The Tesla Cybertruck. In a country where pickup trucks are half of the top 10 selling vehicles, making an electric one seemed like a no-brainer. At the time the pickup debuted, Tesla was already making the world's best selling EV.
To solve sustainable energy, we have to have a pickup truck.
The truck's design certainly provoked a range of opinions, some loving it, others...
I thought it was a joke. certainly provoked a range of opinions, some loving it, others…
But in terms of performance and capability, Tesla was making big promises. At first it looked like customer interest would be as impressive as the truck's specs. The demand is off the charts. We have over a million people with rivers of the car. But just a fraction of the more than one million reservation holders have actually made a purchase. There's been plenty of reports of trucks piling up on lots.
Tesla has a tendency to drastically overpromise, and it's starting to catch up with
the company. There have been recalls and canceled plans that have angered customers. Despite all this, some owners say the truck is great.
I really like the way it looks. I like the way it drives.
For the most part, I would buy it again.
So what went wrong? CNBC dove in to find out. Elon Musk had been talking about making some kind of a Tesla truck since at least 2012.
For most of the last decade, the three best selling vehicles in America have been full size pickup trucks. It's the Ford F-150, the Chevrolet Silverado and the Ram 1500. So if the industry is going electric, it's not ridiculous to think that large, that full size trucks need to go electric.
I present to you the Cybertruck.
Thought it was a joke. I thought they were going to pull up the real truck after they showed this thing. And I'm just like, OK, no, really. And the show kept going on. I'm like, that's it.
Oh, my God. Initially, when I saw it, I love the stainless steel look. I'm a DeLorean fan. I'm a Back to the Future fan. So that was striking enough and I was like, oh yeah, I never had a chance to get a DeLorean.
Tesla's advertised specifications bested those of longtime market leaders. Up to 14,000 pounds of towing power, 500 more than the top selling Ford F-150. A 3,500 pound payload capacity, about a thousand more than the Ford truck. A top zero to 60 time under three seconds, faster than many sports cars. It's important to mention that this is comparing the Cybertruck specs advertised at the 2019 reveal with the specs of a 2025 Ford F-150. Initially, Tesla said the truck would start at $39,900.
As of July 2025, it started at sixty two thousand four ninety. The max towing capacity on the Cyber Beast, the top trim, is eleven thousand pounds, three thousand short of the promised 14. The most payload any version gets is two thousand two hundred seventy pounds on the tri motor version with all terrain tires. That's less than the promised 3,500.
One month before Tesla began deliveries, Musk said over one million people had placed reservations. But since deliveries began in November 2023, only 52,000 units have sold in the U.S. In Q3 2024, they peaked at nearly 17,000 units. For a time, it was the best selling electric pickup.
From there, sales fell.
With a lot of EVs, we see people place a reservation that never turns into an order. And it's often because the price of a reservation is very low. But Tesla told everyone this niche was absolutely enormous and it's relatively small.
Reports documenting the challenges started to roll in. There were shortened production shifts. Tesla telling Cybertruck line workers to stay home, sometimes for a few days at a time. The company started offering potential customers lifetime free supercharging
on Foundation Series Cybertrucks, a special first edition of the truck that originally cost about $100,000. By January 2025, Tesla was offering discounts.
They're not gonna sell anywhere close to a million trucks.
So what went wrong?
It fell short of the projected range. It fell short of the projected payload capacity. It fell short of the projected towing capacity. It fell short of the projected speed. And it fell way short of the projected price.
It's far more expensive than they had said in the first place. Specs aside, the design was certainly eye catching, but it was off putting and even cumbersome for many of the customers who use pickup trucks for work. And that is a large portion of the truck market.
The side of the bed, I think, is still difficult to get into. I mean, one of the things that you do with pickup is put things inside of it. You can't reach the side of the cyber jar. It's very difficult to do so from like near the cab.
Full size truck buyers are a fairly conservative set of people. And I don't necessarily mean politically so much as I mean in their expectations. They're often buying a truck that they're going to work with. So those specifications for how hard it actually works are very
important. And then there is the range. The company had targeted up to 500 miles but delivered something closer to 300. The Cybertruck is Peter Scott's third Tesla. He also has a Model S and Model X. He got into EVs after news broke of the Volkswagen diesel gate cheating scandal. At the time, Scott was driving a diesel powered VW.
He loved his first two Teslas.
Felt like I owed them more money. It was the first car I didn't have buyer's remorse. I was so happy because everywhere I turned, I had no gas payment. I had no repair payment. I mean, it was just a it was a beautiful thing.
Scott is a contractor and he needed a work truck. He paid the full $120,000 for the Cyber Beast. When he bought it, he was disappointed with the range, but Tesla had said it would offer a range extender that would bump the range up to 470 miles, close to the original 500 mile target. The range extender was canceled.
OK, 470 versus 500. That's fine. I'll go ahead and buy the truck knowing I'm going to get 470 miles. I put the deposit down on the range extender. I bought the truck knowing that I was going to get 470 miles. Then when they canceled it, that just crushed me.
They got my money and then they canceled what they were going to do. If I knew that, then I would have looked at a Silverado because the Silverado has the mileage that I'm looking for.
As with many other Tesla products and plans, the Cybertruck suffered many development and production delays and challenges. Some of these, the company said, resulted from production shutdowns and supply chain shortages common to automakers during the coronavirus pandemic. Setbacks have only continued. There have also been ongoing production and quality problems.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows Tesla conducted eight voluntary recalls for the 2024 model year alone. Many pertained to physical defects, not just software. One was over body panels falling off the truck due to the use of improper adhesives. Another was for a trapped accelerator pedal defect that caused some drivers to experience frightening, unintended acceleration.
Tesla did not respond to CNBC's request for an interview or comment.
What feels weird is I feel guilty for the people that had all those problems. I didn't have all those problems like they did.
Keenan Cobra Curtis did have a fair bit of trouble with his foundation series, Cybertruck, much of which he documented on his YouTube channel.
I have so many issues and I have repeated visits to the service center and being a newer vehicle, they struggled a little bit in the beginning, but they you know, they worked on it. They repeatedly worked on it and it got to the point where, you know, it was just unreasonable. And they actually repurchased the Cybertruck from me. Essentially, it was a lemon law buyback.
They gave me all my money back and I turned around and got another one. The second one, there is a night and day difference.
But Cybertruck sales still fell. Overall, EV pickup truck demand is a fraction of the total truck market.
I think that in the long run, there will be an argument for electric trucks. It's a combination of the infrastructure has not caught up in the place where trucks are most necessary.
However, Cybertruck has lost ground to the rivals against which it was benchmarking.
Let's actually have a tug of war here with an F-150.
Yeah, but it was uphill.
And while we saw Cybertruck sales spike a little bit above F-150 lightning sales for a while, they've now fallen below. And the best selling electric truck in America is a copy of the best selling gas truck in America, which is completely unsurprising.
But Curtis and Scott find much to like about their trucks. The fact that Tesla's can be updated remotely all the way down to the powertrain give them an edge.
The next closest would be the Sierra. I really love that interior is very luxurious, but I feel like the software wouldn't be there. And I had another buddy of mine talk me out of it. He said, you know what? It's going to be outdated.
They won't update it at all.
And I was like, you're right.
Scott says some other features on the Cybertruck make it stand out from the pack. For example, the air suspension can lower the truck to fit into parking structures. The included tonneau cover keeps things secure in the bed. The truck's software can recognize different types of trailers and adjust the brakes accordingly.
I mean, it's just amazing. Like it just keeps getting better and better.
Of course, I love the look and the feel of it. I love the steer by wire. I love the the comfort.
One downside is some of the attention the truck attracts. Tesla has faced protests and declining sales in response to CEO Elon Musk's incendiary political rhetoric as well as his extensive spending and work to re-elect Donald Trump and to slash federal agencies. As you can see I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark MAGA.
I bought it four and a half years ago before Elon went political and so when I'm driving I get flipped off sometimes or people swerve in front of me.
Two separate occasions, I've had people show me they didn't like my purchase, right? Out in the streets, random people. And some people don't wanna deal with that, and that's fair. You know, I stay out of the politics. I stay out of all of that.
I just try to enjoy the vehicle.
In some ways, the Cybertruck story mirrors Tesla's larger
troubles. Tesla sales as a company peaked all the way back in February of 2023, and have been falling for the most part ever since. So a lot of the Tesla story is a story of both overpromising and of some of its early success came coming when it really didn't have competitors. And now it has a
significant number of competitors. Rivian, Ford, GM all have pickups in the North American market, and there are more on the way. In late July, Tesla VP of Engineering Lars Moravi said Tesla might make a smaller pickup truck.
I always talked about making a smaller pickup. And so we've definitely been churning in the design studio about what we
might do. I'm OK with it selling at a low volume, like the Model S and the Model X, because, you know, honestly, the Cybertruck isn't for everyone.
But for a successful smaller truck, Tesla might need to make different choices.
They need to change the styling if they wanna make more sales. Of course, the lower price will help, but I think it's just associated with being weird, with things people don't believe in.
It was always at risk of being one of those vehicles where everyone who wanted one was gonna get it in the next, in the first year, year and a half. And after that, it was a good struggle, but that seems to be what's happened with the Cybertruck so far.
So the question is, if Scott and Curtis each had to buy a new EV pickup truck today, what would it be?
I would definitely do my research. It's not Tesla that I really think people should be looking at. I think it should be any kind of EV. So far, it'd be a cyber truck.
There's a lot of great things that I feel like you get really good value for your money. Like I said, I'm watching this one closely. Like I said, I'm watching this one closely. If I start having any issues, that might be it.
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