By RACHEL LERMAN and CATHY BUSSEWITZ

AP – Tesla is aiming for the heart of the auto industry’s profit machine with its own version of the heavy pickup truck.

Rolling onstage before a wall of lasers and flame on a California stage, the introduction of Tesla’s sharp-angled, stainless-steel “cybertruck” was not a quiet one.

Nor was it without surprises.

The vehicle, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk said will cost $39,900 and up, will have an estimated battery range of between 250 miles (402.3 kilometers) to more than 500 miles.

The electric pickup truck will be in production in 2021, Musk said Thursday in Los Angeles.

With the launch Tesla is not only edging into the most profitable corner of the U.S. auto market, it’s also gunning for buyers with fierce brand loyalty.

Many pickup truck buyers stick with the same brand for life, choosing a truck based on what their mom or dad drove or what they decided was the toughest model, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

“They’re very much creatures of habit,” Gordon said. Getting a loyal Ford F-150 buyer to consider switching to another brand such as a Chevy Silverado, “it’s like asking him to leave his family,” he said.

The event in Los Angeles was intended to set Tesla’s version apart from all others. The truck’s doors were pummeled with a sledgehammer that did not make a dent.

A demonstration of the vehicle’s “armor glass” did not go so smoothly. Metal balls hurled at the car cracked two windows — though it did not completely shatter.

We’ll “fix it in post,” said Musk, who appeared caught off guard with cameras rolling.

Wall Street, anticipating further risk for Tesla, sent shares down more than 6% in early trading Friday.

The cybertruck starts at $39,900 for a single motor model, with a base price of $69,900 for a tri motor all-wheel drive model. Production for the latter is planned for late 2022.

Tesla’s pickup is more likely to appeal to weekend warriors who want an electric vehicle that can handle some outdoor adventure. And it could end up cutting into Tesla’s electric vehicle sedan sales instead of winning over traditional pickup truck drivers.

“The needs-based truck buyer, the haulers, the towers at the worksites of the world, that’s going to be a much tougher sell,” said Akshay Anand, executive analyst at Kelley Blue Book.

However, it will help Musk fill out his portfolio and offer a broader range of electric vehicles.

“Elon Musk is trying to not be one-dimensional when it comes to automotive,” said Alyssa Altman, transportation lead at digital consultancy Publicis Sapient. “He doesn’t want to look like he only has a small selection. He wants to build a brand with a diverse offering and in doing that he wants to see where he could enter in the market.”

Musk stands to face competition when his truck hits the market. Ford, which has long dominated the pickup truck landscape, plans to launch an all-electric F-150 pickup. General Motors CEO Mary Barra said its battery-electric pickup will come out by the fall of 2021.

Rivian, a startup based near Detroit, plans to begin production in the second half of 2020 on an electric pickup that starts at $69,000 and has a battery range of 400-plus miles (643.7-kilometers). The Rivian truck will be able to tow 11,000 pounds (4,989.5 kilograms), go from zero to 60 mph (96.6 kph) in three seconds and wade into 3 feet (0.91 meters) of water, the company said. Ford said in April it would invest $500 million in Rivian.

Tesla has struggled to meet delivery targets for its sedans, and some fear the new vehicle will shift the company’s attention away from the goal of more consistently meeting its targets.

“We have yet to see Tesla really make good on some of the very tight deadlines they imposed on themselves, and this has the added challenge of having architecture that is going to be challenging because we haven’t seen an EV pickup before,” said Jeremy Acevedo, manager of industry analysis at Edmunds.

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This story has been corrected to remove a reference to the event taking place at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

By TRAVIS LOLLER

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Former Vice President Al Gore said that even though President Donald Trump wants to back out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the U.S. cannot legally pull out until the day after next year’s presidential election.

“If there’s a new president — pardon me for a minute,” Gore said to laughs and then loud applause, as he stretched out his arms and looked up. “Now don’t you dare interpret that as a partisan gesture. I have freedom of speech and freedom of prayer,” he joked.

Gore’s spirited speech Wednesday night kicked off a series of climate presentations that continued around the globe on Thursday. Called “24 Hours of Reality,” it’s an endeavor of The Climate Reality Project, founded by Gore to educate the public and inspire action on climate change.

Gore said some of the more than 20,000 climate activists he’s trained will present their own takes on climate change as the event continues through Thursday at more than 1,700 locations, as far flung as Antarctica and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

More than 1,000 people gave Gore a standing ovation at the opening presentation at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Gore said he tries to avoid partisan politics at his climate presentations. He made a point of praising Vanderbilt’s College Republicans for calling on the Republican National Committee to change its stance on climate.

But he said many current U.S. politicians need to be unseated.

“We need to really clean house. Change is not happening fast enough unless we change policy,” he said. Later he added, “To change our policies, we’re going to have to change our policy makers.”

Gore took aim at Trump’s characterization of the Central American migrants coming to the U.S. Gore called them “climate refugees” and said many are fleeing drought.

“The reason they’re leaving is because they’re hungry,” Gore said to applause. “They’re not rapists and terrorists. They’re hungry and they’re trying to feed their families.”

He also took a shot at Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, accusing him of giving “the green light to burn down more of the Amazon.”

Gore said the U.S. is suffering from a “democracy crisis” caused by the influence of special interests on politicians.

“They put a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, for God’s sake. The fact that there is not widespread outrage about that is a symptom of our weakened democracy,” he said.

Gore called climate change “the life and death struggle of people alive today,” comparing it to 9/11, Pearl Harbor and such World War II battles as Dunkirk and Midway. Such an existential crisis demands an “aspirational set of goals,” he said, expressing support for the Democrats’ sweeping Green New Deal proposal to combat climate change.

The Green New Deal calls for the virtual elimination of greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming by 2030, by shifting U.S. from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

“I think it’s a very effective and brilliant branding because it conveys the idea that the solutions to the climate crisis have to be on the scale of the New Deal,” he said.

Prior to Gore’s presentation, actor and singer Jaden Smith took the stage briefly to talk about the impact that Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” had on him.

“For me, for my generation, for all the generations that are going to have to go forth, dealing with the climate crisis, I am so glad we have an icon here to look up to,” Smith said.

By GILLIAN FLACCUS

PULLMAN, Wash. (AP) — The apple tree stands alone near the top of a steep hill, wind whipping through its branches as a perfect sunset paints its leaves a vibrant gold.

It has been there for more than a century, and there is no hint that the tree or its apples are anything out of the ordinary. But this scraggly specimen produces the Arkansas Beauty, a so-called heritage fruit long believed to be extinct until amateur botanists in the Pacific Northwest tracked it down three years ago.

It’s one of 13 long-lost apple varieties rediscovered by a pair of retirees in the remote canyons, wind-swept fields and hidden ravines of what was once the Oregon Territory.

E.J. Brandt and David Benscoter, who together form the nonprofit Lost Apple Project, log countless hours and hundreds of miles in trucks, on all-terrain vehicles and on foot to find orchards planted by settlers as they pushed west more than a century ago.

The two are racing against time to preserve a slice of homesteader history: The apple trees are old, and many are dying. Others are being ripped out for more wheat fields or housing developments for a growing population.

“To me, this area is a goldmine,” said Brandt, who has found two lost varieties in the Idaho panhandle. “I don’t want it lost in time. I want to give back to the people so that they can enjoy what our forefathers did.”

Brandt and Benscoter scour old county fair records, newspaper clippings and nursery sales ledgers to figure out which varieties existed in the area. Then they hunt them down, matching written records with old property maps, land deeds and sometimes the memories of the pioneers’ great-grandchildren. They also get leads from people who live near old orchards.

The task is huge. North America once had 17,000 named varieties of domesticated apples, but only about 4,000 remain. The Lost Apple Project believes settlers planted a few hundred varieties in their corner of the Pacific Northwest alone.

The Homestead Act of 1862 gave 160 acres (65 hectares) to families who would improve the land and pay a small fee, and these newcomers planted orchards with enough variety to get them through the long winter, with apples that ripened from early spring until the first frosts. Then, as now, trees planted for eating apples were not raised from seeds; cuttings taken from existing trees were grafted onto a generic root stock and raised to maturity. These cloned trees remove the genetic variation that often makes “wild” apples inedible — so-called “spitters.”

Benscoter, who retired in 2006 after a career as an FBI agent and an IRS criminal investigator, pursues leads on lost apples with the same zeal he applied to his criminal cases.

In one instance, he found county fair records that listed winners for every apple variety growing in Whitman County, Washington, from 1900 to 1910 — an invaluable treasure map. In another, he located a descendant of a homesteader with a gigantic orchard by finding a family history she posted online.

Once he discovers a forgotten orchard, Benscoter spends hours mapping it. He has pages of diagrams with a tiny circle denoting each tree, with GPS coordinates alongside each dot. A lengthy computer database lists apples including the Shackleford, the Flushing Spitzenburg and the Dickinson— all varieties rediscovered by the project.

Apples from newly discovered trees are placed in a Ziploc baggie and carefully labeled with the tree’s latitude and longitude and the date the fruit was collected. The apples are then shipped to the Temperate Orchard Conservancy more than 400 miles (640 kilometers) away in Molalla, Oregon, for identification.

There, experts work to identify them using a trove of U.S. Agriculture Department watercolors and old textbooks. Once a variety is identified as “lost,” the apple detectives return to the field to take cuttings that can be grafted onto root stock and planted in the conservancy’s vast orchard, to be preserved for future generations.

The trees could eventually boost genetic diversity among modern-day apple crops as climate change and disease take an increasing toll, said Joanie Cooper, a botanist at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy who’s helped identify many of the lost varieties found in northern Idaho and eastern Washington.

She and two others founded the nonprofit conservancy in 2011, and operate it on a shoestring, after recognizing the need for a repository for rare fruit trees in the U.S. West.

“You have to have varieties that can last, that can grow, produce fruit, survive the heat and maybe survive the cold winter, depending on where you are,” Cooper said. “I think that’s critical.”

For Benscoter and Brandt, however, the biggest joy comes in the hunt.

Brandt, a Vietnam veteran and passionate historian, last year found a homestead near Troy, Idaho, by matching names on receipts from a nursery ledger with old property maps. Three wind-bent apple trees neatly spaced along the edge of a wheat field were all that remained of the orchard.

Brandt collected the apples, hoping one was the Enormous Pippin, a lost variety he saw listed in the sales ledger.

Months later, he learned he had instead found the Regmalard, a yellowish apple with vibrant red splashes on its speckled skin. It hadn’t even been on his radar.

“It’s a lot of footwork and a lot of book work and a lot of computer work. You talk to a lot of people,” Brandt said, savoring the memory. “And with that type of information, you can zero in a little bit — and then after that, you just cross your fingers and say, ‘Maybe this will be a lost one.’”

Brandt is still looking for the Enormous Pippin.

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Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus