Tesla’s launch of $39,900 cybertruck goes awry

Tesla’s launch of its $39,900 Cybertruck on Thursday night went off the rails, with the unexpected happening during a test of the toughness of its glass windows.

After running through some specs and hitting the truck’s door with a sledge hammer, Elon Musk asked an on-stage companion (Tesla’s lead designer, Franz von Holzhausen) to demonstrate the strength of the vehicle’s “Armoured Glass” by throwing a solid metal, baseball-sized ball at the driver side window.

It shattered the window.

“Oh my [bleeping] God,” Musk laughed. “Well, maybe that was a little too hard.”

So they tried it again on the rear passenger window… and it cracked too. “Room for improvement,” Musk said with a shrug.

Was this a gag? A “Hah hah! Just kidding, here’s a test on the real glass!” sort of thing? Nope. Elon stood in front of the truck, two broken windows and all, and completed the presentation.

While no one would expect most standard windows to stand up to a test like this, even Elon seemed surprised by the results. “We threw wrenches, we threw everything.” he said on stage. “We even literally threw a kitchen sink at the glass, and it didn’t break. For a little weird reason it broke now, I don’t know why.”

“We’ll fix it in post,” he followed up with a laugh then moved on to talking about the car’s suspension. The video went private on Tesla’s YouTube channel about 30 seconds after the live stream was over.–Yahoo News