Elon’s Edsel is no more. Last night Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed on social media that his car company is calling time on its failed attempt to wrest control of the American pickup truck market. The Cybertruck will cease production in the middle of 2027, liberating that space in Tesla’s cavernous factory for other uses-more Cybercabs, most likely.
Musk first revealed the Cybertruck in late 2019, back when Tesla was still trading at a theoretically understandable price-to-earning ratio. The pickup’s unusual angular shape owed more to low-res video game models than any concessions to practicality. At the time Musk made fanciful claims that the truck would use a stainless steel monocoque construction, telling his audience that “the body and bed don’t do anything useful” on a normal truck. While some race cars use carbon-fiber monocoques for strength and lightness, making a pickup truck with a stainless steel monocoque chassis would only make sense if someone had an awful lot of stainless steel lying around and needed something to do with it all.
The truck was supposed to go on sale for less than $40,000, and Tesla made its usual stratospheric sales predictions that (had they been accurate) the bare metal EVs would be as ubiquitous as the Model 3 and Y.
