of chaos at Tesla delivery centers at the end of the year.

Electrek’s Take

Honestly, these deliveries are coming much sooner than we expected. Given Tesla’s history of having a significant gap between delivery events and the first actual wave of public deliveries, we thought it would take longer to get a significant number of Cybertrucks out to the public.

This might still be the case, and maybe there will only be a few deliveries by the end of the year. But with the number of people signed up to the tracking spreadsheet just today, and given that most Cybertruck owners won’t think to go straight to an online forum to talk about their order, there might be enough to call this a “wave” of deliveries.

It makes sense, because we have certainly seen more than ten Cybertrucks in existence. But a lot of those are going to be engineering prototypes or other early models which may or may not be ready for public consumption.

Then again, Tesla did say it currently has production capacity to build 125,000 Cybertrucks per year. We really doubt we’ll see five digits worth of cars delivered by the end of this month, but a few hundred would still be above our expectations given the history of latency between Tesla delivery events and real mass deliveries.