late made the headlines recently for proposing a highly customizable electric pickup truck. It also wanted people to believe it is affordable, but it is very far from it, as I explained in a recent article. TechCrunch broke the news about it and also revealed that it received 100,000 reservations in two weeks. Some said it was encouraging, others that it was insane, but the real insanity is giving these refundable preorders any divinatory powers.
The best proof that these numbers do not mean future sales success is the Tesla Cybertruck. The American battery electric vehicle (BEV) bragged about reservation numbers every once in a while. On November 24, 2019, Elon Musk tweeted that his company had received 187,000 preorders for the electric pickup truck. That was three days after it was revealed. And he didn't stop there.
On Tesla's Q3 2023 earnings call in October 2023, the BEV maker's CEO said, "So, really, the demand is off the charts. We have over 1 million people who have reserved the car." Eventually, that number climbed all the ladder steps toward the final 2 million reservations estimate that some websites said the electric pickup truck had.
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