Tesla Cybertruck seen close to BMW’s Munich R&D middle – for teardown?

A photograph of a giant and conspicuously triangle-shaped car in Munich, close to BMW’s Analysis and Innovation Middle, has surfaced on the web, suggesting the German automaker is doing a teardown of the newly-released Tesla Cybertruck.

Now that the Cybertruck is out, sightings aren’t all that unusual, particularly in California and Texas the place many of the automobiles are being delivered.

However one place that Cybertrucks nonetheless aren’t frequent is Europe, the place it isn’t bought (and it’s unlikely that the car will ever be bought attributable to its dimension and the chance that its excessive and boxy front-end wouldn’t cross pedestrian security rules).

So think about the shock when a flatbed automotive transporter was noticed with a coated(-but-really-you-can-tell-what’s-under-there), triangle-shaped car in Munich, simply down the highway from BMW.

The pictures have been posted by Nextmove, a German EV rental firm that additionally has an lively youtube channel posting details about EVs. Right here’s an embed of the video, deep-linked to the portion in query (pictures begin at 27:36):

The pictures have been despatched in by a viewer who says they have been taken on April 4 at round 7:45am on the nook of Schleichheimerstrasse and Frankfurter Ring, coming from the course of BMW’s Analysis and Innovation Middle. The situation is certainly only one block away from a number of BMW amenities, as you may see on this map of the realm:

Now possibly that is all only a loopy coincidence, nevertheless it appears fairly probably that BMW purchased this truck, in all probability for teardown functions. Which is fascinating, on condition that BMW doesn’t make vans (although it does make SUVs).

However regardless of their lack of pickup vans, BMW might be nonetheless thinking about seeing a number of the new applied sciences that Tesla is working with within the Cybertruck. Regardless of the car being a… let’s say “assertion,” it’s full of a great quantity of tech that the automotive trade has been speaking about for a very long time, however which heretofore has been seen in few or no completed automobiles.

This contains issues like 48-Volt structure and steer-by-wire, and another applied sciences which are on some automobiles however nonetheless moderately new, like Tesla’s bigger 4680 cell format and Powershare bidirectional charging. Tesla additionally initially promised to make use of a distinctive “exoskeleton”-style chassis, although because the truck obtained nearer to manufacturing that appears prefer it didn’t fairly pan out the best way we imagined – however we’re certain BMW is thinking about seeing what’s beneath that pores and skin anyway.

This isn’t the primary time we’ve seen Cybertrucks within the possession of different automakers, and it’s common for automakers to acquire new automobiles from different automakers to allow them to take them aside and see what the competitors is as much as.

Final month, a Cybertruck was noticed outdoors Ford’s proving grounds in Detroit, and reportedly the automaker paid fairly a reasonably penny for it. Early Cybertrucks bought for nearly 1 / 4 million {dollars} on the secondary market, regardless of Tesla’s menace to promote early consumers who flip their vans. To date, Tesla hasn’t adopted by means of on this menace with a lawsuit, nevertheless it has blacklisted at the least one proprietor after he listed his on the market, and as extra vans have gotten out, the resale market has cooled from its preliminary excessive highs.

However then, even that quarter million quantity may very well be low in comparison with what BMW might need paid. In February, a Cybertruck was listed on the secondhand market in Germany for a cool €485k, so both a wealthy fanatic wantsa triangle to embellish their storage, or a wealthy German automaker needed to be the primary to test it out. We hope they realized quite a bit for that sort of cash.