The Cybertruck was supposed to make the F-150 obsolete. It wasn’t supposed to be boring, like a Ford or a Chevy. It was supposed to be “more truck than truck.” It turns out, people just wanted trucks that were trucks, and CEO Elon Musk announced on X earlier this morning is that the Cybertruck is dying.
I’m struck by this quote from the Cybertruck’s second unveiling in 2019, from Musk: “Trucks have been the same for a very long time, for basically 100 years.” It was meant as an insult. He then showed the front of a Ram 1500, a Ford F-150, and a Chevy Silverado with the badges off and said it was “hard to tell which is which.” That’s absolutely not true, and it turns out that in 100 years of making trucks, traditional truckmakers gained a decent sense of the market.
It’s going to be hard to write a eulogy for a vehicle whose meaning grew well beyond the actual truck itself. The Cybertruck, perversely, is this generation’s Hummer; an over-the-top expression of a particular worldview pregnant with so much cultural meaning that it’s impossible to see it through any lens than your own personal politics.
The jokes are already being made on X, with one poster requoting Musk by saying: “blue wave so big even the cybertruck got canceled.” The timing makes this kind of humor unavoidable, though it’s not entirely untrue. There’s a certain type of Silicon Valley psychosis that saw a quirk in electoral vote allocation as a dramatic shift in popular thought. The same people who believed online accounts with Roman bust avatars and ChatGPT-fueled misinterpretations of Thomas Hobbes were the new great philosophers embraced the Cybertruck.
If those are your politics, the Cybertruck, then, very much typifies a creatine-poisoned mindset. It would be comforting for a lot people to see the failure of the Cybertruck as the death of this whole era, supported by a dramatic legislative (and in Tesla’s home state, executive) shift. What this ignores is that basically no one has made electric trucks successful.
Elon Musk sold the Cybertruck as a vehicle that would be resistant to bullets, when really what he built was a truck that deflected objectivity. A sober, rational, completely neutral analysis would probably show that the Cybertruck is the best electric truck ever made. That, of course, is essentially impossible.
Tesla was clearly deluded when it thought it could sell 250,000 Cybertrucks in a year. In its best year, the Cybertruck couldn’t crack 50,000 sales, and it’ll be lucky to do half of that this year. It’s the rare example of the company, which popularized electric cars, getting high on its own supply.
It’s easy to say that the Cybertruck’s polarizing appearance or bro-ish, conservative aura killed the vehicle, but I think you could easily argue the opposite. Perhaps the in-your-face, high-T bravado is what helped it find any buyers at all. As a bit of a control group, look at the Ford F-150 Lightning. That truck was essentially an F-150 with an EV powertrain shoved in it. While it often outsold the Cybertruck, it barely did so, and not at any kind of volume that could support continued production.
In our first review of the vehicle, David pointed out that, while compromised, the truck was actually great:
It is a vehicle with a clearly-defined soul, and that, especially to car enthusiasts, is worth admiring. It did not succumb to the dreaded “death by a thousand cuts,” even if it will leave your forearm with a couple. It stands proudly with all of its flaws so that it can be what it set out to be: a Cybertruck.
And overall, it really is a compelling machine. I know I just spent this entire article talking about compromises (and I didn’t mention them all; the visor mirrors are hilariously tiny/useless, the automatic emergency braking is too aggressive, etc), but there are so many positive attributes worth mentioning, too. Obviously, there’s the ~600 horsepower that rockets the 6,600-pound vehicle from zero to 60 mph in about four seconds; the thing is quick.
But more surprising than that is the ride quality, which is simply phenomenal for a truck on 35-inch tires. The truck is quiet and rides like a magic carpet even over speed bumps; honestly, I can’t think of a vehicle that dispatches speed bumps as well as the Tesla Cybertruck — it’s remarkable.
Tesla and SpaceX lost nearly half a trillion dollars in value this week, as the hype around data centers and anything AI-related ran into the reality that these industries were likely to face some scrutiny, and it’s possible that this sudden midnight announcement from Musk is connected. My knock against the company has always been that Musk doesn’t want it to be a car company, but selling cars is still how Tesla makes money.
All of that capacity in Tesla’s Texas plant will have to be used for something and, according to Musk, it’ll be the Cybercab. Whether or not the Cybercab is another product for a market that doesn’t exist is another question, and one that only time will answer.
For all of Musk’s maybe playful shots at the F-150, the strangest outcome of all is that Ford has built a Tesla-inspired arm of the company to build EVs, and that vehicle’s first product will be the sub-$30,000 Ford Fathom. While Tesla made a big deal of rejecting what makes trucks like the F-150 so popular, Ford is embracing the efficiency and engineering advances that continue to make Teslas the best-selling electric cars not from a Chinese company.
Top photo: Ford/Tesla
Elon killed his baby? I did “not see” that coming!
(You have to imagine the pun yourself)
“Ha Ha”- Nelson
I came here to make this exact post.
I’ve repeatedly said that the saddest part of the CyberTruck is that it’s a beautiful piece of engineering wrapped in an ugly and polarizing shell.
The actual tech in the platform is brilliant. While the figurehead of Tesla is…well, he just IS.
The engineers that work there are VERY good at what they do.
Delivered late (it’s a Tesla, so par for the course), too expensive, terrible for and finish (despite being late, it was also not ready), a Nazi CEO tauting it, and polarizing looks.
I don’t think polarizing is necessarily bad, but there were so many compromises to make the body from stainless steel that made the truck worse and way more expensive.
Yes.
There is quite a lot that was very good with the CT.
Unfortunately, some public pedo guy also promised it would be a Stainless Steel wunderwaffen. And since that didn’t work out, they decided to make it an aluminium vehicle that had to be clad in SS. And since SS is difficult to shape, it became somewhat of an abomination.
I think it would have been a good truck if they managed to sack the Musk two years before finalising it.
Yeah. Once they realized they couldn’t build it either the originally envisioned structural stainless body, the whole idea should have changed dramatically. But looks, feelings, and egos made the production version silly.
Ironically the same thing that happened to the DeLorean. The original design brief was supposed to be something akin to what Pontiac did with the Fiero, and then when it was clear that couldn’t work the way they wanted to (or at least without the massive industrial capacity GM was able to put forward for the Fiero) they basically had Colin Chapman steal taxpayer money and then when he had time build an Esprit and then put stainless steel body panels over the top of the fiberglass.
Even the Fiero didn’t work out totally as intended, the body structure had to be beefed up so much to compensate for the plastic skin, it was over its weight target and probably would have been better off with a more conventional design, particularly since the cost savings never materialized, either
Appropriate use of SS when it comes to Musk.
Make of this what you will, but Autocorrect wants to call this truck a Cybercrook.
LOL the garbage can truck is so stupid!
Tesla should’ve just made a Model 3 with a pickup bed. That would fucking print money.
I’d love to do a write up on how much crap I’ve fit into a model 3 remodeling my house. I have trucks I could use – but stopping at HD on the way home from work saves time.
Model 3 wagon, minus the Nazi-evoking Elon connection, would be useful.
May I suggest we now refer to the Cybertruck by the nickname “Tedsel”? Like the Edsel, it was rushed into production with truly notable production flaws. Both were in series production for three model years. Both have a questionable aesthetic, all right, Edsel is tough to love, Tedsel is just ugly. Neither appealed to their target market, Edsel to the upscale Mercury buyer, Tedsel as a legitimate truck that could do legitimate truck things. And finally, like the Edsel, sold in far fewer numbers than were intended and tooled up for. If I have my numbers straight, I think the Tedsel has sold fewer vehicles that the Edsel. Quite the accomplishment considering how the Edsel held the mantle of biggest commercial flop in the history of automotive manufacturing. The parallels between the two are very interesting to ponder. I guess the biggest difference between them is that racoons never broke into Edsels looking for garbage scraps, due to their lack of looking like stainless steel commercial dumpsters.
Yeah the Cyberturd makes the Edsel look like a success and in their first model year sold almost as many as Tesla has sold over 3 model years. Not only that the Edsel wasn’t that big of an investment relatively speaking since it many parts with Ford, Mercury and few with Lincoln.
I don’t think there were flaws with the truck. I haven’t heard of issues with them breaking down or failing. Production goals are always going to be issues for new vehicles regardless of who sets them.
I like the Edsel comparison. Both are ideas of their respective times taken to the extreme. Those of us who will be around in 50 years (I don’t think I’ll make it to 103, so I won’t) may find the CT has a comparable cult following as a 2020s fad that highlights some peculiarities of our era.
I see Cybertrucks several times a week in and around Boston, where I commute to. I enjoy seeing something that’s at least different, but that’s about all that’s positive that I feel for them. I have never met or talked to someone who owns one, so I don’t have a sense of who buys them in my area.
Some that I see are still raw stainless, and quite a few have flat black wraps. I’ve seen one with a pearlescent orange wrap that at least added even more “look at me” to the already attention-hungry stock ones.
RIP, sure, but we will still all be looking at these things for years.
Given their initial build quality, I’m not really sure that’s the case.
Let’s hope you’re right.
Actually, I bet we will still be looking at these things for decades, up on blocks in the driveway, awaiting an LS swap.
OP name is “rust collector”. The Tesla truck being stainless and aluminum will allow it to last. Electric drive motors are nothing new. It isn’t unreasonable to think Tesla vehicles will easily stick around for hundreds of thousands of miles. Even my 300k Toyota is being slowly killed by corrosion.
No one wants your ugly, unreliable, overpriced StasiMobile, Elon. How this flim flam man keeps getting people’s cash is astonishing to me.
He did make a sportscar that flys LOL LOL LOL! He is the master of smoke and mirrors! Still waiting for my DOGE check, BTW….
I never liked the Cybertruck. It felt different for the sake of being different and catching headlines (whether good or bad). A few months ago I rode in one, and (much to my dismay) it wasn’t a bad truck. I left with an appreciation for what they accomplished with it. I still have no interest in it, but if you strip away all the public opinion and arguing and grade it purely on it’s merits… honestly.. there wasn’t much to complain about. Still as ugly as it comes, but otherwise it was a very pleasant experience. A good wrap goes a long way on them.
It’s unique looking and makes for a good, albeit enormous, commuter truck. The baggage associated with it is astronomical though
You need people to push the limits of what is normal every so often or else we’ll all be driving gray Rav4s.
I don’t disagree, but there’s advanced pioneering design, and then there’s just a toddler scribbling.
I see at least 3 Cybertrucks in traffic every time I’m out in traffic here in Texas. God they’re ugly. The sides look wavy and stained. Even on the ones with a wrap the sides look wavy.
Yeah, it turns out that when you try to mass-produce a vehicle with featureless panels using an unusual material and an equally unusual stamping/assembly method, you get body panels that make a Wrangler door look flat. Well, maybe some Wranglers are just as bad, but at least it’s just their doors, mostly.
Also take a look an F-150, especially one of the early aluminum ones. The stamping is atrocious, also wavy to the point you could see it just driving next to one. They’ve improved over the years some, but still not great.
One look at the buckling along the sides of any random bus or panel van should be enough for a designer to understand why passenger vehicles are curvy. Flat panels show every imperfection, and have very little stiffness to resist deflecting.
If the muskrat had any real intelligence, he would put a pickup looking body on the platform and might even be able to sell a few.
Of course it can’t survive a blue wave, it can’t even survive a car wash.
COTW.
Based on my observations and my interactions with actual owners, I’d give that title to the Rivian R1S.
Can confirm. Last year, couple of my friends and I spent some time in the deserts of southern California off-roading and camping with a R1T and a R1S. The Rivians were fantastic trucks!
Nah that would be the dearly departed Lightning R1T sales fell off of a cliff once the people who wanted one got theirs.
A friend owns a R1T. I own a Silverado EV. Both tow fantastically. Comes down to little things – Rivian has a better ride and features, Silverado has a huge battery, real door handles and a real bed – but is so heavy. I have the work truck version so I can’t speak to automated features.
Dearly beloved,
We are gathered here today to say goodbye to the Cybertruck, and lay to rest the noticeably polygonal attempt to upend our own personal views of a great American institution: the pickup truck. The Cybertruck dared to stare America in the face and boldly declare, “You know what your F-150 doesn’t have? A toybox mode! I don’t need doorhandles or windshield wipers! Who loads shit in a truck from the side? F**k you!”
Indeed, the Cybertruck taught us a lot. It taught us that people will pay insane money for a truck, then still pay insane money to get it wrapped in gawdy vinyl. It taught us that sometimes people buy vehicles just so they can chase you down and explain them to you until you want to hang yourself. Most of all, it taught us that some people who aren’t professional wrestlers really want you to hate them.
In the end, the Cybertruck did manage to do what the Ram, F-150 and Silverado couldn’t do: It died.
Our service concludes as we put the Cybertruck in self-burial mode.
Amen
“Pie Iesu Domine, dona eis requiem”
*Hits self on forehead with wooden plank*
Trucks should never be trendy.
Toyota took YEARS to jump into the full size truck market, and for good reason – they needed something to be competitive, and similar to what was already on offer from the big 3.
As some others have pointed out, if this thing had just looked NORMAL it would have been a hit. But because MuskRat drew it on a napkin after a ketamine bender and demanded his engineers make it happen, we got a stainless steel doorstop with hubcaps that dug into the tires.
The Cybertruck was the Tesla equivalent of fast fashion – something cars should strive to avoid.
Every cuck out there couldn’t get their wallets out fast enough for a Foundation edition, but then the world ran out of cucks.
When I was at Kennedy Space Center last month, they were everywhere with little SpaceX logos on them. Can’t sell ’em? Use ’em for pointless go-fer tasks around a rocket launch pad. Sounds about right…
I see a few a week and 2 in an hour just the other day. Last month I saw a woman in the passenger seat of one, that was a first for me.
Sometimes breaking things intentionally does not work.
I have seen exactly one woman as a passenger and exactly one woman as a driver. I was floored by the driver.
We have one locally with a “Wicked” theme wrap on it. https://www.facebook.com/KatzkinLeatherOfficial/videos/popularwell-help-you-be-popular-we-love-highlighting-this-wicked-cool-tesla-cybe/1197283522350182/
I’ve only seen the driver once, yesterday the typical gym dude bro going into a gym.
I usually can’t see the driver or passenger because the windows are invariably tinted extra dark.
I kind of enjoyed seeing all the different approaches to wrapping them. I have not seen a single one in the Hudson valley or adjacent Connecticut since I moved.
A half sized version made by someone not bent on destroying western culture would have been fine.
Few and far between here, but I will admit that I once saw one wrapped fully in camo and honestly that wrap sort of worked. You couldn’t pay me enough to take a trump-sucking cyber truck, but if I’m honest, the camo motif was okay… perhaps because it helped hide just how hideous it is.
My two favorite wrapped Cybertrucks in California are a sort of hand-drawn cartoon version of woodgrain, and one that is polka-dotted, somewhere between Robert Lopshire and Damien Hirst
So now we are down to just the 3, Y, and a “flying” Roadster that may or may not ever exist outside of AI enhanced promotional videos?
More than anything, I’m mystified at how Tesla’s board seems to be unconcerned with the future of this company.
The Y and the 3 made up like 85-90% of their sales. If anything, it allows them to streamline a little more on what they’re selling.
True, but the Y and 3 make up 90% of sales because they are essentially Tesla’s only products. Plus, they aren’t new. Even the updated versions of the 3 and Y are a few years old. At some point Tesla will need something else to sell, although the 3, Y, semi, and supercharger network could keep them going for a while.
I presume a merger with SpaceX is inevitable and whatever company emerges from that will not be a car company, even if they continue to sell some cars. It is just weird that Tesla built a really profitable car company and the board/investors allowed Elon to throw that away with no apparent pushback.
Similar to how Ford can take the loss selling Mustangs because of their F150 sales – the 3 and Y sales are money makers. With the cab aiming to be sold to regular owners as investment vehicles – who knows where it may go.
The Cab is meaningless, and the Y and 3 are withering on the vine. No halo products, no new products in the pipeline, and their bread and butter vehicles are abandoned. Not sure what the plan is.
Cab is interesting. You can buy one or a few of them. Set them loose daily to work as driverless cabs. Plug them in when they return. Unplug when full and set them out again. Even if you needed it as your own car – you could just set it up so that it drives you to work, goes out and works while you’re at the office all day, then be ready to take you home when you’re done. Our cars just sit and do nothing most of the time. Buying a cybercar allows us all to become car pimps. All we need to do is keep your cab hand in check and start dressing like Huggy Bear – finally.
Musk is the biggest shareholder by far. He Is The Board.
Doesn’t he only own around 20%, though? Where is the other 80%??
I thought it was over 50%, but maybe that’s wrong.
Apparently he currently owns 19.8% of Tesla shares, according to a few sources I just found.
Got it. I guess he has enough allies to do whatever he wants.
What shocks me more are the shareholders who somehow keep the stock price high while the company throws money away on this, the Cybertaxi, and the Roadster, which may or may not even make it to market.
There for a while it seemed like Tesla might have a full line up of vehicles and now they are down to two as they still aren’t actually selling the Cybertaxi. It also seemed like they were ahead in autonomous driving but others got actual driverless taxis out in revenue service first and it is unlikely Tesla will catch up.
Yeah, the stock price makes no sense given anything that has happened in the last few years.
I wonder how much of that is passive investing driving up share prices? Given how popular ETFs are these days, I wonder how many shares are bought out of obligation to follow an index irrespective of share price.
Of course, a lot of the run up in price is probably also blind faith that Tesla’s AI products will somehow be transformational and massively profitable.
Don’t you guys know the money is in humanoid robots?
/s
Robotaxi and Model Y Robotaxi will dominate rideshare. Uber and Lyft without paying drivers is rideshare corporate wet dream.
There are too many bureaucrats ready to take away your right to drive a vehicle in the name of safety.
Future is bright for Tesla.
Robotaxi and Model Y Robotaxi will dominate rideshare.
Why? What benefit do they have over Waymo? It seems, if anything, Waymo has the lead in autonomous taxis. Waymo has been around longer and is available in more markets. In my city both Tesla and Waymo are available, but Waymo has a larger service area.
Tesla doesn’t have a clear advantage in the autonomous taxi space. It is possible they are the biggest operator in this space in the future, but I don’t see an obvious reason why that would happen.
Plus, Tesla seems to be wasting a lot of time and resources creating the Cybercab. Presumably any EV (and probably most ICE vehicles) could be converted to self driving with less effort than creating an entirely new model. Not to mention the Cybercab only has two seats, and therefore has less utility than an average vehicle. I would be more inclined to agree with you if Tesla was exclusively focused on creating self-driving Model Ys. The Cybercab actually seems to be subtracting value to Tesla’s robotaxi efforts, not adding.
There are too many bureaucrats ready to take away your right to drive a vehicle in the name of safety.
I really, really wish I could disagree with this.
First the Blue Wave, now this? The Earth is healing.
Fuck yes!
Now if only we could “cancel” the main douchebag behind all of this shit show.
The world might then become a better place again.
Prior to the cancelation of the Lightning it outsold the Cybertruck on a yearly basis. Yes there were a few months and maybe an entire quarter or two when the Cybertruck outsold the Lightning, but once those early reservation holders got theirs that was that.
As far as what to do with the plant, the Cybertaxi ain’t going to fill that factory. For one they already have a line set up and running and output, still not up to full capacity, is already exceeding deployments so zero need to increase its output with a second line.
Oh no!!!
Anyway….
“A sober, rational, completely neutral analysis would probably show that the Cybertruck is the best electric truck ever made.”
Yeeeaaaaahhhh… I’m gonna disagree with you there. It had the POTENTIAL to be the best electric truck ever made. Tesla makes probably the best electric powertrain currently.
If they had made it somewhat normal, that attribute, combined with the Supercharger network, could have actually made it a best seller.
Instead, we got an expensive, poorly made, weird for the sake of being weird failure.
I wonder if someday we’ll see a Tesla powertrain offered in another brand’s vehicle. Like Cummins is now.
That already happened, with the 2nd generation RAV-4 EV but Toyota saw the writing on the wall and sold their shares and cut all ties with Tesla.
So it has the potential, but it’s not currently?
All about the energy, amirite?
It is just so damned ugly…
I love the idea of an electric truck. When I was car shopping 2 years ago, I wanted an F150 Lightning but just couldn’t justify the price. I’m sad it’s dead. Hopefully when I’m ready for a new vehicle again in ~3 years or so, there will be another option. Really looking forward to seeing what the Fathom is like.
Beauty of cars and trucks in America is that we don’t have to buy things we don’t like. I like having the ability to say cars and trucks are “ugly”. Means they’re all not the same – yet.
Not as ugly as the all the other pickups offered in American by ford. GM, Toyota , and Ram or Fiat or whatever they are.
I’m looking forward to the Slate that seems relatively un-ugly.
You need ugly things to appreciate the others. Variety is good.
To quote the great Mr Clarkson: “Oh no. Anyway…”
Good news!
Is there a new Dacia Sandero?!?
Amusingly there is, they launched a hybrid not that long ago!
kerFLUUUSSSHSHSHSHSHSflugflugflugflug
Good riddance.
Goodbye incEl Camino.