The prototype was photographed near the company’s California headquarters.
As the much anticipated Tesla Cybertruck all-electric pickup nears the start of production this summer, more and more prototypes are seen cruising the streets of California, where the EV maker has its engineering headquarters.
Now, a new sighting was posted on the Cybertruck Owners Club forum by the user greggertruck showing what appears to be the Beta prototype of the vehicle, but this time around it was missing its massive single windscreen wiper.
At closer inspection, though, it seems that the wiper spindle is still there, in the lower corner of the driver’s side, but it’s unclear why the mule was going around without this essential feature.
The Cypertruck’s wiper has been debated before by enthusiasts and car geeks alike, with some arguing that it won’t be up to the task of cleaning the whole windshield properly, to which Elon Musk replied with a tweet in 2021 that the setup we’ve seen time and time again isn’t the production version, adding that an ideal solution would be a “deployable wiper that stows in the front trunk.”
In 2019, the American company filed for a patent regarding a wiper system that can employ one or two wiper arms that can slide left or right to cover the entire surface of the windshield. However, none of the Cybertruck prototypes spotted thus far have had such a system in place, so we still don’t know if Tesla is ever going to use the system described in the 2019 patent filing.
The EV carmaker also patented the wheel cover design seen on the original prototype that debuted in 2019, with this latest spotting showing the Cybertruck wearing the black covers that were first seen almost four years ago.
Limited production is set to start sometime this summer, with Tesla hard at work assembling not one, but potentially two Giga Presses sent from Idra Group in Italy to the Texas Gigafactory. A ramp-up in production is expected for the first part of next year, but as time goes by, more and more Cybertruck prototypes will be hitting the roads for testing purposes before mass assembly begins.
As always, we’d like to know what you think, so scroll down to the comments section and write away.
Source: greggertruck (Cybertruck Owners Club)
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Keyword: Tesla Cybertruck Spotted Without Its Massive Windscreen Wiper