Musk pulls the plug on the Cybertruck after three years and a pile of recalls

The Cybertruck is on death row. Musk announced last week that Tesla will probably end production of its electric pickup next year, closing the book on a model that never came close to the hype that launched it. Seven years from unveiling to the scrap heap is a blink for Tesla, which kept the Model S alive for 14 years and the Model X for 11. The company isn't retiring this truck because it got old. It's retiring it because it became an embarrassment.

Rewind to November 2019, when chief designer Franz von Holzhausen hurled a metal ball at the supposedly shatterproof window and cracked it on live television. Musk's stunned reaction and audible expletive went around the world, and Tesla later sold T-shirts commemorating the flop. The truck finally reached customers in late 2023 after years of delays, giving it only about three years on the market. Cox Automotive estimates put first-year deliveries near 100 units, rising to about 40,000 in 2024, then sliding to roughly 20,000 in 2025 and 12,000 in 2026 — nowhere near Musk's unveiling forecast of 250,000 to 500,000 a year.

The recall list reads like a checklist of things that shouldn't happen to a truck. An ill-chosen lubricant that could jam the accelerator pedal in April 2024. A windshield wiper motor that gave out under the strain of the truck's single giant blade. A bonded rear aluminum panel that peeled off, roof components that came loose, power inverters that cut motor output. By April 2026 the rear brake discs on the rear-wheel-drive version were the problem, with mounting holes that could widen until the discs broke. There were also complaints about blinding lights and a front light bar that detached.

Physically, the Cybertruck is a monster: 568 cm long against 472 cm for a Model 3, 220 cm wide with mirrors, and 2.7 tons in base trim, edging toward three tons in the higher-end all-wheel-drive version. Its angular aluminum body is an acquired taste, and buyers could have any color they wanted as long as it was silver. Pickup owners expect their trucks to take a beating, and U.S. tests — some admittedly extreme — showed the chassis could crack under heavy loads where a conventional Ford would have held up.

Tesla didn't chase this market for nothing. Roughly 3.1 million pickups were sold in the U.S. in 2019, 2.48 million of them full-size. But rivals got there with electric options like the Ford F-150 Lightning and an electric Chevrolet Silverado, and Donald Trump's return to the White House delivered a heavy blow to America's electric pickup demand. Regulators in some markets also questioned whether the Cybertruck met local safety rules, and although it sat on Tesla's Israeli website for years, it was never officially sold there.

So the truck that was meant to reinvent the pickup ends as a footnote. Tesla keeps the factory, the lessons and a very expensive story about a window that shouldn't have broken.