These are dark times for Elon Musk's much-vaunted Tesla Cybertruck. Musk once claimed it might sell 250,000 per year, despite its steep sticker price. So far in 2025, he's on track to sell less than half as many as he did in 2024.
Source: Forbes
Tesla’s stock has slid steadily this year, hurt by declining sales and widespread protests over CEO Elon Musk’s leadership of President Trump’s DOGE initiative, which is making haphazard staffing and budget cuts to federal agencies. The electric vehicle maker’s sharp-edged Cybertruck is also sliding, posting sharply lower sales in the year’s first quarter.
The Austin-based company delivered just 6,406 Cybertrucks this year through March, according to Cox Automotive. That’s more than double its volume in the year-earlier period, when it was slowly starting to make the hard-to-build model. But the quarterly figure was less than half of what it sold in either the third or fourth quarter of 2024–14,416 and 12,991 units, respectively–as its production ramped up.
Musk had previously forecast that annual sales of the electric pickup might average 250,000 a year, though it delivered only about 39,000 last year. A combination of multiple recalls–including one last month to fix stainless steel body panels that fell off due to faulty glue–and the likelihood of sharply higher costs for steel, aluminum and imported auto parts due to Trump’s tariffs, suggest Tesla will struggle to boost sales of a model that can sell for about $100,000. Weak demand has also led to an inventory of about 2,400 unsold new Cybertrucks, according to auto news site Jalopnik.
