How It Started on 2023-04-19

During the Q1 2023 earnings call on April 19, 2023, Elon Musk announced that the first Cybertruck deliveries would take place in Q3 2023. Technically, that means September 30th latest. Source: Electrek

How I See It Going

Nope. Won’t happen.

How It Is Going as of 2023-09-27

Between Q1 and Q3 Elon complained that building Cybertrucks was hard. Source: Ars Technica

How It Actually Went on 2023-09-30

Here we are. To nobody’s surprise, Q3 went by and not a single Cybertruck was delivered to customers. My bet is that during the next earnings call, Elon will claim that the first Cybertrucks will be delivered sometime in 2024. At one point he will complain again that making Cybertrucks is hard.

How it is going is based on a simple idea: corporations make a lot of promises. Carbon neutrality. Inclusivity. Responsibility. They promise to revolutionize the world with millions of robotaxis and full self-driving. They say they’re going to make smartphones obsolete with a little something in your pocket. Having observed this game for several years, I can say this: the main goal of many (but not all) of these press releases is to (a) get free publicity and (b) reduce the psychological guilt of potential buyers.

This is how I got the idea of “How it is going.” I’m going to track the press releases promises of several companies:

• What they promised, when, and for which deadline.
• What my prognosis is: from “yep totally going to do it” to “utter bullshit.”
• We reach the set deadline I’m going to document what they actually achieved.

There are the companies that are true to their word. There are the companies that actually mean well but set goals that they know are unattainable. And there are the companies that plainly lie. When possible, I intend to make a distinction between companies based on their past track record.

The irony is that I have no idea how this project will be going. This is just a start. I know I need to make a few changes to the architecture of my blog to add tags per company, dates, etc., but I think an imperfect start is better than waiting forever to implement the project. So let the good times roll!