Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets

It's not every quarter, but it's steady and that spells absolute disaster for US car manufacturers:

https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/q3-2026-ev-sales-report-...

US car companies have been protected and bailed out too many times and are now not only completely uncompetitive on the global market, but set up to be completely demolished as EVs take over.

Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency mean that either investors are going to pay a massive price, or US consumers are going to pay a massive price. If we keep on pushing up consumer costs by propping up bad manufacturers with protectionism and bail outs, the US's entire economy is drug down by that.

There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.

I hadn't followed just how bad US manufacturers were failing at EVs the past two years, what with all the other disasters unfolding, thanks for the wake up call. Two years of wasted time, of the US falling even farther behind... such a massive fail and yet not the most massive.

Not so in Europe, where the top 10 EVs sold in 2025 [1] has not a single Chinese car.

[1] https://autorai.nl/tesla-van-de-troon-gestoten-als-populairs...

That EV market share direction in the US, though .. really bad compared to non-petrostates (except Norway)

Cybertruck was a mistake but rest of the business is printing cash hand over fist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

Robotaxi is live in some markets. I've used it twice here in Houston. Works quite well.

I realize that some of it is just a cult of personality, and that part will be unusually sticky because of things like cognitive dissonance. But that can’t be all of it. My next best guess is a bunch of it is a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky, but keep it to themselves because it’s not their money they’re putting on the line and taking a contrarian position would risk angering a presumably vocal subset of clients of unknown size. Which isn’t a great way to make yourself popular with your boss.

They are running a fleet of taxis around the Bay Area. It's kind of scary because they aren't that safe, given the lack of LIDAR. But they are doing it anyway.

But if Optimus ends up with a HW3 problem (current manufactured Optimus bots aren't autonomus yet because the software isn't finished) he'll have a pile of Cybertrucks and early-model Optimus units rotting in a field.

Personally, I just don't see it. If he merges Tesla and SpaceX it won't really be about cars or vehicle autonomy.

Their current stock valuation can't ride this uncertainty forever. At some point he has to have new products that work, no caveats.

Probably will get acquired by SpaceX to hide the poor financials

They should just be the Toyota of EVs -- mass produce quality vehicles people want to drive -- instead he's trying to be Tony Stark and keep pumping it as a meme stock.

Tesla remains excellent at engineering and manufacturing. They need not seek the exotic.

He's a liability to that company, not an asset, at this point. And his name has become a brand liability.

A bad design that costs too much, the only people who bought these were ideologues committed to the vision of a man responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths, the gutting of the American state, and some of the most destructive politics of hate in living memory.

I celebrate their passing.

I'm not an Elon fan in the least, but it does feel like most cars are designed by committee and converge on a few well-defined shapes and segments. And they sell a ton of them, so sure, of course.

But there's certainly some charm when you see a weirdmobile that doesn't conform and somehow got by the bean counters and into existence. The MINI Clubvan, for people who needed something compact and cargo-focused. The Cadillac CTS-V wagon, for people who wanted to haul ass ... and the family. The Toyota MR2, which felt like Toyota engineers decided "let's take these Corolla parts and build them in the shape of a Ferrari".

With the high costs of certifying a new car for sale it seems like we see fewer and fewer of these oddballs, and that feels like a shame.

So even though I'd never personally consider driving a poorly rendered dumpster from a 1980s video game, perhaps the world is a bit more interesting due to its existence.

I suppose, if you don't really like cars much, this was interesting. No one debates the ability for EVs to have absurd 0-60, 0-100 times, but there's almost no overlap between why you'd buy a Cybertruck versus a 911 besides status symbol, which gets back to... maybe it's neat, if you don't really care about cars much.

Those cars did have uses, but those uses revolved around drawing attention ( think advertising ). Whenever I saw one in my neck of the woods, they were selling something.

The US style pickup is pretty rare. There are some Ford Ranger/Raptors, which look comically large but are apparently smaller than the common F150 (??). People who need a truck bed get a Ford Transit or similar with the bed variant.

Agricultural use cases are handled with actual tractors (who can use the cheaper "red" diesel!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_T90 (EV version)

Even gasoline trucks are stupid no low end torque, you need to rev it. I had a 6 cylinder Cummins diesel and at 500rpm idle on a hill it could move the 10,000 pound truck up the hill.

By the time of its delayed release, Musk had become deeply unpopular with many of that original coalition of fans and buyers, the truck was more expensive than originally promised, his new ‘base’ probably couldn’t afford to buy many of them, and it was structurally a fairly normal car underneath the steel panels. It also suffered plenty of embarrassing issues, which people were of course gleeful to publicise.

It could have been a cool funky status symbol, but Musk screwed it all up.

To me, it’s more like answering a complaint about the blandness of pop music with electric bagpipes and nails on chalkboard: if you can’t be different and good, maybe don’t try so hard to be different.

The end result is a vehicle with all of the costs of a normal unibody design plus the costs of dealing with cutting, folding, and attaching thick sheets of stainless steel.

It never delivered the promised $40k starting price or the promised 500 mile top spec range either.

Also painting IN THE FACTORY isn't expensive. Re-painting the part on repair is because of all of the prep work required (take apart, clean, color match etc).

Might be break-even, but I doubt it would be cheaper

"It will be cheaper" is a perspective of ignorant "smart guy" that thinks because he got successful in one thing that they can weight in on industry processes they have no idea about

A press brake is generic and cheap. Molds for presses are cheap if the cost can be spread over many vehicles, but are expensive for low volume manufacturing.

Paint shops are similar. They're not expensive if you're running a lot of cars in the same color through it, but at low volumes with custom colors they are fabulously expensive.

Of course the final production Cybertruck didn't use the exoskeleton design so it was the worst of both worlds, but it does feel like the original design wasn't expected to sell well and was designed for low volume manufacturing.

I live in the UK so I'll likely never be able to get one, but I'd love a car I can just buy new panels for and wrap them with minimal tools.

I don't know any item where the unpainted stainless steel version is cheaper than the painted steel version, thinking about kitchen appliances for instance. For cars, the most famous car with a stainless steel body is the DeLorean DMC-12, which was notoriously expensive, even without the time circuits.

Elon talks about a lot of things. Consider if you might be part of the media ecosystem that enables that strategy.

It turns out that sitting in your office wearing an adult nappy and snorting cat sedative until your bladder no longer functions might give you a lot of quite "creative" thinking, but it doesn't make you an engineer.

At some point Elon has to climb out of the K-hole and realise that these things are better left to proper engineers.

It's also an ugly-ass car. If it had turned out to be super-reliable and cheap and "hackable" that would make up for it, even earn its strange look a cult following, but no it just ended up as an overpriced weird ugly-ass car.

Had the Cybertruck brought forward the manufacturing innovations that were alleged to cause the weirdness in its design, I could draw the comparison with the Multipla, but as it stands, it has all the visual appeal of one, with none of the reasons for it. Can't comment on the Pontiac, have never seen one outside Breaking Bad.

There's a shit ton of software between the gas pedal and the machinery of just about every car on the road today whether that be an ICE, hybrid, or EV. We're a long ways away from the go-go pedal directly pulling a cable opening the throttle plate.

This is specifically about the Tesla Cybertruck, which has been shown to be fairly shoddy in construction AND is tied to a very, very divisive figure.

The only guaranteed way to lose is if you stop swinging. And Tesla has stopped swinging. They haven't revealed a mass market consumer vehicle since 2019.

There is some incredible technology in the Cybercab that allows them to be built cheaply in high volume. Instead Ford looks like they are going to be the first Western consumer vehicle out of the gate with the unboxed production method with their Ford Fathom. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese are ahead here too.

The 3/Y and the screens had lots of design and product innovations. Iterating on those lines would’ve been quite nice.

To anyone who is/was a crusader against cancel culture, recognize the source of it. Become a crusader against Citizen's United instead. It would be a much more productive coalition.

(btw dope earthbound reference in your username if that's what it is)

You are deeply, utterly misinformed and loudly ignorant.

Ukraine uses StarShield, which is owned/operated by the USGov. Starlink is a civilian service not for military use.

If you can't be bothered to perform a simple google search to educate yourself about basic matters such as this in a few seconds, why should anyone listen to any of your other (ridiculous) points?

A Tacoma is basically the US model of the Hilux.

Those people are just as loud as others, but never actually buy, because a $40k CyberTruck never existed.

Tesla took over 2 million preorders for the Cybertruck before they closed the program due to high demand.

Btw have you seen the roadster??

Literally nothing Tesla promised is coming true.

And Model 3 and Y have always been 95%+ of the cars Tesla delivered.

> To me trucks are the most useless type of vehicle apart from niche utilitarian cases in farming or construction. Super heavy, gas guzzling, open bed, compromised handling, pedestrian crushing death machine. If you want big family hauler, grocery getter: mini-vans, wagons.

Minivans and trucks get similar fuel mileage. For the average family there are not enough kids to need a minivan.

> If you are in trades: van, box truck or flatbed box truck (where bed is useful shape and size, and all sides can be removed if needed).

Obviously you are not in the trades and don't know anyone in them. I've heard plenty of people in the trades debate the merits of truck vs van. They are compromises and there is no clear winner.

> you don't need 3 tonne vehicle with bajillion horsepower as a daily, because you may need to pull a trailer with your inflatable dinghy once in a two years.

If I need to tow something even once every two years then I need to own a truck. I've tried to rent a truck to tow something - turns out most rental contracts don't allow towing. There are exceptions, but the cost is so high, and finding a place to rent is so inconvenient that I will just own my own truck instead - it is worth it.

This anecdote might indicate why: We recently had a bunch of work done on our house. The siding crew had a pickup truck, and every morning the very first thing they did was unload the entire contents of the truck into our back yard. The plumbers and electricians would just get the stuff they were actually using and then lock the van.

> Zero-emission trucks over 12 t ·

(Cybertruck is still in the <3.5t class afaik)

> Zero-emission Class 7–8 trucks

These seem to be the classical cargo carrying trucks, not the pickup trucks.

No added information, with a thread full of ad hominem attacks

(The history of John DeLorean is quite the read!)

There was nothing "new" in cybertruck. Delorean had bare metal panels! It wasn't a good truck, vehicle, EV, anything. It was Elon's crayon drawing turned car. That's not "innovation" we should applaud