Collin Woodard writing for Jalopnik:
The incredible news just keeps coming after Tuesday's huge victory for everyone not named Elon Musk. After a little more than three years blighting our roads, filling divorce court parking lots, and getting recalled for all of its parts falling off, the Tesla Cybertruck is dead. Never trust Elon Musk further than you can throw him, but early Friday morning, Tesla's CEO tweeted that the company will wind down production of the Cybertruck before finally killing it once and for all at some point next year.
Posting at 12:30 a.m. Texas Freedom Time, a very normal time that every major CEO is awake and making important business announcements, Musk tweeted, "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." So there's no word twisting or reading between the lines required. Tesla's Texas Gigafactory will cease production of the Cybertruck next year, and that's the only place Tesla builds the Cybertruck.
That's basically the gist of the announcement. Tesla will continue to make cars for a while, but their current product line is very small and very old. And even if the Roadster makes it into production, something I'm inclined to bet against for various reasons, it would still be in the extremely high-end sports car market.
A trillion-dollar-plus valuation for any car company is silly, but a trillion-dollar valuation for a niche car company, with no mass-market vehicles in the pipeline, is insane. Excluding shady deals where Musk finds a way to funnel SpaceX money into Tesla (something that's about to get considerably more difficult and risky now that Elizabeth Warren is about to be let off the leash), the only profits Tesla is likely to see in the foreseeable future will come from two models dating back to 2017 and 2020, respectively. But Musk was never in the product business. He was in the next-big-thing business, and he has long since reached the point where he has no ideas for real, viable products that could justify the insane market cap of his company.
Here are some reactions, starting with the guy who wrote the definitive book on the company.
The Cybertruck is dying because it sucks and people hate it, not because Tesla needs the production capacity for Cybercab Tesla claims to already have 125k units/year of installed Cybercab capacity, and has maybe a few hundred on the road, and they crash at rates that make scale a terrible idea
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) November 6, 2026 at 5:23 AM
[image or embed]
The cybertruck was a total disaster but without it we would never have had this one perfect quote. www.wired.com/story/owning...
— Brian Barrett (@brbarrett.bsky.social) November 6, 2026 at 8:20 AM
[image or embed]
Cyberpunk country is about how the singer's girlfriend broke down and his truck ran away
— Zuthal (@zuthal.bsky.social) November 7, 2026 at 12:40 AM
RIP Cybertruck. You are with the angles now.
— Dr Dean Burnett (@drdeanburnett.bsky.social) November 6, 2026 at 3:18 PM
[image or embed]
No comments:
Post a Comment