You wouldn’t know it by Tesla’s cultish stock price, but its start to this year has been the absolute worst in its history, and now Elon Musk’s company has capitulated on its new signature model and is accepting trade-ins on the Cybertruck, with one estimate given to a customer showing a 34.6 percent depreciation in the Cybertruck’s value in just a year and 6,000 miles. Fresh off their CEO making two Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration, Tesla’s brand value has plummeted as people are deciding en masse that they don’t want to drive a swasticar around in public. Tesla’s first quarter earnings were catastrophic, as their global sales fell by 13 percent, which was the worst decline in company history. It is basically a two-car company at this point, as Tesla said it only sold 12,881 Cybertrucks, Model S’s and Model X’s combined in the first quarter (missing its estimate by 46 percent). Without its robust carbon credits business that will only shrink as more companies get their own electric vehicle fleets, Tesla lost money last quarter.
The Cybertruck looks like it will live forever in business school case studies as to what happens when you let a 12-year-old boy run a company with no checks on their decision-making. Elon Musk claimed there were over a million reservations for his hideous truck upon its launch, but their recall earlier this year of every Cybertruck made between November 13, 2023 and February 27, 2025 proved that only 46,096 Cybertrucks were sold during that period, falling short of Musk’s claim by 95.4 percent. In other news, he promised full self-driving again for the tenth year in a row (which is already reportedly a mess, and Musk has said that a “painful” and “difficult” hardware update is needed to achieve this annual promise he’s never delivered on). Anyone buying Tesla stock on Musk’s empty promises at this point is just declaring to the world how much they enjoy being scammed.
There are currently about 10,000 Cybertrucks sitting in lots in the US, which amount to about $800 million in unsold inventory. Tesla has reportedly cut its Cybertruck production team by more than half, and it seems unlikely the company will ever sell 250,000 of these trucks, let alone do that in a year which was Musk’s initial promise.
The latest development in the Cybertruck saga feels like a nail in the coffin for this flop. If Tesla is finally capitulating and taking Cybertruck trade-ins, but they are only paying roughly two thirds of what it cost upfront even if there is only 6,000 miles on it, then even Tesla is admitting that these hunks of junk aren’t worth anywhere near what they charge for it. The rule of thumb is that a car depreciates about 20 percent in its first year, and Tesla is nearly doubling that pace on the Cybertruck. One study even found that the Cybertruck is more dangerous than the notorious Ford Pinto, as it is 17 times more likely to have a fire fatality than the last car that was the previous avatar for corporate greed and indifference to putting their customers in danger. I can’t imagine why people don’t want to buy this $100,000 truck.
Not only is the Cybertruck dangerous to people driving it, but according to this Edmunds test, it can be totaled by a “small sedan.” Their Cybertruck was parked on the side of the road, and it was slammed into by a sedan from behind. Edmunds began the process to try to get it fixed, and they found that there were only four collision repair centers that could work on Cybertrucks in all of southern California, with just two within 50 miles of their base in Los Angeles. The first shop they visited quoted them one month just for an estimate and another five months for repairs. Fixing a Cybertruck is not simple due to many unique factors to its design, and they were quoted $41,295 for parts and repairs plus $16,584 for labor for a total of $57,879 to fix their $100,000 car that can be traded in today for about $65,000. They wound up selling it for $8,000 to a company that auctions off damaged vehicles. What a deal!
The Cybertruck is shaping up to be a boondoggle of world historic proportions, and the only people who want to buy them anymore seem to be confined to Elon Musk’s mentions. No wonder Musk has pivoted to talking about Tesla’s Optimus robot, as the numbers for Tesla are so catastrophic that even his desiccated brain can see it’s not a car company anymore. It’s a carbon credits company being dragged down by one of the dumbest products in the history of corporate America.
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