What does this mean for the release of Cybertruck at the end of Q3?
Go For Broke
A Tesla Cybertruck has been spotted abandoned and apparently broken down on the side of the interstate near Silicon Valley — and we've got a lot of questions about what's going on.
As Electrek reports, a reader saw someone he presumed to be a Tesla worker poking around under the hood of a still-unreleased Cybertruck prototype off the highway in Los Altos Hills, a small town near the powerhouse tech cities of Palo Alto and Mountain View.
The reader turned around to get a better look and said that once he returned to the stalled truck, it had been abandoned and covered with an unmarked tarp — a strange turn of events that allowed the reader to get close-up photos of the Cybertruck, including its undercarriage and suspension, the latter of which has apparently never before been photographed.
A Tesla Cybertruck was found seemingly broken down on the side of the road in Los Altos Hills.
Now before Cybertruck haters call for the truck to be doomed, it is quite normal for vehicles to break down during test programs. pic.twitter.com/NzKqF2wPy1
— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) August 11, 2023
Wreck Room
Naturally, this roadside Cybertruck sighting raises more questions than it answers, and it's unlikely we or anyone else will get satisfying answers any time soon —though we did reach out to Tesla anyway — because the Elon Musk-owned company infamously shuttered its press office back in 2020.
In its post, Electrek noted that it's not uncommon for prototypes to break down during testing, and that in fact, pushing these test vehicles to break down in order to diagnose problems is the point of stress-testing them in the first place.
But as commenters noted on the r/RealTesla subreddit, the Cybertruck being broken down isn't its biggest issue.
As more than one user noted, it's strange that the person presumed to be a Tesla employee left the Cybertruck prototype alone on the side of the interstate without waiting nearby — a seeming abandonment that allowed an Electrek contributor to get previously-unavailable photos of the unreleased vehicle's inner workings.
Whether leaving broken-down prototypes on the side of public highways is part of Tesla's employee protocol is anyone's guess — as are any implications for the Cybtertruck's purported release date at the end of Q3, which is coming up next month.
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