On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk unveiled the Cybertruck at Tesla’s design studio next to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, promising an exoskeleton in “ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless steel” and “armor glass” that couldn’t be broken. To prove it, Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen threw a steel ball at the driver’s-side window. It shattered. He threw a second ball at the rear window. It shattered too, live, in front of the crowd and every camera in the room.
Musk’s explanation (that a sledgehammer strike moments earlier had already cracked the glass at its base) didn’t undo the hype. Tesla later said the truck drew roughly 200,000 pre-orders in the days that followed.
