Tesla Cybertruck appears to be facing significant sales challenges. After initial hype faded, and over a million reservations turned out to be as real as unicorns, Tesla is now enabling leasing options and free upgrades to move its inventory of the futuristic pickup truck. The company’s recent silence on the Cybertruck, even omitting it from their earnings call, speaks volumes about the situation.
Tesla initially projected sales of 500,000 Cybertrucks annually and established production capacity at the Giga Texas for 250,000 units per year. After working through the initial reservation backlog with fewer than 40,000 deliveries, the automaker is now struggling to sell the remaining vehicles.
I just had a talk with a friend of mine in southern Ontario who lives in a farming rural area. He likes cars and often does searches for used vehicles in his area. In a 200km area around Brantford, there are over 200 used Teslas on sale down there over the past month or two because people are dumping them because they don’t like the brand.
The well moneyed sort who buy Teslas also like to change cars more often than the rest of us. Some of them are going to even more expensive brands like Rivian, and there’s a huge array of less expensive, more practical options.
Here’s how I personally see the brand transformation. I don’t believe these people are so principled that they are dumping these cars in protest. It’s more that the appeal that used to be there: of being part of the future, of moving off gas and embracing clean tech to help save the world… that little halo just isn’t part of the brand anymore. I see Teslas all the time where I live with license plates like “BYE CO2” and “LOL GAS.” But no one is going to hop on board that Tesla hype train any longer. They are no longer novel, they no longer virtue-signal and yes have actually become a bit icky. But I think we’re just seeing the end of the mirage, not really any kind affirmative lashback.
This should surprise no one. The reception was poor, delivery was poor. It’s a niche market item in an existing niche market. On top of that, the de facto spokesperson of Tesla isn’t well liked by a lot of potential buyers.
It is jaw dropping that only 40,000 of their one million+ reservations actually turned into sales. Thats 4% conversion!
Also, trucks are not a niche market. And there is pretty minimal overlap between the kind of douche who wants one of these and people who object to Musk’s behavior. It’s designed for his cult, especially.
Plus it looks stupid, like what my drawings of a car looked like at 5 years old
“Isn’t well liked” is quite the understatement. “Despised” is more like it. I actually like the way the cybertruck looks, I think the technology is interesting, and if I really wanted to, I could probably afford one.
I wouldn’t drive one if it was given to me for free. I’d rather take a taxi every day than drive a public display of support for the treasonous fascist manchild that owns the company.
Tesla’s second biggest problem is their shit standards and quality control. Their first biggest problem is their shit corporate leadership.
I swear that every time I saw one, the people around would point and laugh. 100k+ to drive a car that is always broken and mocked by everyone is quite expensive.
Hey! I heard you could get one of these fasc-mobiles for $75k, now!
/s
Isn’t well liked…. Is a Nazi.
Just wait till DOGE start requiring it for all government vehicles
“What?! You all wanted electric mail trucks, so here they are!”
(Sadly / Probably)
With all the trailer capacity available it will be able to carry one, maybe even TWO packages!
oh shit…
I’d like a GTA singleplayer cheat making every police car a cybertruck that can’t pursue you for long and would rather lose control and do a barrel roll than even get close to you.
Plus the initial sales were to people who had already committed to preorders at a lower price for a truck that was hyped up to be far better than the end result.
Cybertrucks are basically No Man’s Sky but without the possibility of being good in a half decade.
Cybertrucks are basically No Man’s Sky but without the possibility of being good in a half decade.
Dag, yo. 🔥
“niche market,” is a way of saying they made a bad product few want.
pickup trucks are hardly a niche product especially in the us
pickup trucks are hardly a niche product
Tanks camouflaged as pickup trucks are.
When did they start importing the Hilux?
To be fair, it’s valid to cater to niche markets.
However, that wasn’t what Tesla was aiming to do.
cybertruck is barely even a truck at all. its a truck shaped car for rich assholes to look rugged.
Which is a very niche market. I’m not part of that market.
Try and fail to look rugged. They just end up looking like the douche nozzles they are.
They’re a comedy show on wheels. They always lighten my mood when I see them. I’m a little smug too, knowing if I had that much money to blow, it wouldn’t be on one of those.
And the cybertruck is hardly a pickup truck. What were you saying?
It makes more sense if you start from the other side - EVs are a niche market, and an electric truck is a small subset of that.
The Cybertruck sold 38,965 units last year, vs 33,510 for the Ford F150 Lightning.
I’m assuming the electric f150 has greater than 1 wheel drive?
Actually most vehicles are only 1-wheel drive unless they have a locker or similar installed (4x4 would be “2-wheel drive”).
I guess making a search online is the one thing slightly more difficult than making an assumption.
You gotta love these comments in forums. Like the whole point of being here is to discuss and people like this are literally telling you to leave the site. Very useful, much contributions.
OK, but what the hell was that person on about though?
Which vehicles have that? The base cybertruck has two motors for AWD.
Regular F150s have single wheel drive.
Can you explain? I’m not much into cars, but that doesn’t sound right to me. A quick Google suggests maybe you’re referring to the open differential, but I don’t think that means that only one wheel is powered.
They’re referring to an open differential. If you look at an open differential vehicle doing a burnout you will see that only one wheel is spinning.
It’s just to make OP feel smart. A single driven axle with an open differential with one wheel on more slippery ground than the other would result in only one wheel transferring torque.
One of the things I love about my Lightning is that it doesn’t look like a fucking cybertruck
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The Lightning really is a nice looking truck.
The trapezoid Minecraft
CybertruckDeplorian— not so much…
Hey, that is a very hurtful thing to say about Minecraft. Please don’t compare it to that rolling dumpster fire
Deplorian
I’ll be borrowing that one.
See also:
- wank panzer
- swasticar
- incel camino
Deplorian… Made me snarf. My previous go to, overheard a while back, Incel Camino.
😂 oh I like that! Good trade.
“Wankpanzer” is the one I’ve been going with.
Other truck makers tend to let their vehicles fully render.
Gotta save some polygons.
I will hand it to Tesla, iterating on the Cybertruck design must have been really fast.
Iteration 1 in play
I’m not a Ford guy, but they do look pretty good.
They shipped 39k cybertrucks for backlogged preorders that were based on a completely different description of what the truck would be.
Well yeah, but to be fair, they were lying.
Which is mind boggling, as the Lightning seems like a good, attractive vehicle, while the cybertruck seems like a pile of shit
I have no need for a truck, and I still considered getting one. The Lightning is very impressive all around.
The Lightning has also been out for a few years now, so it’s not the “new” thing. Also, I feel like half of those cYbErTrUcK purchases were people trying to resell them.
Hopefully these people get double-fucked. Moreso because they bought a swasticar from President Musk, but also because fuckyou to people who buy stuff just to resell at a higher margin.
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I don’t think I’d call that thing a pickup. I’m not gonna run to the farm and pick up a 1000lb bale of hay in that thing. A Baja looks like it has more bed space.
And more ground clearance
Most pickup truck owners don’t do that either.
Maybe in the US they don’t…
A bad pickup truck is still just a pickup truck.
Yep, what else could you call it? It’s not a hatchback, a sedan, a convertible, a sports car, etc.
Swasticar
Incel Camino
An enormous mistake?
Trash.
A kid’s drawing of a car come to life.
Hakencruiser
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Yeah. A wagon.
Hatchbacks can fold down the rear seats to extend the cargo area. The Cybertruck fails even at that.
The worst El Camino ever?
It’s an Ute (as the Australians et al. call it), like the old El Camino etc.
Real pickups have body-on-frame construction with cabs and beds bolted onto the chassis separately, so that the bed can be removed and replaced with a specialized/custom one if necessary.
Calling it a ute implies some degree of utility.
Let’s not forget the quality. Also poor.
I mean off the bat that’s one of the worse combinations of people/product I’ve ever seen. I mean off the bat electric car’s target market is people that want to think they are doing something better for the environment.
So… then the guy making them goes loudly in the “fuck the environment” group.
To top it off though, Cybertruck itself always confuses me. I don’t know who the target audience is. The original tesla’s I could look at and think, that’s a cool car, if they ever came down in price I’d be interested.
Cybertruck you look at and think… What a car would look like if you scaled up games from the 32/64 bit console era and made them HD without increasing the polygon count.
My problem with Tesla is that so many things seem half-unthinking, half-finished or half-assed:
Unthinking: I know! I’ll put a ledge in from of the headlights, so snow can pile up while I’m driving!
Unfinished: all the seam mismatches and eternally unfinished-but-really-close! full self-driving (it ain’t gonna happen).
Half-assed: that recall they had to do because sometimes the latch doesn’t catch properly and the hood flies open when you’re driving and blocks your view. Tesla’s solution isn’t to fix or replace the hood latch so this doesn’t happen; they push a software up that monitors the hood latch and pops up a warning, telling you to pull over and check the hood latch. Because apparently fixing the issue that their poor design (see #1) and bad implementation (see #2) doesn’t warrant an actual fix, they’re just going to fob the risk , the cost and the work off to the customer.
eternally unfinished-but-really-close! full self-driving
Promised by next year since 2013
I like the theory that Tesla had a long term roadmap before Elon scooped it up, and that he wasn’t able to do too much to disrupt that in the early years because he was focused on LARPing as Tony Stark on the Internet, and the team that developed around him to insulate the company from him were reasonably good at their jobs. But even the best can only hold back so few bad ideas while keeping up the illusion, and the result has been gradually diminishing amount of ass.
Until that roadmap ran out, and/or Elon stopped being distracted, resulting in them designing and building the Elon.
We’re not all buying EVs for the environment. I bought an EV because I think the car is cool and it’s really enjoyable to drive. It’s nice that the “gas” is also significantly cheaper, but that wasn’t high on my list of reasons to get the thing, either.
The EV owners I’ve talked to didn’t buy them for the environment, either, but I haven’t talked to any Leaf owners or anything. Maybe they’re more environmentally conscious. It being better for the environment long term is definitely nice, and I hope progress continues on batteries made with less toxic components.
Thankfully, I did not buy a Tesla and they were never on my list of options because of Elon. So he definitely alienated a customer due to him being an awful human being. I also won’t use any of their charging stations, since I don’t want them to profit off of me.
You could say we bought our Teslas “for the environment” in a way, though a bit roundabout. When we bought them (2018), it was after having previously leasing a Leaf which had shit mileage and poor performance over 40mph. We wanted to signal to the industry with our dollars that we wanted the EV movement to succeed. Because apparently money is the only thing they listen to. We knew full well that EVs were only a step toward a greener future or whatever but we wanted the industry to take that step and understand that being environmentally friendlier was important.
The target audience is monied tech bro millenials who really wanted a warthog out of Halo.
The problem is that the overlap between tech bros and nazi lovers is definitely not 100%, probably not even 10%.
The problem is that the overlap between tech bros and nazi lovers is definitely not 100%, probably not even 10%.
Dont be so sure about that ratio. Plently of “got mine, im all bootstraps” tech bros. Id put the number at about 70/30% against nazis, but no better.
If they wanted a Warthog, they should have gotten a Jeep.
Or built one. There are at least three fully functioning Warthogs out there, I think. I’ve seen the one at Weta.
got treasure money now, no need to sell overpriced junk
Yeah because they were showing such restraint before.
I wouldn’t take a cybertruck if it was free, ignoring musk entirely it’s just a bad vehicle.
The only place I’ll drive a Cybertruck is in Fortnite because there I want my car to be unsafe.
I wish journalist would stop calling this PS 1 Pontiac Aztek “futuristic”; it just highlights how shitty our future is going to be.
Ironically, the Aztek is way better, despite its age…
I mean it would fit well in Robocop or The Running man so I guess it counts
Both shitty visions of the future. Well the movie for Running Man took place 6-8 years ago, and the book takes place this year which could count as “future” since we’re only in February.
So things are going to go downhill real fast, is what you’re saying
It would certainly fit this version of Robocop.
I’m thinking more omikron the nomad soul lmao.
That’s retro-futuristic, a very different thing.
All DEI fault for this failure
/s (if it wasn’t obvious 🙂)
The only thing Elon’s ever pulled out of.
Beat me to it
Tesla just needs a new slogan or a good marketing campaign.
Something like:
Tesla - power by joy
Or “Kraft durch Freude” in German.
All that would perfectly fit the brand image.
Have they tried making a good car?
Weird, I’ve heard Elon’s pull out game sucks balls.
And I’ve heard the majority of his kids are IVF/surrogate… does Leon even fuck?
Elen musk
Yes but the joke if you missed it was thats a picture of Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil.
Does he look like a bitch?Is this a bot?
Did you get excited and spell boot wrong? Heard a bell started to drool a little?
I’m sorry
This news makes me smile.
I got a chubby
You win lol
Have they tried making a decent truck?
Value is harder to deliver than hype.
The main reason I bought a truck was to tow heavy shit, and this piece of fuck trash Cyber truck can’t even do that without the battery failing after less than 100 miles. Meanwhile an F150 can tow six times it’s own weight thousands of miles.
The one person I know who owns a cyber truck was upset when I didn’t call him when I had a truck needing emergency, my wife’s car had broken down on a freeway offramp. The people that own these stupid things are cos playing as truck people even moreso than the average truck owner. The weirder part of his upsetness is, I was already driving a 3/4 ton truck because my commuter vehicle was not running. All I had to do was go get a uhaul trailer and go get her car. My mind is still boggled that he threw a fit about not calling him.
LOL. I have a truck for towing and other truck-related things and am quite happy to help others with aforementioned truck activities when asked. The amount of times I get upset when people don’t call me to do truck things is like, hmmmm let’s see…zero. It is zero times. A shrug is all I might manage to evoke from the drama.
It was the weirdest shit. He doesn’t know anything about towing or hauling. His cybertruck is the first truck like vehicle he has ever owned and for some reason his ego tells him he’s qualified to help. Its probably his total lack of experience that caused his upset.
To redeem him a bit he is incredibly willing to help people. He’s just got more money than brains and experience lol.
Yah, I was about to mention ego being very much involved in all of this from the purchase of the “truck” to feeling spurned by not being asked to help. My ego would be hard-pressed to avoid educating him. Politely, of course.
Do you get upset when people move without calling you? 😄
Yes! Shouldn’t your parents tell you before you come home from school???
Well that would make you in the 10% of people actually using their truck
I bought a truck as a back up to my daily and weekend warrior, purely for towing and dirty jobs.
Always used my daily with a tow hitch for most things and honestly still pick it with a 6x8’ trailer on occasion over my truck often because it’s easier to maneuver…
A few of us exist
I’m surprised you mentioned the battery (which is a problem with any EV towing), and not the fact the hitch can just snap off if you hit a pothole hard enough.
Wait what?!?!
Tbf it’s kinda a fundamental limitation of electric vehicles vs gas that the energy density of gas is way higher.
Bit like Elon, Never lived up to the hype
Has Elon Musk tried not being a fascist plutocrat?
