Elon Musk has announced that the distinctive Tesla vehicle will be phased out of production beginning next year.
Cybertruck, we hardly knew ye.
Yes, Elon Musk has announced that Tesla’s Cybertruck will be phased out of production beginning next year.
Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2026
I cannot say that I personally loved the Cybertruck — but my boys (ages seven, five, four, and less than one), did. (I suppose I am making an assumption about the baby’s aesthetic preferences!) While we’re out driving around town in our very, very cool 2019 Toyota Sienna (92,000 miles), it has been a near daily occurrence for one of them — in between requests for “Sharks” (Imagine Dragons) or “Seven Nation Army” (the White Stripes) — to scream out “Cybertruck!” when one of them got in visual contact. For a young, red-blooded American boy, nothing was cooler than Elon’s titanium white whale.
Now, whether that should be read as an enthusiastic endorsement of Elon’s design acumen or a reminder that little boys do not have fully developed prefrontal cortexes, I will leave to your judgment.
Regardless, the Cybertruck, though . . . innovative, was a commercial failure. According to the New York Times’ Dave Phillips, since its debut on “a stage full of smoke and lasers in California in November 2019,” the Tesla pickup truck repeatedly failed to hit sales goals and was becoming something of an albatross to the company.
Reuters reports that, “according to automotive data platform Kelley Blue Book, the company only sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in the US last year, down 48% from 38,965 in 2024. Around the start of production in 2023, Musk had predicted annual sales of 250,000 units.”
Numbers like that will turn any new vehicle into the Edsel. So was the Cybertruck simply ahead of its time, or was it the ugliest car to hit American roads since the Chrysler PT Cruiser?
Maybe a little bit of both.
“Cybertruck, I can say this, we will always remember you,” Mike Ramsey, an auto industry analyst at Gartner Inc., told Phillips. “You were the most distinctive vehicle that nobody asked for.”
The most distinctive vehicle that nobody asked for? Holy smoke — this Mike Ramsey guy takes no prisoners!
But it’s true. When given the choice of producing a vehicle that may have had mass appeal and sales potential — such as a reasonably priced Tesla minivan — Elon went full Elon. Musk is a genius. He’s also an odd duck. And the Cybertruck was the result.
Okay, okay, I’ll leave you with one last quote from Mr. Ramsey, slayer of automotive dreams:
“When you see a Cybertruck, the automatic assumption is that it’s being driven by a guy — and it’s almost always a guy — probably with some kind of goatee, likely compensating for something, so desperate for attention that he will take negative attention,” Mr. Ramsey, the analyst, said. “There’s a word for these kind of guys. You probably can’t print it.”