SpaceX & xAI bail out lagging Cybertruck orders
Through the first nine months of 2025, Tesla has sold just 16,097 Cybertrucks, a steep 38 per cent decline compared with the same January to September period in 2024. The trend has been ongoing all year now, as Tesla delivered 6,406 Cybertrucks in the first quarter, which went down to 4,306 in the second quarter. Deliveries climbed slightly to 5,385 in the third quarter, but this is also connected to the expiration of the federal EV credit.
For most car manufacturers, this would be absolutely very bad news; however, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk also happens to run two other large companies, SpaceX and xAI. Both of these companies have started taking deliveries of hundreds of Cybertrucks.
From its launch in 2023, the Cybertruck has been a divisive vehicle. At the time, Tesla was planning to build around 375,000 units of the electric pickup truck per year, but now it is looking at probably finishing the year with about 20,000 deliveries, according to Carscoops, which is already well below the 50,000 delivered last year. Neither figure is anywhere near the number of vehicles that Tesla would have been envisioning at launch, either.
Recently, the Cybertruck also gained attention after a series of accidents showed that the door handle on Teslas can deactivate in case of a crash, and an NHTSA investigation was launched in the USA. In China, the technology similarly became the subject of public discussion. In addition, Tesla also took out the more affordable, entry-level variant from the lineup in September, only five months after being launched. European markets have not been very open to the massive vehicles from the USA, either.
Not all reactions to the new Cybertruck deployment were negative, however, as Tesla engineer Wes Morrill, who led the development of the Cybertruck, is delighted to see his creation being used by Elon Musk’s other companies: “Love to see the ICE support fleets from Tesla and SpaceX get replaced with Cybertruck. When we were engineering it, this was always part of the dream. Never imagined how hard the fleet photos at starbase would go. Looking forward to more of this,” he wrote on social media.
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