It’s Official: The Cybertruck Is One Of The Greatest Flops In Automotive History

Tesla broke almost every promise it made about the Cybertruck. The result was unambiguous: A failure of historic proportions.

Photo by: Fernando Pino

By: Mack Hogan

Nov 6, at 12:29pm ET

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The Tesla Cybertruck is a failure. We’ve suspected this for quite some time, but CEO Elon Musk confirmed it on Thursday night. He announced that Cybertruck production will wind down next year, concluding after just over three years on the market. That seals its position as one of the greatest automotive failures in history.

That means it’ll live about as long as Ford’s Edsel—an automotive flop so epic that I learned about it in my high school history class.

What a tremendous waste. Let’s break down what went wrong.

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Source: InsideEVs

Broken Promises

If you haven’t seen it in a while, I recommend reading InsideEVs’ original story about the Tesla Cybertruck reveal in 2019. The event stirred up quite a bit of buzz, as Musk promised to fundamentally reset the electric truck race. On stage, he touted a $40,000 starting price and some jaw-dropping specs:

Range: 500+ miles
0-60 mph acceleration: <2.9 seconds
Towing capacity: More than 14,000 lbs
Payload: Up to 3,500 lbs
Seating for six adults

All of this in an electric truck that would beat every established automaker to the market; Tesla projected an on-sale date of 2021 for the single- and dual-motor versions and 2022 for the tri-motor flagship.

Every single promise listed there was broken, except the 0-60 time, by far the least important metric for truck buyers. Worst were pricing and delivery dates. Deliveries did not begin until nearly three years after the promised date. The Foundation Series, tri-motor version cost a staggering $120,000. That’s three times what the base model was supposed to cost and $50,000 more than the originally promised $69,900 price for the tri-motor.

Photo by: InsideEVs

Even the base dual-motor version was ten grand north of where the flagship model was supposed to sit. A $60,000 rear-wheel-drive version arrived late and didn’t last long. The cheapest Cybertruck model at the end of its run was $82,000, over double the initially promised price. (Tesla has stopped taking orders for that version.)

None of these models came close to 500 miles of range, either. Its maximum EPA rating of 325 miles may have been good enough for daily driving, but in a truck market that values towing, it wasn’t enough to win over EV skeptics. When the Cybertruck launched in 2023, Tesla announced a drop-in battery pack for the bed that was supposed to boost range to 470 miles. But that feature was scuttled last year before making it to production.

While Tesla couldn’t deliver that range, publicly calling that pushed other truck-makers to develop long-range electric options. Tesla may not have ever delivered a truck with over 400 miles of range, but Rivian did. Chevy sells a Silverado with 493 miles of EPA range, all for about the same as the dual-motor Cybertruck.

The Whole Segment Failed

Of course, it’s worth noting that Rivian, Ford, and Chevy haven’t had much success in the segment either. Fundamentally, the EV truck wars were kickstarted by Tesla and Ford promising $40,000 battery-electric trucks. At that price, going electric seemed like an obvious advantage.

Neither could deliver in reality. Chevy never quite promised it, and Rivian always targeted the high-end market, but the simple fact is that no electric truck built to date could match the pricing of gas-powered alternatives. Given real buyer concerns around range, towing, and infrastructure, that alone made these tough sells.

The Ford F-150 Lightning, the best-seller in the segment for its time, died almost as quickly as the Cybertruck. Ford had planned to build up to 150,000 Lightnings per year; real sales never surpassed 35,000 units annually. GM's electric trucks, meanwhile, have also struggled. The company originally planned to build hundreds of thousands of electric trucks across two factories. Those plans changed; it's only using one facility, Factory Zero, and demand has been low enough that the company has idled the plant for two of the last 13 months. It's no surprise, then, that the company has reportedly postponed its next-generation of electric trucks. All of this happened amid a broader EV market pullback, driven in part by regulatory changes.

But even among these market-wide disappointments, the Cybertruck stands out. Musk publicly said that the Cybertruck could sell 250,000 to 500,000 units per year on its own. That wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky promise from the simpler days of 2019, either; he said it in 2023, on the eve of first deliveries.

Ford built up enough capacity to build 150,000 F-150 Lightnings per year. But like the Cybertruck, the Lightning arrived with a much higher price than originally promised, and sales peaked at 33,510 units per year.

Photo by: Ford

Tesla never got close to those numbers. Despite claiming over a million preorders, the company moved just 38,965 Cybertrucks during its first full year of sales in 2024, per Cox Automotive estimates. Sales dropped a staggering 48.1% in 2025, a brutal showing for only its second real year on the market.

Tesla Dug Its Own Grave

I wasn’t surprised when those 2025 numbers came out. First, Musk had destroyed the brand of the Cybertruck, with his political meddling making it the poster child for a tech-bro hard-right pivot. But it also launched with a bunch of quality issues, missing features, and extremely questionable durability.

Its success was concentrated more with Tesla fans than traditional truck buyers; I’ve seen far more wrapped in promotional liveries for marijuana dispensaries than actually hauling work equipment or trailers. And while there are enough of those types to fill reservation lists and overrun coastal California with gold-wrapped trapezoids, there aren’t enough to make a dent in the real truck market.

After all, this vehicle was supposed to herald the end of the gas-powered pickup era. Musk implied it would make the Ford F-150 irrelevant. The reality is that Ford is on track to sell over 800,000 F-Series trucks this year. Cybertruck sales, meanwhile, won’t clear 20,000 units. Oy.

The Cybertruck is dying to make room for increased Cybercab production. This represents Musk's major pivot away from consumer cars and towards robotaxis, which is really hurting Tesla's competitiveness in its primary market.

Photo by: Tesla

None of this is surprising. Tesla delivered a product that came in years behind schedule. It underdelivered on almost every key spec at a price that was far higher than promised. Its novel production method drove up costs and contributed to high-profile quality issues. Its durability testing was clearly less rigorous than truck buyers expect, and its design was more polarizing than attractive. Meanwhile, the man behind it became politically toxic to the exact buyers most likely to go electric, and lost his interest in the human-driven car business altogether.

What do you think?

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This failure lies primarily with him. Musk’s culture of promising before thinking, and lying without shame, created the culture that built one of the most overhyped and under-baked products in modern automotive history. Its failure will be studied for decades to come as an example of executive incompetence, just like the Edsel. That much is written.

What’s unclear is whether Tesla and Musk will learn from this experience, tempering the bluster and focusing on execution. It’s certainly possible, but after years of covering this story, I’m not holding my breath.