Yahoo Finance Tesla sells ‘bulletproof’ t-shirt mocking viral Cybertruck launch
Tesla has cashed in on last year's calamitous unveiling of the Cybertruck with the launch of a "bulletproof" t-shirt making fun of the unsuccessful demonstration of the electric truck's armoured glass.
The $45 garment features an image of one of the Cybertruck's cracked windows, which shattered during the live event in November when an employee threw a steel ball at it.
Clips of the incident went viral and attracted widespread media coverage of the new vehicle, described as "an armoured personnel carrier from the future".
The apparent mishap did not appear to affect interest in the Cybertruck, with hundreds of thousands of pre-orders placed with days of its unveiling.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was onstage at the time of the demonstration, revealed the t-shirt on Twitter, joking that it "is bulletproof" and "makes you buff".
The Cybertruck's body, which is made out of the same alloys found on spacecraft, is described as "literally bulletproof", but the truck's windows are only actually designed to resist heavy objects.
The reason for them cracking during the demonstration, Mr Musk later claimed, was the order in which the toughness of the body and the windows was tested.
"Sledgehammer impact on door cracked base of glass, which is why steel ball didn't bounce off," Mr Musk tweeted shortly after the event. "Should have done steel ball on window, *then* sledgehammer the door. Next time."
T-shirt is bulletproof & makes u buff!https://t.co/wO0oAakclu pic.twitter.com/8k1WvVO1sm
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
The Cybertruck t-shirt is the latest in a series of unconventional merchandise from Mr Musk's companies.
To help fund his tunnel-digging venture The Boring Company in 2017, Mr Musk revealed "the world's most boring hat" that sold for $20 on the startups website.
More than 50,000 of the baseball caps were sold in the first few weeks, which he claimed was helping "build that tunnel one hat at a time".
Spurned on by their success, Mr Musk announced The Boring Company flamethrower, which sold out within days. The $500 device, which in reality was just a modified roofing torch, generated around $10m in revenue for The Boring Company.
