Tesla will stop building the Cybertruck around the middle of 2027, Elon Musk announced Friday, bringing down the curtain on the angular, stainless-steel pickup that captivated fans, drew ridicule from critics and never came close to the sales targets its creator once promised.
Musk disclosed the decision in a brief post on X, his social media platform, writing that production at Tesla’s Gigafactory outside Austin “will be winding down” around mid-2027. He said the move would free up capacity for the Cybercab, the robotaxi he has placed at the center of Tesla’s autonomous-vehicle ambitions but which has yet to prove itself as a commercial product, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation noted.
Replying to a user on X, Musk described the Cybertruck as the “best vehicle Tesla has ever made” and called its wind-down the “end of an era.”
It was not immediately clear whether production would shift to another site or end altogether. The Austin plant is the only known Tesla facility equipped to make the specialized components the heavy, sharp-edged truck requires.
The announcement capped a punishing week for Musk. His record political spending of nearly half a billion dollars delivered little in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections, with most of the Republican candidates he supported losing their races, the CBC said. His companies were also on pace to shed more than $180 billion in combined market value over the week.
Sales far below Musk’s forecasts
Tesla began delivering the Cybertruck to customers in late 2023. Around the start of production, Musk predicted annual sales of 250,000 units. The reality proved far more modest.
Automotive data platform Kelley Blue Book estimated that Tesla sold just 20,237 Cybertrucks in the U.S. last year, a 48% drop from 38,965 in 2024. Sales through the end of September this year slid another 28%, Kelley Blue Book said.
One of the model’s largest customers last year was another Musk company. SpaceX purchased $131 million worth of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025 at list price, its IPO filing shows.
Former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer said the decision followed simple business logic. “It doesn’t make sense to keep it going when it’s not meeting its targets,” he said. “Every rational auto guy would say the same.” He added: “It will no doubt only be a rounding error on Tesla’s balance sheet, but the statistics speak for themselves.”
The truck has also been dogged by quality problems. Tesla has issued 11 recalls for the Cybertruck since it went on sale, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said. Some required physical repairs, while others were resolved through over-the-air software updates.
A debut that went sideways
The Cybertruck’s troubles began at its very first public appearance. At the 2019 unveiling, a Tesla designer threw a metal ball at the vehicle to show off its supposedly unbreakable windows. The glass cracked. He tried again on a second window, and it cracked too.
Musk never wavered. “I just wanted to make a futuristic battle tank — something that looks like it could come out of ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘Aliens’ or something like that but was also highly functional,” he told Automotive News. He called it “a better sports car than a Porsche 911” and “a better truck than an F-150.”
At the official launch in 2023, Musk positioned the vehicle as a futuristic challenger to pickups from General Motors and Ford, declaring, “finally, the future will look like the future.”
“Few vehicles in history have generated as much attention,” said Armen Hareyan, whose Torque News site covers the auto industry. “The Cybertruck became a cultural symbol – loved, mocked and impossible to ignore.”
Spencer Penn, a former Tesla executive who left before the truck’s launch and now leads software developer LightSource, called it “a really controversial vehicle unveiled by a controversial individual into a market where none of the electric trucks have been able to really capture demand.”
Penn recalled being repelled at first, describing the truck’s look as “madness,” before warming to it and placing a reservation. He never took delivery after Musk’s promised price of under $40,000 failed to materialize and early trucks sold for double that or more. Still, he credited the vehicle as part of the risk-taking culture behind Tesla’s innovations. “Some of these bets work and some of these bets don’t,” he said.
Blocked from overseas markets
Automotive analyst Felipe Munoz argued that the Cybertruck’s struggles reflect a broader problem rather than a unique failure, noting that electric pickups from Ford and other manufacturers have also stumbled in the U.S. “All of them lost the competition because electric pickups aren’t popular in the U.S.,” Munoz said.
Yet the truck’s stainless-steel, sharp-cornered design shut it out of Europe, where EVs enjoy stronger demand, because of rules governing pedestrian safety in collisions. “Anywhere where you have crash regulations that take into account pedestrian impact, that Cybertruck won’t go, can’t go,” Palmer said.
Caught in Musk’s political crossfire
The truck’s fate was also tangled up with its owner’s public image. As Musk aligned himself with right-wing figures, most prominently President Donald Trump, some customers turned away. Tesla owners sold their vehicles or added bumper stickers declaring, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”
Protesters gathered outside showrooms, and the backlash at times turned violent, with Tesla vehicles targeted by Molotov cocktails, charging stations set on fire and dealerships defaced with graffiti. Cybertruck drivers became targets of harassment on the road.
Ross Blankenship, a Cybertruck owner who spoke from behind the wheel as he drove through Sunnyside, Colorado, said the truck reminded him of the “Halo” video games of his childhood. “I had that sort of child in me wanting to be part of something cool that would change the future of automotive,” he said.
Though he shares many of Musk’s political views, he said it pained him to see the truck turned into a symbol. “I never bought it for any other reason than the fascination with the future technology of trucks … so that was a little heartbreaking.”
He said he would buy another without hesitation and called the end of production “a sad moment.”
What the Cybertruck’s exit signals for Tesla
The decision is less about one underperforming model than about where Tesla is placing its future. By explicitly tying the wind-down to Cybercab production, Musk is signaling that the company’s manufacturing capacity is more valuable devoted to an unproven robotaxi than to a vehicle with a known, if shrinking, customer base.
That is a significant wager, and it carries risk: the Cybertruck generated real revenue, while the Cybercab’s commercial viability depends on regulatory approvals and autonomous technology that have not yet been demonstrated at scale.
The timing compounds the pressure. Arriving in the same week as heavy market losses and a disappointing political outcome for Musk, the announcement may be read by investors as a clearing of the decks, an effort to refocus attention on autonomy as Chinese competitors continue to gain ground in conventional electric vehicles.
The SpaceX purchases also raise a question likely to draw scrutiny: how much of the truck’s already weak demand was propped up by a related Musk company. Without that buyer, the sales picture would have looked even thinner.
Finally, the Cybertruck’s arc offers a cautionary lesson for the industry about the limits of spectacle. Few vehicles have commanded such attention, yet attention did not convert into durable demand.
Design choices that made it unforgettable also locked it out of major markets, while its association with Musk’s politics turned a product into a statement many buyers did not want to make. For Tesla, the end of the Cybertruck may ultimately be remembered as the moment the company formally traded the pickup truck dream for a driverless one.
Sources: AP, CBC
