Elon Musk says sledgehammering Cybertruck led to the onstage window failure

After beating the side of his fresh Cybertruck with a sledgehammer with not a marker left , Elon Musk switched his attention to the “Tesla Armor Glass”.

As we all saw, the glass did not fare so well. A throw of a metal ball into the window made it to splinter, catching everybody on stage off guard. “Oh my [bleeping] God,” stated Musk.

A repeat effort on the back window gets exactly the same results, leaving cracks sprawled across its own glass for the rest of the presentation to the vehicle.

In hindsight, Elon states that they probably should’ve finished the window demonstration before they hit on on the truck.

Elon tweets:

Would the window have cracked regardless of sequence? At least on stage, they only pounded to the door panel; were those strikes sufficient to decode the bottom of the glass to the back door, too? It’s probably impossible for anybody beyond Tesla to state with certainty, however this seems pretty wild.

The night Elon tweeted out a movie of their tests “before launching ”, Where the window had no problems:

Franz yells steel ball in Cybertruck window before launch. Guess we have some improvements to make before production haha. pic.twitter.com/eB0o4tlPoz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2019

Several commenters postulated (supposing the truck in the movie was the exact same one on stage) these earlier tests might ’ve primed the window for failure — which the evaluation strikes weakened the glass, even if they didn’t noticeably damage them.

Whatever the cause, the glass cracked — twice. The (literal) damage is completed. However while the broken windows are becoming something of a meme, it’s not like the failed demonstration wiped out interest; Musk states that, as of Sunday night, over 200,000 people had set down low cost $100 residue (s O over $20M in deposits in all) on the vehicle. With this Cybertruck not expected to enter production until 2021, I’Id be amazed if Tesla doesn’t make some tweaks and find some over-the-top approach to demonstrate V2 of this automobile ’s glass until those items begin rolling out.