Bookmakers back Tesla electric pickup in Ford tug of war as Elon Musk says pre-orders reach 250,000
- Tesla claimed it had 455,000 reservations for the Model 3 in 2017 before it started selling and it had sold 275,000 of the cars by the second quarter of this year
Orders for Tesla’s electric pickup Cybertruck are inching closer to the record set by the company’s Model 3 sedans in 2016, with company head Elon Musk signalling 250,000 customers have now lined up to buy the new vehicle less than a week after its launch.
The flood of reservations has been encouraged by Tesla’s cut-price US$100 deposit to place a booking and a steady drumbeat of promotion from the Silicon Valley billionaire to his millions of social media followers.
Musk tweeted “250k” on Tuesday night in an apparent reference to the number of orders. The company did not immediately confirm that figure on Wednesday.
Ford Motor Co executive Sunny Madra has also pitched in by challenging Musk via his Twitter account to an “apples to apples” tug of war between the Cybertruck and a comparable Ford F-150 pickup.
At the Cybertruck launch last week, Musk showed a video of the Tesla vehicle winning a tug of war and dragging a Ford truck uphill. He said he would happily hold another contest next week.
One online bookmaker on Wednesday had Tesla as favourite to win a contest at odds of 5 to 2 on.