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.
A national map showing the paper’s findings. Nature
