No more Cybertrucks; Musk moves on from the angular metallic flop

Elon’s Edsel is no more. Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed on social media that his car company is ending its failed attempt to wrest control of the American pickup truck market. The Cybertruck will cease production in the middle of 2027, liberating that space in Tesla’s cavernous factory for other uses—more Cybercabs, most likely.

Musk first revealed the Cybertruck in late 2019, back when Tesla was still trading at a theoretically understandable price-to-earning ratio. The pickup’s unusual angular shape owed more to low-res video game models than any concessions to practicality. At the time, Musk made fanciful claims that the truck would use a stainless steel monocoque construction, telling his audience that “the body and bed don’t do anything useful” on a normal truck. While some race cars use carbon-fiber monocoques for strength and lightness, making a pickup truck with a stainless steel monocoque chassis would only make sense if someone had an awful lot of stainless steel lying around and needed something to do with it all.

The truck was supposed to go on sale for less than $40,000, and Tesla made its usual stratospheric sales predictions that (had they been accurate) the bare metal EVs would be as ubiquitous as the Model 3 and Y.

But development of the Cybertruck was more troubled than usual for Tesla, which struggled heavily to bring both the Model 3 and Y into mass production. Musk demanded “Lego-like precision” from the workers assembling the trucks, but achieving the 10-micron tolerances required by the Danish toy company was not evidently successful, based on what we saw when we experienced our first Cybertruck in reality.

That was in 2023, when Cybertruck headlines were mostly about recalls and stop sales. By then, the truck used a conventional unibody chassis—conventional for Tesla, not for full-size pickup trucks. Toward the end of that year, Musk told his audience that “we dug our grave” with the truck, perhaps the first public acknowledgment that annual sales of a quarter of a million Cybertrucks probably wasn’t going to happen after all.

Sales never took off, and the Cybertruck’s divisive shape became an all-too-visible reminder of the CEO’s role in reshaping the federal government to his liking. Even selling thousands of Cybertrucks to SpaceX couldn’t save the pickup. Now, with America having vociferously rejected Musk’s vision of governance, those wishing to drive something that reminds everyone around them of that vision will only have a few months more to purchase one.

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