Why the Tesla Cybertruck is years behind schedule

Elon Musk’s concept of an all-electric, stainless steel truck is one that you might say belongs … well, back to the future.

Taking a cue from that movie’s biggest star — John DeLorean’s extreme vision of a stainless-steel-bodied sports car — Musk three-plus years ago shocked the industry when he announced that Tesla would build a “Cybertruck” that would accelerate faster than a 911 and look nothing like a Ford F-150. And it would be built of DeLorean-esque stainless steel.

The Musk plan, like many Musk plans, has yet to come to fruition. In a revealing essay in The New York Times, veteran auto writer Jack Ewing details the effort to produce the Cybertruck, with a focus on the use of stainless steel in an "exoskeleton" vehicle as “another example of Mr. Musk’s penchant for pushing technological boundaries to the brink of disaster.”

Ewing discusses with experts the challenges of working with the material — challenges, he writes, that may “help explain why Tesla is two years behind schedule in manufacturing the Cybertruck, which the company plans to produce at its factory in Austin, Texas.’’

The story quotes Raj Rajkumar, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, on Musk's go-my-own-way approach: “Tesla thinks they can solve any problem and don’t have to learn from anyone else. And then they get stuck in a corner.”