Tesla says it will end Cybertruck production next year

Musk forecast 250,000 Cybertruck sales a year; Tesla sold 70,000

Tesla will wind down production of the Cybertruck next year, an announcement Elon Musk made three days after what The Guardian described as a historic blue tsunami that changed America’s political landscape. Musk said the move was “to make room for increased Cybercab production”, referring to Tesla’s Robotaxi. The Guardian treated the timing as the close of an era, writing that, eccentric and overhyped, the Cybertruck “became a kind of automotive stand-in for Musk himself amid his political ascent”.

The Guardian wrote that, like so many of Musk’s projects, the truck was massively promoted, heavily delayed and ultimately fell short. Musk once predicted he could sell 250,000 a year, but Tesla ultimately sold 70,000 in three years, losing $1.9bn in the process, according to Quartz. The Guardian reported that the 2026 model runs from about $72,000 to $102,000.

A launch delayed four years, and a demonstration that failed

The Guardian wrote that the design “seemed to prioritize science fiction over robust engineering”. Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck in November 2019, the year the film Blade Runner was set, as Musk pointed out, but it did not arrive on the roads until four years later. Musk unveiled the truck at Tesla’s Design Center in Hawthorne, California, on 21 November 2019. At that event, Musk had a designer throw a ball at the truck’s window to demonstrate its durability, and the glass cracked. While Musk called it apocalypse-proof, The Guardian wrote that “it often seemed like the opposite”.

Five fires, four deadly, and 11 recalls

Cybertrucks suffered at least five vehicle fires, four of them deadly — making them deadlier than the notorious Ford Pinto, according to an analysis. The Cybertruck was subject to 11 recalls amid technical issues, including a loose pedal that could get stuck and cause unintentional acceleration. They routinely got stuck in the snow.

A design that divided buyers

The Guardian wrote that, like its creator, the Cybertruck was highly divisive: many observers were repulsed by its bizarre, boxy appearance and its road-hogging size, a parallel parking nightmare. “It is the ugliest vehicle I think I have ever laid eyes on,” the automotive expert Mike Caudill told Fox Business. Others, however, were deeply devoted to their Cybertrucks. “I’ve got 6,000 miles on my Cybertruck; I’ve had zero issues,” Matt Holm, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Austin, told the Houston Chronicle.

The truck also had strong points, according to experts. “People at Tesla were rightly proud of the engineering they put into it,” said Ezra Dyer, a senior editor and columnist at Car and Driver. But “a lot of the engineering problems they solved were self-imposed” — driven by the need to incorporate Musk’s design choices. When Jay Leno asked Musk during a test drive why the truck needed to be bulletproof, Musk replied: “Because it’s badass and super cool.”

The truck as a political symbol

The truck coincided with Musk’s political rise in the Trump administration. The truck, as The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence put it, became essentially “a Maga hat on wheels”, indicating its driver’s political beliefs — or at least the politics onlookers would ascribe to them. An automotive analyst told the New York Times that the archetypal Cybertruck driver was a guy “probably with some kind of goatee, likely compensating for something, so desperate for attention that he will take negative attention”. Many drivers of various Tesla models rushed to distance themselves from the CEO with bumper stickers that say, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”

The Guardian’s package includes a photograph of Donald Trump speaking during a news conference with Elon Musk in the Oval Office on 30 May 2025. The Cybertruck, meanwhile, “became this totem and symbol of Elon Musk himself”, said Dan Neil, an auto columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Musk’s time leading Doge

While Cybertrucks took to the streets, Musk was taking a literal chainsaw to the US government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), The Guardian wrote, adding that the department bore similarities to the truck, “beginning with the empty promises”. Musk said Doge could cut $2tn from the federal budget; its website now claims it has cut just $215bn. In the process, hundreds of thousands of workers left the government due to workforce reductions, early retirement and other reasons — before many were rehired, a sequence The Guardian compared to the Cybertruck’s recalls. Musk left the administration amid a public spending dispute with Donald Trump over spending in his “big, beautiful bill”.

Sales have struggled

When it comes to the Cybertruck, “you’ve got this expensive luxury product with a very off-putting aesthetic and all this political baggage,” Dyer said. Sales have struggled. “It’s following the trajectory of any cult vehicle,” Dyer said. “The hardcore fans line up, but once they’ve all got theirs, demand fizzles,” he said.

Vehicles that come to symbolise their era

The Guardian wrote that, as the Cybertruck reaches the end of its short road, it — “outwardly mighty, inwardly fragile, a poorly conceived product of an increasingly oligarchical system” — feels alarmingly apt as a symbol of Trump 2.0 Phase I. Ten years from now, spotting an ageing Cybertruck on the street will serve as a reminder of the bad old days, the paper wrote. The paper wrote that the truck “will join the ranks of other vehicles symbolic of their eras – for better or for worse”.

The Guardian placed the truck in that lineage: the Cybertruck is to the 2020s what the Volkswagen Transporter, AKA the VW Bus, is to the 1960s, the paper wrote, describing the two as opposites — the VW Bus calls forth images of peace and music, flower decals, and a crowd of well-meaning hippies packed inside, while sixty years after the summer of love the Cybertruck suggests an isolated middle-aged man hiding from the apocalypse. The vehicles do have a few things in common, the paper added: one is drugs, but while the VW conjures cannabis, the Cybertruck is more ketamine; the other is a reputation for putting looks over safety.

The Guardian also compared the truck to another icon of its era, in many ways the progenitor to the Cybertruck: the Hummer H2, introduced in the early 2000s. Like the Cybertruck, the Hummer was inconveniently enormous and associated with a certain kind of aggressive masculinity, the paper wrote, and with its military ties and gas-guzzling reputation it was bound up with imagery of the Iraq war. “It became a lightning rod for pro and con militarism, and so people drove them or bought them as a political statement as much as a style statement,” Neil said.

A fleet of Cybertrucks was photographed outside SpaceX’s south Texas testing facility, The Guardian reported. Tesla also showed off the truck’s ability to withstand bullets. “All of that was childish,” Neil said. “It didn’t speak with any seriousness to the mindset of people preparing to put down $80, $90,000.” The Cybertruck “represented a kind of a militarized vision of the future” to an American public tired of war. As for Tesla’s clientele, “the wager was they were emotionally immature and it looked like a toy-slash-weapon,” Neil added. The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi wrote that the Cybertruck “looks as if it were designed by a five-year-old”; in that sense, the paper suggested it might best be compared to the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe, the plastic red and yellow car that was for a time the bestselling vehicle in the world.

A mixed verdict on the truck’s legacy

Perhaps that comparison is unfair. To Neil, the Cybertruck represents both a “failure of management” and “a phenomenal piece of engineering”. “Its ambition and its vision and its willingness to break the mold of convention — that I think is its legacy,” he said.

Dyer agrees. “I’m glad in a way that it exists because it’s interesting, and I’m in favor of more interesting cars. Period,” he said. In this case, however, that difference “is a towering monument to overconfidence”. “There’s never been anything like it,” Dyer added, “and I guess there never will be again.”