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Tesla Finally Gives a Cybertruck Release Date: November 30

It’s coming. Probably.

A Tesla Cybertruck.
Heatmap Illustration/Tesla

Tesla’s electric Cybertruck might actually hit the roads before the end of the year.

The automaker will deliver its first pickup trucks on November 30, it announced today, amid a disappointing set of financial earnings that saw its sales rise but profits fall.

“I’ve driven the car — it’s an amazing product,” Elon Musk said on Wednesday evening. “But I do want to temper expectations for Cybertruck,” he added, warning that production of the vehicle will take at least 18 months to scale. “While I think this is potentially our best product ever, I think this is going to require immense work to reach volume production and be cashflow-positive at a price that people can afford,” he said.

The delivery will (probably) end a chapter of the Tesla-made pickup’s nearly decade-long odyssey to market. As early as January 2014, Musk expressed interest in selling an all-electric pickup. Two years later, he mentioned a pickup in the company’s master plan, before teasing the truck again in early 2019.

Musk finally unveiled the Cybertruck in November of that year — you might remember him accidentally smashing the truck’s window when trying to demonstrate its shatterproof glass — and he promised to deliver the first vehicles by 2021. But the stainless-steel-clad pickup faced supply chain and scaling issues, and its debut was kicked to 2022 … and then to early 2023 … before getting delayed again to late 2023. We’ll see next month whether the automaker can hit this final deadline; in the meantime, Ford beat Tesla to market with an all-electric pickup, and Musk bought a social network.

Setting aside its production delays and Pokemon-like geometry, the Cybertruck may help the broader car industry better understand the contours of the electric-pickup market. Ford, GM, and other automakers have slowed down their EV pickup build-outs after initially embracing the body type. Tesla says that nearly two million people have paid $150 to “preorder” the Cybertruck, but it has yet to announce a price for the vehicle, and Musk sounded uncharacteristically daunted on Wednesday by how challenging its scale-up might be. Now we’ll see whether customer interest for the Cybertruck translates into actual demand — and whether America’s most famous electric automaker can produce, and sell, America’s most iconic type of vehicle.

Yellow

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Sparks

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

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Donald Trump and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

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A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

An eagle clutching a wind turbine.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.

The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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