By Christopher Bonanos
The Tesla Cybertruck—a product that exists at the curious intersection of low-emissions global responsibility and red-pilled macho Trumpism—is officially coming to an end. Elon Musk has announced that production of the polarizing electric vehicle will wind down around the middle of next year, clearing assembly lines to make way for the future Cybercab, a putatively autonomous vehicle designed with a much more conventional shape.
Announced with a prototype unveiled to the public in 2019, the truck finally became available for the 2023 model year. That timeline roughly parallels Musk’s dramatic public-image collapse, a period during which he shifted in the public consciousness from a huckster with genuinely big ideas who is nonetheless annoying to a figure viewed by critics as a danger to the republic.
Everything about the Cybertruck was intentionally designed to provoke a reaction. There was its knife-edged form, of course, an origami prism often compared to a child’s drawing of a car. It was remarkably large and very heavy, standing as one of the biggest sport utility vehicles you could possibly buy, and it made a correspondingly huge statement every time it rolled onto public roads. The stark stainless-steel exterior was undeniably eye-catching, but its aggressive, sharp edges immediately put pedestrians at safety risk. Those very design choices barred it from being sold in Europe, a massive automotive market that has notably lost enthusiasm for Tesla vehicles over the past couple of years.
Furthermore, the truck fell short when it came to safety devices that have become standard on virtually all other modern cars. For instance, it famously lacked the standard sensor designed to keep a motorized trunk lid or "frunk" from closing on a user’s fingers. In the distinct philosophy of Musk’s corporate world, such omissions were framed not as markers of dodgy or dangerous design, but rather as user error. In the actual world, however, great design is widely understood to conform to human behavior as it naturally happens, rather than demanding that everyday people remain constantly on high alert to avoid injuring themselves on the machines they operate.
And let’s face it: like much in the broader political and cultural sphere associated with modern conservatism, its styling was a smirking, antagonistic answer to an actual, reasonable point of debate. Most modern automobiles are shaped primarily by aerodynamics, and the wind prescribes a similar teardrop shape to almost every carmaker on earth. It is entirely understandable for buyers to crave something genuinely different, an impulse that sometimes leads automotive designers toward stunning beauty and other times gives the world missteps like the Pontiac Aztek.
What buyers perhaps did not want, however, was something that felt like the spawn of a DeLorean—which was also notoriously heavy, also stainless-steel, and also produced by a controversial figure—mated with a first-generation stealth fighter, or perhaps a utilitarian plywood shipping crate. To quote Douglas Adams from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, "Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking." Perhaps with the Cybertruck, it was more like six out of ten.
The vehicle’s aesthetic and cultural footprint feels a bit like the grandiose Trump ballroom project, which confronts a genuine, significant problem—the White House is simply too small to serve the contemporary demands of the executive branch—and solves it not with careful analysis and architectural care, but with a deeply flawed behemoth. It is a space that is gleaming and shiny, yet built on controversy and paid for in contentious funds.
Tesla has never officially released precise sales figures for the Cybertruck, but the prominent electric-vehicle tracking site Electrek estimates that production peaked at about 30,000 units per year. That figure represents a bit over 10 percent of the initial 250,000 vehicles that the company originally projected, beginning decently upon release before fading remarkably fast. By way of direct comparison, about 1.5 million Tesla Model 3 cars were sold globally in 2025 alone.
Instead of becoming a high-volume commercial titan, the Cybertruck ended up functioning, likely unintentionally, as a mobile billboard not only for Tesla itself, but for a wide array of other companies. Its completely flat, unadorned stainless-steel surfaces proved to be an ideal canvas for advertising wraps teasing everything from commercial pressure washing services to snoring therapy clinics. It may not have been originally designed to serve as a traditional halo car in the vein of the Chevrolet Corvette—a model typically produced in small numbers to maintain brand enthusiasm and demonstrate technical prowess while more prosaic vehicles bring in the bulk of the corporate revenue—but it ended up occupying that exact niche.
Indeed, if you think of the Cybertruck through that specific lens, and only that lens, it was an undeniable success. There are approximately 90 million cars sold worldwide each year, and this one tiny, unusual production line probably generated as much media attention, digital chatter, and cultural discourse as all the rest of the global automotive industry combined. Beginning with its infamous introduction event—at which the nearly unbreakable armored windows most definitely got smashed on live stage—it drew attention like nothing else in recent corporate history.
In New York City, a punishing landscape of hair-thin driving maneuvers and high-stakes parking wars, the sheer scale of the vehicle alone presented a moving spectacle or a rolling target. If you creatively relabel Tesla’s substantial financial losses on the Cybertruck—however many millions or billions they ultimately amounted to—and classify the entire enterprise as an aggressive marketing expense rather than a traditional purchasable consumer vehicle, it was a smash hit. Furthermore, Tesla’s lead engineer has noted that the troubled program also yielded some underlying manufacturing technology from which future company designs will eventually borrow.
Perhaps another historical comparison is in order to truly contextualize the rise and fall of the vehicle. The most legendary dud in automotive history remains the Ford Motor Corporation’s infamous Edsel. It constituted not just a single car model, but an entire new corporate subdivision, introduced in the fall of 1957 with a sprawling line of seven distinct models spanning four sedan styles and three station wagons. It, too, was optimistically projected to sell 200,000 cars a year.
Like the Cybertruck, the Edsel was explicitly intended to look sharply different from everything else on the road, particularly from the front fascia. Its designers, looking at the horizontal grilles featured on every other automobile on the road, famously asked, "How about we make it vertical instead?"
They ended up with an awkward, controversial shape that was variously likened by the public to a horse collar, a pickle, a lemon, or something far more crudely anatomical. The Edsel line—and perhaps this is starting to sound familiar—staggered along for two years and change, its sales figures steadily falling as it gained a pervasive loser reputation and its range of models was gradually scaled back. The total production tally had reached about 120,000 vehicles when Ford finally abandoned ship and pulled the plug at the end of 1959.
Ever since, the name "Edsel" has remained universal shorthand for a catastrophic commercial flop. Given recent political and cultural alignments, despite Musk’s massive, headline-making financial gambles to sway elections, one might reasonably propose a modernized, 21st-century equivalent phrase for a high-profile disaster: "Hoo boy, that was a real Cybertruck."
