Last Updated on: 29th July 2025, 02:38 pm
At one point, Tesla reportedly pulled in more than one million “reservations” for the Tesla Cybertruck. Many Tesla fans/shareholders were expecting it to reach hundreds of thousands (or more) sales a year. In theory, it might even dethrone the king of trucks, the Ford F-150!
Naturally, if anyone dared say that only about 20,000 Cybertrucks a year would find their way to customers, they would be torched by Tesla fans/shareholders and called a moron. Sacrilegious! Insane! Such a hater! How dumb!
Somewhat surprisingly at the time, CEO Elon Musk seemed to temper expectations and talk down the hype about 1 million reservations. He noted that he hoped to reach 150,000 annual steady-state sales of the Cybertruck a year.
Well, it seems he was still overly ambitious on that….
Last year, in the first half of the year, 11,558 Cybertrucks were delivered. But, hey, production was still ramping up, right? But Tesla started pushing the model more and more with various incentives and marketing materials. Clearly, production was no longer the problem, demand was.
Now, we’ve gotten through the first half of 2025, and there were reportedly only 10,712 Cybertrucks delivered to customers. Double that and you get fewer than 22,000 Cybertruck sales a year. Yikes! That is so far off Elon Musk’s target of 150,000 a year that it’s shocking, even for him. Despite all of his other problems with predictions and forecasting, he has historically had a pretty good sense for how many people would buy Tesla vehicles.
Compared to the 1 miiiiiiillion sales a year many Tesla fans/shareholders were expecting Tesla to sell, I think the Cybertruck can officially be called a gigantic flop. I don’t recall any vehicle from any brand having a bigger split between expected sales and actual sales. This is not about being a hater, but about taking a realistic look at expectations and reality in regards to this model, but also in regards to the company at large. Is the Cybertruck the only thing from Tesla that has seen vastly overestimated hype and expectations this decade? What of “breakthrough products” on the horizon?
Yes, if Tesla had delivered the Cybertruck at the price and range initially included at the product launch, perhaps it would see an order or magnitude more sales. But Tesla didn’t deliver on that pricing and range — far from it. And that is a big part of the problem. Tesla brought its semi-affordable breakthrough EV to market, the Model 3, and then a crossover version of it that’s even more popular. However, since then, the company has been missing target after target, expectation after expectation. The Cybertruck is probably the most obvious example of that right now, or perhaps Full Self Driving is, or perhaps the Tesla Semi, or maybe the Tesla Roadster 2.0. Unfortunately, that’s the issue — this has become a trend, not just a one-off error.
But, yes, the Cybertruck is unique. I went for a test drive of a Kia EV6 this week. The young sales guy knew a ton about EVs, and his dad was an early VC investor in Tesla. He told me on the test drive that he had ordered a Cybertruck — like ordered it ordered it, not just put a reservation down. However, he said his girlfriend wouldn’t let him get it (or something like that) because it looked too much like a garbage can. He thus lost the $10,000 deposit he had put on the Cybertruck. Yikes!
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