Tesla Just Made The Cybertruck An Even Tougher Sell

The cheapest Cybertruck is now nearly double the projected starting price Tesla pitched in 2019.

Photo by: Tesla

Rob Stumpf

By: Rob Stumpf

Aug 25, at 12:48pm ET

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Tesla is once again raising the price of the Cybertruck.
Its entry-level and Premium trims increased $5,000 this week.
Getting into even the lowest trim now costs $15,000 more than it did in February.

Tesla has once again raised the price of the Cybertruck. The cheapest Cybertruck now starts at $74,990, up $5,000 from yesterday and a full $15,000 from its $59,990 price tag that Tesla (briefly) offered in February.

That's a fascinating strategy for a vehicle whose biggest problem is that relatively few people are lining up to buy it. In fact, it's starting price is nearly double what many early reservation holders anticipated shelling out for the truck back in 2019.

Photo by: Tesla

If you've been following the saga of the stainless steel polygon since CEO Elon Musk debuted it nearly seven years ago, you may remember a slightly different number: $40,000.

That's what Tesla originally projected the Cybertruck starting at. Accounting for inflation, that's about $53,000 in 2026 bucks, which is still a far cry from the nearly $75,000 price tag on the window sticker. Even the Premium trim got a price hike to $84,990 (though the top-tier Cyberbeast remains untouched at a cool $99,990).

What might seem perplexing is that Tesla has raised the price of AWD variant by nearly $15,000 over the last six months despite the trucks not flying off the lot.

Remember that it was estimated Cybertruck reservations estimated to have exceeded two million units back in 2023. Tesla even planned to manufacture about 250,000 units annually, so the estimated 7,263 Cybertrucks sold during the first half of 2026 isn't exactly a number that screams supply-constrained. That number is down significantly from last year, too—about 32% year-over-year. And propping up its year-end 2025 sales was SpaceX, which reportedly bought nearly 20% of all Cybertrucks sold in Q4.

Bloomberg recently compared the Cybertruck launch to the Ford Edsel. It noted that while the Edsel was widely regarded as the biggest automotive flop of all time, the Cybertruck could finally be the vehicle that overtakes that title. Between a polarizing design, quality and reliability issues, and Musk's politics repelling Tesla's customer base, the launch fell short of expectations. The sales figures have yet to recover.

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Musk admitted at the beginning of the entire journey that the truck could "flop." He didn't care, he said—he loved the design. But now that the numbers are front and center, it's hard to justify sales 94% lower than planned capacity.

Maybe Tesla has given up chasing volume and would rather extract more revenue per sale to make up for that loss. But it certainly is a strange evolution for the company that set expectations for an affordable electric truck so high and instead of raising the bar, it raised the price.