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It was the sci-fi inspired truck that was meant to reimagine the classic American pickup. Finally, the future will look like the future. Now Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybert truck after dealing with delays, recalls, political attacks, and quality problems. Elon Musk once called it the company's best product ever and projected to manufacture 250,000 per year, but the company sold just over 20,000 in the US in 2025 and is on pace to sell fewer this year.
Yeah, I mean, we dug our own grave with Cer Cybertruck. Here's what went wrong with Musk's polarizing pickup. Welcome to the Cybertruck unveil. Cybertruck made its debut as a concept in late 2019. Trucks have been the same for a very long time. Yes. Over like a hundred years, trucks have been basically the same. We want to try something different. What I saw at that event when I was there was one of the more surprising things in covering Tesla, which was the room full of people who were there.
Genuinely didn't believe that the Cybertruck was real. There were lots of lasers, crazy music, and they were kind of positioning this truck as the future. Doesn't look like anything else. Here was this thing that was so radical that was going to change the landscape of the United States. You know, truck country. This was the first car that they made that was really pushing the conventions of car design. And then they started hitting the truck.
The body was said to be bulletproof. Let's shoot it. That's how strong the skin is. And it would come with armored window glass. Maybe that was a little too hard. Musk said the entry-le rearwheel drive Cybert truck would start at $39,900. There'll be three versions. That's just like the price without any incentives. There was a lot of excitement around electric trucks in the late 2010s and so Tesla always wanted a piece of that. I mean the truck market in the United States is enormous. So it made sense for them to go after that.
Tesla as well as the other EV makers thought that maybe if we make an electric pickup that will get Americans excited about these green vehicles. We had companies like Ford that were bringing the F-150 Lightning to market. You had GM starting to get itself involved by making electric pickup trucks like the Silverado and the Hummer. You had startups like Rivian. And I think that really put the Cybertruck on its back foot to some extent because here was this product that was supposed to be at the forefront of the technology.
Bringing the Cybertruck to market hit years of delays that have included design changes, cost overruns, and pandemic uncertainties. We had all the resulting supply chain shortages, and that essentially put the project off for a long time. We didn't see the Cybertruck actually hit the market until 2023. When sales began, the new base price was roughly $61,000, about 21,000 more than promised. It was also supposed to have about 500 mi of range. We only saw versions of the Cybertruck that had about 300 mi of range. Still pretty capable for an electric vehicle, but not the kind of radical new thing that Elon Musk was
promising it at that event. Delivering on those promises proved difficult largely due to the complexities of manufacturing a vehicle unlike anything else on the road. It just is different than making a normal car. So it took them a lot of time. It took them a lot of effort to really perfect the line and then they struggled to bring the cost down because of that. Special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market to reach volume to be prosperous. Um, it's it's fundamental to the nature of the newness.
Another way that this product really struggled is that because the factory line was so hard to build, the truck faced numerous recalls. One of the more interesting things about it was just that these recalls were strange, some of them. In particular, there was one where people were having issues with the cover of the throttle pedals sliding up and getting stuck, which is obviously dangerous. It really struggled with structural integrity in the early days as they were learning how to build it.
I don't think it's easy to say whether or not that scared away buyers or gave them some pause, but it certainly didn't help. Tesla has sold about 73,000 Cyber Trucks since deliveries began in late 2023. While that falls well short of Musk's early expectations, it's out selling competing EV pickups this year. That's only really because it's sort of fighting against this war of attrition where other automakers like Ford are pulling their vehicles completely out of the market and other companies like GM are sort of disincentivized from EVs because of all the regulatory changes and the loss of the federal tax credit in this country.
Tesla was really the only company that I think had the willingness or the appetite to try and stick it out and see what they could do with a vehicle like this as these other competitors receded away quickly. As rivals pull back, Tesla has been buoied by a fiercely devoted fan base. The nation's largest electric car maker has led the auto industry in customer loyalty. Musk said the Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate and that Tesla will have to return deposits for a lot of people. There's been a really strong reaction amongst some of the most ardent supporters of Tesla about this thing being cancelled.
This was very popular with a subset of car buyers. Some of them are Elon fans, some of them are SpaceX fans, some of them are just people who like have found community among other Cybertruck owners. It's kind of amazing. Cyber Trucks and by extension some of their owners became synonymous with Musk's polarizing stint in politics. Get out of the White House. The Cybert truck became a really easy target for people who wanted to speak out or protest in some way against what Elon Musk was doing in politics by supporting Donald Trump. As you can see, I'm I'm not just MAGA.
I'm Dark Ma. And I think that anybody who may have still been considering buying a Cybert truck by that point was starting to think twice about that decision. Musk says winding down production of Cybert truck at Gigafactory Texas is to make room for increased cyber cab production. Tesla did not respond to a request for additional details on the decision. The move underscores Tesla's shift away from its core autos business to focus on autonomy and robotics.
Musk says that this is the future of the company that instead of selling cars with steering wheels, they're going to be offering people rides in fully autonomous vehicles. Musk said in order to work through more of the Cybert truck order backlog, production will be extended through the end of summer 2027. I think this is another example where the company is willing to even if it's in service of the sentimentality of its CEO decide to keep something like the Cybert truck around to earn it a little bit of goodwill or earn back a little bit of goodwill that it may have just squandered by deciding to cancel its most for better or worse iconic vehicle that it's come out with
in the last couple years.
