If you want to make sure everyone immediately knows not to hang out with you, there’s no better truck to buy than the Tesla Cybertruck. If you want something that does regular truck stuff, though, you probably want to look elsewhere. Since the Cybertruck went on sale, it’s been recalled eight times, for everything from body panels that fly off to unintended acceleration, and it also infamously may not survive a car wash. But how did we get from Tesla promising a go-anywhere, conquer-any-terrain truck to the current disaster? According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s because the initial design was scrapped, and the final design was rushed.
It would have probably helped if there had been a clear, final design brief that outlined specific goals for engineers to achieve, but instead, Musk preferred to randomly tweet about new features the Cybertruck would have. The engineering team reportedly took those tweets seriously and attempted to deliver everything Musk promised online, including the part where he claimed it would be amphibious, but when that ended up being too hard, the engineers were forced to give up and start over in an attempt to deliver something Cybertruck-shaped:
Former employees said they took Musk’s social posts as orders, but the engineering proved difficult. By 2022, it was clear internally that Cybertruck wouldn’t be able to meet all Musk’s criteria, so engineers scrapped an early design and started over—developing a smaller, landlocked version of the truck, the people said.
So much for the supposed late-2021 production start that we were initially promised.
Unintended acceleration recall
With only about a year and a half to reportedly develop and test the production version of the Cybertruck, it isn’t exactly surprising that problems soon appeared. But while Tesla blamed the truck’s unintended acceleration issue on “[a]n unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal,” one source told the WSJ the company already knew it was an issue and simply didn’t fix it before starting production:
An internal investigation found the issue was the result of an “unapproved change,” in which Tesla employees used soap as a lubricant to attach the pad, according to the recall notice. Inside Tesla, the accelerator pad had been a known issue starting with the prototype, according to an employee who worked on the part. The manufacturing team also identified the part as problematic, this person said.
The windshield and its massive single wiper also quickly caused problems, as the glass would sometimes show up from the supplier already cracked or crack during handling at the factory. As for the giant windshield wiper, it also proved to be too big for the motor they used, leading to another recall. According to the WSJ, the problem with the wiper was already a known issue, but production began before they fixed it, even though that wasn’t supposed to happen:
The wiper had been flagged nearly a year before, two people who worked on the Cybertruck said. It was one of the first issues identified on the vehicles, at which point it was classified as a “gating issue,” which meant that it needed to be resolved before production could move forward.
Sales flop
Had the Tesla Cybertruck been a huge hit, you could have perhaps made the argument that Musk’s decision to put it into production before all the problems had been fixed was at least a good business decision. The truck reportedly had more than a million pre-orders, and with other electric trucks already on sale, maybe risking customers’ lives with a little unintended acceleration would have been worth the risk of a lawsuit.Â
Except the actual orders never actually appeared. The company just couldn’t convert pre-orders into actual orders, and when Tesla issued its eighth recall for the Cybertruck, it had been on sale for more than a year, but Tesla had only sold about 46,000 of them. Maybe Tesla shouldn’t have set up the production line to allegedly produce 250,000 Cybertrucks per year, or perhaps it should have actually fixed all the problems it knew already existed. Regardless, even with big discounts, unsold Cybertrucks quickly began piling up, forcing Tesla to find places to store its unwanted inventory.
Then again, the biggest issue with Cybertruck sales probably wasn’t the quality of the truck itself. It was the part where Musk decided to jump into politics, spouting toxic, ultra-far-right views that killed a whole lot of people’s interest in Tesla as a brand. Musk’s alliance with Republicans also appears to have blown up in his face recently, although Musk could still find a way to worm his way back into Trump’s good graces. You never know. Trump could eventually need someone to help ensure more babies get HIV.
