Elon Musk's widely derided Tesla Cybertruck now stands alone as the biggest flop in automotive history, according to experts.
Sales of the recall-plagued, sharp-cornered vehicle have fallen laughably below the 250,000 in annual sales Musk predicted, and the truck has become the focal point for global protests over his alliance with president Donald Trump and his sweeping cuts to the U.S. government, reported Forbes.
“It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”
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Ford had hoped to sell 200,000 Edsels a year when the infamous car hit the market in 1958 but sold just 63,000 before it was dumped two years later, but Tesla sold only 40,000 Cybertrucks in 2024, its first full year on the market, and sales trended lower in January and February this year.
Deliveries for all Tesla vehicles have tumbled 13 percent in the first quarter of this year to 337,000 units, well below the consensus expectations of 408,000, and while the company did not break out Cybertruck sales from its reporting, sales clearly are nowhere near what Musk promised.
“Demand is off the charts,” Musk bragged in November 2023, just before the vehicle started shipping to customers. “We have over 1 million people who have reserved the car.”
Tesla modified its Austin Gigafactory to produce up to 250,000 Cybertrucks a year, but its unique design – which Musk has boasted was based on "zero market research whatsoever" – makes it noncompliant with safety standards in many overseas markets and off-putting to many would-be buyers.
“The spectacular failure of Cybertruck was a failure of empathy,” Noble said. “Everything from the bed configuration to the cab configuration to its performance and all sorts of pickup truck duty-cycle issues, it’s just not empathetic to a pickup truck buyer.”
Tesla spent an estimated $900 million developing the Cybertruck, which sells for more than twice what Musk predicted, but none of that work can be used on the company's other vehicles, and now it's currently sitting on $200 million in unsold inventory.
“Does it have a demonstrated technology that could be used elsewhere by the company? That is not the case,” said industry researcher Glenn Mercer. “Can the manufacturing plant make all this other stuff based on investments for Cybertruck? No, it can’t. An unpainted stainless steel vehicle just doesn’t have that much broad traction.”