And on this metric, the Cybertruck might be wanting. “Cars with ongoing recalls well after launch suggest a much higher lifetime recall total,” says Brauer. He calculates that the Cybertruck’s six recalls to date are “worse than 91 percent” of other 2024 vehicles. All this was possibly foreshadowed in 2023 when a leaked Tesla report showed the Cybertruck had basic design flaws.
“We aren’t comfortable making [lifetime recall] predictions on the Cybertruck at this very early stage,” stresses Brauer, “but so far it isn’t doing very well.”
Most Cybertruck buyers pay scant attention to longevity estimates, believes Edmunds’ Drury, and plenty probably aren’t exercised by recalls, OTA or otherwise, he said. “Cybertruck customers are in it for the stares and glares—they don’t care about how many times [this vehicle is] going to be recalled over 30 years,” says Drury. “They’re buying this car for now, with zero thought to the future.”
“A standard auto customer wants to know if a car will last 10 years or will be ongoing good value for money,” he says. “A Cybertruck customer doesn’t care about any of that. Owning a Cybertruck isn’t practical; it’s a boast. A boast that ‘I have so much discretionary income I can afford to waste it on an impractical car.’”
Similar to other critics (earlier this year, a CNN reviewer called the pickup a “disturbing level of individual arrogance in hard, unforgiving steel”), Drury believes Cybertruck buyers are people “who think, ‘I don’t care if I kill people when I drive this thing down the street,’” he says. “There aren’t many of those people out there, so there’s a relatively small market for the Cybertruck.”
If Tesla, which was contacted for this piece, is genuinely fishing in smaller pools than originally anticipated by Musk—at a 2023 shareholder meeting he predicted that Cybertruck sales could hit 250,000 by 2025, and reach 500,000 a year once production ramped up—this might help explain the softening of Cybertruck aftersales.
“Used values on these things have plummeted dramatically,” said Drury. Price tracking website CarGurus estimates that the average used Cybertruck dropped from $175,000 in April to $110,864 today. The cheapest Cybertruck on Autotrader was $86,000 earlier this week, and many of the other 276 currently listed on the site sport “recent price drop” banners.
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