If Tesla’s April 22 earnings report made anything clear, it’s that Cybertruck sales are in the crapper. Less than two years after the highly anticipated truck arrived, its 1,000,000+ reservations have been run through with fewer than 50,000 actual deliveries, and now the truck is piling up on Tesla dealer lots. Cox Automotive estimates that just 6,406 Cybertrucks were sold in the first quarter of 2025. Because of that, Tesla has quietly been repositioning the Cybertruck and what it stands for. It hasn’t worked, but it’s certainly attempting to make its stainless steel pile of horse excrement more of an everyman’s vehicle.
Business Insider noticed a strange trend in Cybertruck marketing. Over the past few months, it has tried to cultivate a more working man’s aesthetic for the truck. The Austin, Texas-based automaker has changed its website, dropping out-of-this-world aesthetics for pictures that show the Cybertruck hauling work equipment and towing an Airstream trailer. A sales worker at Tesla said the company needs it to appeal to traditional truck buyers as it becomes harder and harder to get off sales lots.
Changing the Cybertruck’s image
Here’s what sales workers told Business Insider:
“Pitching it to truck people is more about the functionality,” said one salesperson who works in the South. “They want to know how much it can tow, how much can fit in the truck bed.”
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Two Tesla sales workers told Business Insider that they’ve seen a push to market the vehicle more toward the typical truck buyer since late last year. The sales worker who works in a Southern state said the truck’s flashy exterior has made it difficult to find people willing to buy it.
“Most of the test drivers aren’t real truck buyers,” they said. “It’s more of a novelty thing.”
Earlier this month, Tesla’s website still had renderings of the Cybertruck in a bizarre Mars-like atmosphere and ad copy that said it was “built for any planet” with a “cabin as quiet as outer space,” according to BI. Well, that’s all gone now. Sometimes in the middle of this month, Tesla redesigned the Cybertruck’s landing page for the first time since its release. The futuristic, outer space aesthetics have been replaced by renderings of construction workers and family outings.
Making the unappealing appealing
From the looks of it, Tesla has completely aped some of the pictures Ford has on its F-150 page, and it’s looking to take a piece of the F-150 Lightning’s pie with a cheaper, stripped-out model, according to BI:
The lead image for both truck’s webpages featured Airstream trailers, and both included images of truck beds filled with wire.
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The cheaper, scaled-down version of the Tesla truck, which launched in April, is also similar in price, range, and towing capacity to Ford’s electric F-150.
Despite claims that the Cybertruck had a “bulletproof” exterior, Tesla has struggled to market the truck as being capable at a worksite and durable. The fact its been — rightfully — clowned online hasn’t helped, either. Even though the typical truck owner doesn’t work on a farm or construction site, they often want to cosplay as someone who does, and that’s not what the Cybertruck has been offering.
This repositioning can be clearly seen as an appeal to more conservative truck buyers — folks Tesla wasn’t really targeting before CEO Elon Musk decided to dive headfirst into politics. It remains to be seen if this strategy will work, and how many of those people have around $100,000 to spend on a truck that isn’t very good at doing truck things.
