Cybertruck Sales Have All But Dried Up

Within weeks of its 2019 unveiling, Tesla claimed to have racked up over 1 million advance orders for the Cybertruck. But sales have failed to come anywhere near its expectations — and fell by nearly half last year. How much longer will Tesla keep the truck in production? More from Headlight.News.

It was billed as tough enough to “survive the apocalypse,” according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. That’s clearly in doubt these days as Tesla struggles to fix endemic quality problems with its all-electric Cybertruck.

But the real cataclysm appears to be the market rejection of the quirky, full-size truck, the vast, vast majority of the more than 1 million potential customers who, early on, plunked down $100 deposits, having failed to follow through by actually buying the troubled pickup.

With Tesla repeatedly cutting production and, even then, having to find storage lots to hold its unsold inventory, the big question is whether the automaker will pull the plug on the slow-selling EV.

Apocalypse now

When Tesla CEO Elon Musk first unveiled Cybertruck in November 2019, he waxed effusive about the pickup’s potential. When the first production model was finally handed over to a retail customer in November 2023 — after a nearly two-year delay — Musk declared, “the apocalypse can come along any moment and here at Tesla we have the best in apocalypse technology.”

Perhaps, but the Cybertruck hasn’t quite lived up to that billing. From the start, it had some embarrassing quality and durability problems. At this point, it has run up 10 individual recalls for a variety of issues ranging from sticking throttles to body panels that can fly off unexpectedly while the truck is being driven.

Owner forums, meanwhile, are filled with a variety of complaints over drivability and range, Cybertruck falling well short of its EPA rating — which was itself significantly short of the numbers Musk promised when the first Cybertruck prototype made its November 2019 debut.

Collapsing sales

Only Tesla itself seemed to believe it could translate those 1 million advance reservations into actual sales. It couldn’t, but the pace at which sales have plunged has taken even the biggest skeptics by surprise.

In 2024, Cybertruck’s first full year on the market, the company delivered approximately 39,000 — analysts having to dig deep to get exact figures since Tesla notably declines to break out the pickup’s numbers.

Things only got worse — much, much worse — in 2025. The company delivered barely 7,000 Cybertrucks during the first quarter, roughly half as many as during the previous three-month period. And, for all of 2025, it seems, demand came to a mere 19,000.

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The Musk Effect

What happened? A variety of factors appear to have been at play. To start with, there were those recalls coming one after the other. There was word of mouth, which helped spread the word about quality and range issues, among other matters.

Then there was the “Musk Effect.” The sudden plunge in demand neatly coincides with Musk’s increasingly close ties to the Trump administration, for which he served as its head of the highly controversial Department of Government Efficiency.

Tesla sales, in general, were hammered by protests at its dealerships, as well as boycotts in the U.S. and other markets. But the bold, in-your-face design of the Cybertruck made it the poster child for that backlash.

Ironically, where Musk initially alienated the traditionally liberal Tesla buyer base with his ties to the president, his subsequent, noisy split with Trump then led many of the more conservative buyers thinking about the Cybertruck to back away.

What now?

Tesla wouldn’t be faulted for abandoning Cybertruck. After all, Ford last month announced it had ended production of the F-150 Lightning, which handily outsold its rival last year. And Stellantis has killed plans for an all-electric version of the Ram 1500. In general, electric full-size pickups have proven to have far less market potential than many experts predicted just a couple years ago.

But Cybertruck was, perhaps more than any other Tesla product, the personal showpiece for CEO Musk. At a time when he is working to meet the targets set by the Tesla board for a $1 trillion payout, it’s likely difficult to acknowledge such a public failure and then shut it down.

So, for now, the wounded EV remains in production, albeit at a decidedly slower pace than originally planned. Even then, however, Tesla struggles to find buyers.