THE MORNING RANT: Tesla Pulls the Plug on its Failed Cybertruck Because There’s No Mass Market for EV Pickups

Tesla’s electric pickup truck, the Cybertruck, was announced in 2019 with great fanfare. It was touted as the electric “F150-slayer.” Hundreds of thousands of pre-orders were registered. The anti-carbon media swooned (this was before Elon Musk aligned with Republicans and Donald Trump) and legacy auto manufacturers panicked and started developing their own electric pickup trucks.

The Cybertruck finally went on sale in late 2023. It was a flop of legendary proportions. A few days ago, Elon Musk finally announced that he is pulling the plug on Tesla’s electric pickup truck.

“Tesla to pull the plug on Cybertruck after years of poor sales” [Reuters – 11/06/2026]

Elon Musk had predicted sales of 250,000 Cybertrucks per year, and that it would take on the Ford F150 as the dominant domestic pickup truck. Since the Cybertruck went on sale a little over three years ago, only 73,000 have been sold cumulatively. Sales peaked in 2024 at just 39k units, dropping to 20K in 2025, and tracking even lower in 2026.

In October 2026, Tesla sold less than 2,000 Cybertrucks while Ford sold more than 73,000 F150s, none of which were electric. (Ford sold exactly zero units of its recently-discontinued electric F150 Conflagration Lightning pickup in October.)

Musk and Tesla have been wildly successful selling electric vehicles as a daily commuter car to upscale professionals, especially those who own a house in which they can install a home charger. As a percentage of the light vehicle marketplace, it’s not a huge niche, but it still represents a lot of car buyers, and Tesla dominates it. A great many of the people whose station in life once steered them toward BMW, Mercedes, and Volvo are now driving Teslas. But they also tend to have at least one gas-powered vehicle in their garage.

Pickup trucks have a much different driver demographic. The upscale person who wants a pickup might already have a Tesla as his daily driver, so he chooses a gasoline-powered King Ranch F150 (or similar competitor offering) that can serve any pickup purpose, while still conveying affluence. For a person whose only vehicle is a pickup truck, however, the Cybertruck was not an option at all.

Despite the emphatic market rejection of electric pickups over the past few years, including the cancellation of the much-hyped flagships from Tesla and Ford, several more electric pickups have been announced. These include the Scout (owned by Volkswagen,) and the Slate from an investment group involving Jeff Bezos. Ford has also decided to lose several billion dollars more with yet another soon-to-fail electric pickup, the Fathom .

The new electric pickup companies are already hyping their pre-orders, with Scout and Slate both announcing they’ve taken deposits for more than 150k “reservations.” Unfortunately, pre-orders and reservations have a poor track record of converting into actual sales.

In Nov 2019, it was announced that 250,000 people had already put down deposits to pre-order a Cybertruck. As noted above, not even 75,000 Cybertrucks were actually delivered over three years before Tesla pulled the plug.

In 2021, Ford took deposits on almost 200,000 reservations for its F150 Lightning before closing new reservations due to “excessive demand.” Based on media buzz and all those pre-orders, Ford projected annual sales in excess of 150k electric pickup trucks per year. It barely sold 100k in total over the next five years, despite massive discounting to make the glut of unsellable Lightnings go away. The pre-orders had evaporated.

There has not been a commercially successful electric pickup truck because there is neither a market for one, nor a practical need. But like conquistadors in pursuit of the gold of Cibola, mismanaged auto manufacturers keep chasing the imaginary riches from a mass-market electric pickup. They are doomed to failure. If Elon Musk and Tesla couldn’t succeed in this market, it’s because the market doesn’t exist.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments