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Making sense of two seemingly opposite Tesla stats.
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.
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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.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.