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
Ford’s decision to modify the gas F150 for EV use turned out to be the less money losing decision than Chevy (full redesign of Silverado?) and the CT where it was “all electric redesign”. This however is no prize. Per the movie Sixteen Candles: “Let’s just say I’m king of the dipsh!its.” Or similar. The market research guys fumbled big time. Who has time to go to market research studies? Not real truck buyers, apparently. Or this would never have happened at Ford or GM. probably would have still happened at Tesla.
It’s funny — I like the Cybertruck more now than when it came out. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it is a dumb pick-up truck but my 5 year old really gets excited when he sees it on the road (for what it’s worth, He’s currently saving his piggy bank money to buy a Bronco this week :-)). And since I truly believe that cars should make you happy and that people should buy vehicles that they like, its hard to hate something that brings Joy, especially to him.
That being said, I think we all hated the people who spewed the “This is the greated vehicle of all time” garbage more than we hated the truck. If you want a Cybertruck, great, own that opinion, just do not pretend its very clear limitations did not exist.
The baffling part of the wind down of Cybertruck production is that somehow, despite being unable to sell enough to continue production and allegedly sitting on something like 10,000 unsold trucks, Tesla is claiming that they will have to return deposits to potential buyers if they’re unable to fill that pipeline in the 8 months before shutting down the line.
That just doesn’t make sense to me.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-wind-down-cybertruck-production-100750122.html
This question is the main reason I read this article. Didn’t get an answer. Frowny face
I asked AI that question because i was too lazy to look up the answer myself, so take this with a grain of salt — Anyway, according to that lazy half assed search it noted that Tesla is basically offering a half-truth about the backlog. Yes there are still outstanding reservations but not all of them are real. A bunch of the 100 dollar reservations can likely never be filled because the Cybertruck did not get regulatory approval in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand so they would’ve had to refund those reservations anyway. On top of that that, they may also be counting failed sale conversions on reservations that were never redeemed due to the 35K – 75K price change. These would’ve likely needed to be returned at some point, and this is a convenient spin
Putting aside all the Elon / Cybertruck butthurt that’s so pervasive these days, the Cybertruck was unlikely to succeed. I’m all about challenging norms, but there’s a lot of “what was the point of doing that” with the CT that didn’t exist with the Model S. The steel and the odd angular roof design (which was probably born of limitations working the steel) being the two that stick out to me.
Not being afraid to challenge the way things have always been done is good . . . But you’ve got to be able to recognize when there was a good reason things were done that way.
By my country, Tesla has recently cancelled 3 of its 5 vehicle lineup. That’s 60% of its offerings within, what, the last year? I understand its not 60% of their sales, but they’re on their way to be the next Chrysler.
Good.
In years to come, it will feature prominently in lists of “WTF was that”
Good riddance
Almost all the people who built Tesla into a car-selling juggernaut left a while ago. They cashed out, they burnt out, or both.
What we have is a company living on past glories and running after its erratic CEO’s whims into increasingly ludicrous business propositions.
Whether it flames out or slow burns, the company will be barely an ongoing concern if that much in a few years.
I love the picture of the two trucks together. One has a plate that says FARM USE. The other should have a plate that says PHARMA USE.
Started seeing a dumpster green wrapped Cybertruck in my area. I hope the owner sees the joke.
There is one in my area wrapped to look like a Wagon Queen Family Truckster. Actually makes the vehicle look better and I appreciate their sense of humor.
Are you sure it’s actually a cybertruck? The difference is that a cybertruck won’t have raccoons inside alongside the garbage.
If any other automaker shown off a dramatically angular pickup, it would have made the made the rounds at the auto shows before being shoved into heritage collection warehouse and largely forgotten while an otherwise conventional pickup actually makes it to production.
But this isn’t any automaker we’re talking about, this is Tesla, and more specifically, Elon. I’ve never met the man, nor do I want to, but the impression I get is a man who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, and will spend any amount of money to be proven right. Sometimes, that works out, like SpaceX’s vertically landing rockets.
I recall a lot of naysayers before this hit production. It can’t be made at scale. Even if it can be made at scale, it’ll never pass safety regulations. Even if it passes safety regs, no one will seriously buy it. General consensus had told Elon “no”.
So what can say in the postmortem? It did hit scale production. One point to Elon. It passed safety regs in North America, but not Europe. I don’t know if an attempt was even made in other markets. Half point to Elon, half point to general consensus. As for sales, if you read the article, you know. There will always be iconoclasts, but not nearly enough willing to put money down. Double points to general consensus.
Goodbye Cybertruck. You shall not be missed.
Passing regulatory inspection in the US says more about regulators than about the vehicle. See also: NHTSA basically ignoring Tesla’s self-driving problems (I.e. deaths) and not recalling FSD, among other things.