Tesla Cybertruck is dead. The massive, steel-plated electric pickup has never sold particularly well, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said last week that Cybertruck production will wind down next year.
Musk would like the world to know, however, that the company isn’t scrapping Cybertruck due to unprofitability or lack of demand.
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“The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate. We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people,” wrote Musk in a tweet on Monday. “This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production,” he wrote.
That’s an interesting logical hoop Musk would like you to jump through. Given that Tesla doesn’t report precise Cybertruck sales numbers, and typically doesn’t talk about profitability of individual models, it’s hard for an outsider to definitively call this or that model unprofitable. We’ve never said it, by the way; we merely pointed to poor sales figures, based on reports and Tesla’s own figures, which lump Cybertruck with “other models” in quarterly reports.
But how do we know the sales figures are bad? Well, we merely compare Musk’s predictions with actual sales numbers. In 2023, Musk predicted Tesla would sell 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertruck units annually. In the third quarter of 2026, Tesla delivered 8,295 “other models,” which include Cybertruck, Model X, and Model S. The total deliveries for this category in the past four quarters are 48,431; even if all those were Cybertrucks (which they definitely weren’t), that’s still less than a fifth of Musk’s lower projected figure for Cybertruck annual sales.
So yes: Cybertruck isn’t selling nearly as well as Musk predicted. The company is placing all bets on autonomous driving, and has scrapped Model S, Model X, and Cybertruck while ramping up Cybercab production. Musk is free to call the Cybertruck a great victory, but we bet the company wouldn’t be winding down production so easily had the demand been five or ten times bigger than what it was.
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