Elon Musk now claims Cybertruck orders “far exceed” Tesla’s production rate, and that the truck isn’t being killed because it’s unprofitable. It’s his second explanation in three days for ending the pickup.
The problem is that Tesla’s own numbers say the opposite. The Cybertruck line has been running at roughly a quarter of its installed capacity, and Tesla spent all of 2026 discounting, re-trimming, and repricing the truck to find buyers.
Here’s what Musk posted on X overnight:
“The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate. We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people. This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.”
He was quote-tweeting a Tesla fan telling people to “get it while you can.” So yes, this is also a sales pitch.
On Friday, Musk announced Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas around mid-2027 “to make room for increased Cybercab production.” That was the first story. Now it’s about “complexity” and “opportunity cost.” Let’s go through it.
“Order rate far exceeds our production rate”
Tesla controls its production rate. That’s the flaw in this claim.
Tesla built the Cybertruck supply chain for 250,000 units a year, and its latest shareholder letter still lists more than 125,000 units of installed capacity. In Q3 2026, it delivered 8,295 “Other Models.” With Model S and Model X out of production, we estimated 7,000 to 8,000 of those were Cybertrucks. That’s a 30,000-a-year pace, down 48% year-over-year in that category.
If orders had been outrunning production at any point this year, Tesla had about 95,000 units of idle annual capacity sitting right there. It didn’t use it.
And companies with a backlog don’t behave like Tesla did. In February, it offered a dual-motor Cybertruck at $59,990 for “only the next 10 days.” It pulled a single-motor RWD version after just 173 sales. It leaned on Musk’s own companies too: SpaceX bought 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025, about 19% of US registrations that quarter once you add his other firms.
Cox Automotive estimates US Cybertruck sales fell from 14,416 in Q3 2024 to 3,519 in Q1 2026 and 3,744 in Q2. It’s a demand problem everyone could see.
So if orders spiked this weekend, there’s an obvious reason: Musk told the world on Friday that the truck is going away. A last-call rush on a discontinued vehicle is not proof that it was selling.
“Will have to return deposits for a lot of people”
Tesla has been sitting on Cybertruck deposits it was never going to fill for years.
Musk touted more than a million reservations, and crowdsourced tallies put the list near 2 million by 2023. Its best US quarter, by Cox Automotive’s estimate, was 14,416 trucks. The reservation book was a vanity number, not an order book.
Two weeks ago, Tesla cancelled the Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand and refunded deposits people had paid in 2019. Returning deposits is something Tesla was already doing because it couldn’t sell the truck in those markets, not because it was swamped.
“Not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable”
This one is a straw man. Our reporting, and most of the coverage Friday, was about sales, not margins. The truck sells at about 12% of the volume Tesla planned for.
Tesla doesn’t disclose Cybertruck margins, so Musk can say whatever he wants here and nobody can check it. But he’s the one who said in 2023 that Tesla had “dug our own grave with Cybertruck” because of how hard it was to build profitably.
And look at what Tesla did the same day it announced the end of production: it raised Cybertruck prices by up to 10% and paused orders for the cheapest trim. The cheapest orderable Cybertruck went from $69,990 in early August to $92,490. You do that to squeeze margin out of the last trucks, not because the line was printing money.
The “opportunity cost” argument proves our point
Follow Musk’s logic to the end. If the Cybertruck were profitable and orders really outran production, killing it would mean walking away from guaranteed profit for a robotaxi that had 463 units registered in Texas as of late October and no proven business yet.
The only way that trade makes sense is if the Cybertruck’s profit at 30,000 units a year is small. Which is another way of saying it doesn’t sell enough.
Giga Texas also has more than 10 million square feet of floor space, and the Cybercab runs on its own “unboxed” line. Tesla can’t make use of the Cybertruck line and floor space was never the constraint. To further adapt his logic for shutting down Cybertruck production, Musk shifted his argument from “space” to Cybercab’s line needing some “smart people”, who he implied work on the Cybertruck.
Musk wrote on Saturday that “there are a very limited number of smart, dedicated people”, but Michael So, who led Cybercab new product introduction and was Giga Texas employee #1, left in April for nuclear startup Aalo Atomics. Last month, Tesla lost its Cybercab general assembly lead to Rivian’s R2 program just weeks after the launch. If talent is the bottleneck, it’s the Cybercab team that’s bleeding it.
Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
