The Tesla Cybertruck, the polygonal pickup that promised to reinvent the automobile and transport astronauts across Mars, was declared dead today. Its father, one Elon Musk, announced the news on X: “Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas [the only factory that makes it] around the middle of next year.”
The Cybertruck was born in Los Angeles on November 21, 2019, announcing a $39,900 price tag and promising 2021 delivery. Despite two of its allegedly unbreakable glass windows shattering during its first public appearance, the vehicle’s looks convinced kids, fanboys, and every nouveau riche who loves faux marble kitchen tops to put down a deposit. For its dedicated audience, this stainless steel doorstop was good car design.
Cybertruck spent its early life dazed and confused on a factory floor while Tesla designers tried to figure out how to actually make it into a production model. As industry designers said back in January 2023, its polygonal body could never be mass-produced in a reliable way. The design demanded sub-10-micron, Lego-like precision, which is next to impossible to accomplish in any current car factory.
At one point, Tesla didn’t care about accuracy anymore, and the Cybertruck was finally declared good-enough-I-guess to go to school with the rest of the Tesla kids. It reached the hands of those who deserved to suffer its countless defects and bratty ways in late 2023, with a $60,990 price tag and visibly misaligned doors.
As predicted, each unit was slightly different from the next. Musk himself confessed the diagnosis in a leaked internal email: “Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.”
Cybertruck suffered multiple ailments throughout its short life. Chronic panel misalignment, recurring trim detachment, accelerator pedals prone to jamming, frunks capable of amputating fingers, windshields defeated by hail, borderline autopilot disorder, dead-on-arrival syndrome, and a systemic rust condition on its allegedly stainless steel body.
Veteran car designer Adrian Clarke assessed its many disorders in words that will outlive the car’s warranty: “The Cybertruck is a low-polygon joke that only exists in the fever dreams of Tesla fans that stands high on the smell of Elon Musk’s flatulences.”
The obituary and the jokes wrote themselves with every recall. There was the locking differential feature perpetually “Coming Soon” and never delivered. The over-the-air recall over warning-light font size. The 3,878-unit recall for soap-lubricated accelerator pedals. The March 2025 recall of 46,096 trucks whose trim panels detached at highway speed. The glued-on light bars. The May 2026 recall of 173 vehicles whose wheels could, as it is technically known in the automobile industry, fall off.
The Cybertruck also suffered from increasing social distancing as it showed its many failings. Its initial popularity was replaced by indifference, then disdain, then active hate. From a peak of 5,175 units in July 2024, registrations spiraled to 2,000 by April 2025. They were roughly 20,237 for the full year, and that’s counting iffy “sales” made to Musk’s other company.
That was barely 8% of the 250,000 annual sales Musk had promised. In the end, Tesla tried to discount the vehicle, but nobody really wanted it anymore and Musk finally admitted defeat.
The Cybertruck did manage to achieve one record during its short life: It saw the steepest EV sales decline in America, ever.
The Cybertruck is survived by roughly 40,000 confused owners, one jumping Roadster vaporware sibling, and a father desperately looking for a new fantasy to convince the stock market to keep financing his next questionable idea.
Cybertruck’s funeral service will be held at the Hyperloop parking cemetery. Someday. I guess.