Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Electric Vehicles

The Cybertruck Is the Third-Best-Selling EV in America. It’s Also a Failure.

Making sense of two seemingly opposite Tesla stats.

Elon Musk and a Cybertruck.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Tesla

It’s a bad sign when they won’t tell you the exact numbers.

On Thursday, Tesla released final production figures for 2024, which saw the EV maker post a rare year-over-year decline in sales growth. It’s likely that a slow start for the Cybertruck, Tesla’s only new model in recent memory, was a big cause of the slowdown. But we can’t tell you exactly how well or poorly the big truck is doing because the company won’t tell us.

Tesla delivered 1,789,226 total vehicles to customers last year. The popular, reasonably affordable Model 3 or Model Y EVs made up more than 95% of those sales. The remainder were lumped into a group called “other models,” meaning Cybertruck and the long-in-the-tooth, expensive Model X and Model S, a move that has the same flavor as a Friday afternoon news dump. The “other models” accounted for just 85,133 deliveries, or 4.8% of Tesla’s total.

If you’ve been following Heatmap’s coverage then this comes as no surprise. Elon Musk & Co. sold just shy of 17,000 Cybertrucks during the third quarter of last year (July to September). That made the shiny metal beast the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s two volume sellers. But Cybertruck was a distant third behind those two EVs. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Tesla delivered 23,640 “other models,” meaning that’s the maximum number of Cybertrucks it could have sold.

The writing for Tesla’s sales slump has been on the wall for years. A recent design refresh helped bump Model 3 sales, and the company is still working on a rumored update to the Model Y, the world’s best-selling EV, that might give Tesla a shot in the arm. But with Tesla’s future prospects resting with the Cybercab and other autonomous aspirations, the Cybertruck is the brand’s only current opportunity to boost its bottom line with a new vehicle.

Except that the stainless steel war rig was never a good candidate for high-volume sales. Cybertruck starts at $80,000. It has suffered embarrassing viral moments where the vehicle failed at basic truck tasks such as getting out of snow or sand. It comes with some cool amenities, such as the ability to back up one’s home power supply via bidirectional charging. It also serves as the avatar of everything Elon, making the car a polarizing hard pass for anyone who doesn’t want to be publicly profiled as a Musk fan.

Get the best of Heatmap in your inbox each day.

* indicates required
  • Cybertruck endured a slow start dogged by production delays and nagging, frequent recalls. Soon it became evident that demand for the vehicle wasn’t exactly red-hot. Musk at one point has claimed that a million people put their names down for a Cybertruck, but doing so cost only $100, so the length of that list doesn’t mean much. More telling was the report that Tesla was scrubbing the badging off the limited-edition Foundation series, which wasn’t selling, so it could offer the vehicles as ordinary Cybertrucks.

    As The Verge notes, how you’d grade the Cybertruck depends entirely on what you believe its potential to be. As a competitor to EV pickup trucks like the Rivian R1T, Ford F-150 Lightning, and Chevy Silverado EV, the Tesla is the king — Cybertruck is outselling all those models. But electric truck sales have been sluggish all along, making the Cybertruck the big fish in a pretty small pond.

    If the Cybertruck’s raison d'etre was simply to bring Musk’s Mad Max daydream to life, then it has succeeded. But if the goal of the Cybertruck was to sell lots of cars, then it’s hard to argue it has been anything but a boondoggle.

    The automakers nipping at Tesla’s heels in the EV market, including GM and Hyundai/Kia, have every reason to see a path to more growth, even with the lingering uncertainty of an unfriendly new era of American government. They’re rolling out new models and posting record sales. If they can continue to bring down the starting price of their electric models, lots of their customers could be ready to ditch fossil fuel engines.

    But, at least for today, Tesla’s status it tethered to the Cybertruck, which doesn’t have a lot of room to grow. Once upon a time, Tesla teased a high-end version of the vehicle that would have 500 miles of range, as well as an entry-level Cybertruck that could start in the neighborhood of $50,000. Realizing either of those goals could make many drivers — at least those not immediately turned off at the thought of owning this thing — take a long look at the Cybertruck. Neither appears imminent.

    Musk’s reaction to all this might be a shrug. Rather than rounding out his stable of cars with an affordable EV with the potential to sell in huge numbers, he has bet the farm on Tesla winning the autonomous vehicle race and tossed out the Cybertruck as a treat to his hardcore devotees. Now he must hope enough of them buy it to keep Tesla’s cratering stock price afloat while he chases the future.

    Yellow

    You’re out of free articles.

    Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
    To continue reading
    Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
    or
    Please enter an email address
    By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
    Economy

    Tariffs Are Making Gas Cheaper — But Not Cheap Enough

    Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.

    Shipping containers.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.

    But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Green
    Electric Vehicles

    There Has Never Been a Better Time for EV Battery Swapping

    With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.

    A battery with wheels.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.

    That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Green
    Energy

    AM Briefing: Record Renewables Growth

    On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture

    Low-Carbon Sources Provided 41% of the World’s Power Last Year
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.

    THE TOP FIVE

    1. Estimated losses from recent severe U.S. storms top $80 billion

    The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”

    Keep reading...Show less
    Yellow