Tesla’s “apocalypse-proof” Cybertruck is continuing to experience a near-cataclysmic plunge in sales that seems impossible to recover from.
According to a new analysis of Cox Automotive data by InsideEVs, the unorthodox electric pickup truck suffered the steepest drop in sales by volume of any EV sold in the US in 2025, capping off a disastrous year in which every quarter seemed to bring more record-setting Cybertruck lows.
For context, in 2024 — the first full year of the Cybertruck being on the market — Tesla sold around 39,000 of the notoriously unreliable pickups. That’s a figure that isn’t even in the same planet as CEO Elon Musk’s up-front boast that the automaker would sell up to half a million of these every year.
The year following, any hope that it would be a late-blooming success story went up in smoke like a wrecked EV. A pitiful tally of just 20,200 Cybertrucks were sold in all of 2025, and that shortfall of around 19,000 sales, representing a near 50 percent collapse, is the largest sales drop of an EV on sale in the US, according to InsideEV. (And that’s without getting into how Musk reportedly sold Cybertrucks to his own companies to juice sales figures, so the real picture may be even worse.)
To be fair to the Cybertruck, its first year of sales had some pretty good numbers for what remains a fairly niche market of electric pickups, regardless of the fact that it was still drastically short of Musk’s typically overly-optimistic projections — so it had a higher bar to fall from than most.
Still, the cratering sales didn’t come out of nowhere. Earning a reputation for being unreliable rustbuckets, the Cybertruck has been recalled ten times for issues as serious and embarrassing as its accelerator pedal getting stuck in the down position and losing power while driving. Add to that the recalls for its stainless steel body panels flying off because they were held on with crummy glue — and another glue recall for its lightbar attachments, too — and it becomes unclear whether the trucks which Musk frequently hyped as capable of surviving the post-apocalypse would even be a reliable pick to survive a trip to the Tesla Diner.
It also certainly didn’t help that Musk spent all of last year speed-running becoming one of the most hated men in America with his espousal of far-right politics and his hands-on role in gutting the federal government through his pet project DOGE, tanking Tesla’s reputation with it. And out of all the EV automaker’s cars, the Cybertruck is the one most closely associated with Musk’s personal brand and vision.
Perhaps Musk’s pride in the Cybertruck is why it hasn’t landed on the chopping block yet. As Electrek noted, Ford’s EV pickup, the F-150 Lightning, comfortably outsold the Cybertruck last year — and it got canned for not selling enough.
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