Save All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Stupid. Divisive. Fugly. The Hummer shouldn’t have sold in numbers, but it did. Might Elon Musk pull off a similar trick with the stainless steel Cybertruck? Forty-six months after the official unveiling—when design chief Franz von Holzhausen famously shattered the prototype’s Armor Glass with the spirited throw of a metal ball—yesterday’s Cybertruck Delivery Event confirmed that Tesla’s Texan Gigafactory is finally now slowly spitting out Cybertrucks. With an estimated 2 million preorders from self-styled “reservationists,” this Blade Runner–inspired electric pickup could make the world’s most wealthy man even more unfeasibly rich. If half of those $100 refundable deposits stack up, that’s revenue of more than $65 billion, based on a newly inflated $61,000 price tag—up $21,000 from what was promised four years ago. “Just 15 percent of those preorders would equal the annual US truck sales of Toyota,” says Boston University Questrom School of Business professor Tim Simcoe. “But Tesla faces the challenges of scaling up production and achieving a sufficient flow of paying customers.” On Tesla’s March 1 Investor Day, Musk said demand for the Cybertruck was “so far off the hook, you can’t even see the hook.” But landing even 15 percent of the reservationists seems optimistic because the vehicle is running late and isn’t global—Cybertruck won’t be for sale outside of the US, Canada, and Mexico for some time, and doesn’t appear to meet safety regulations in the European Union and Australia anyway. The price bump will also be a drag on demand. The vehicles picked up by the 10 or so customers yesterday—likely to be “manufacturing unit” one-offs rather than true retail models, and which will be tethered to Tesla for some time—was $21,000 more expensive than the $39,900 base model promised in November 2019. Crucially, the world has moved on since, with a slew of competitors selling here-now, traditionally-shaped product. Ford snuck in ahead with its $49,000 F-150 Lightning, the battery-powered version of the truck that has dominated the pickup segment for decades. GM will soon roll out its $52,000 electric Chevy Silverado, and Stellantis is readying its $58,000 RAM 1500 REV. Extroverts wanting a look-at-me e-candy truck can buy Rivian’s $73,000 R1T. F-150 Lightning owner Coleson Bruce, a pickup driver for 30 years, might switch from Ford to Tesla. “I put in a reservation [for a Cybertruck] the day after the original reveal,” the tech startup executive told WIRED on a Zoom call. “While I’m not one of the earliest in line, I have the possible advantage of being in Austin,” he says. Historically, Tesla’s new product deliveries have often been weighted toward favored geographies rather than first-come-first-serve, Bruce says. Bruce’s interest in yesterday’s presentation was, he adds, colored by the knowledge that Tesla’s product promises are “likely to materially change before my order opportunity arrives. There will be time, independent reviews, and improvements to the vehicle before my order comes up—and I’ll be able to make a better-informed cost-benefit decision at that point.” Not For Traditional Truckers Americans buy 2 million pickups a year for an average of $59,000 apiece, but, so far, only a smidgen are all-electric. Last year, Ford estimated it would sell 150,000 Lightnings this year. Many analysts scorn Musk’s estimated 250,000 annual Cybertruck sales, even after a successful ramp through 2024. “If [Tesla] can build and sell 50,000 a year, it has to be deemed something of a success,” says Gartner automotive analyst Mike Ramsey, calling the Cybertruck “outlandish and outrageous” but also “weirdly cool.” Cool sells—weird, outlandish, and outrageous not so much. “Cybertruck is likely too form-over-function to do many of the tasks American pickup customers expect of a truck,” says Ed Kim of the specialist market research firm AutoPacific, “and I don’t expect there to be much cross-shop between Cybertruck and traditional pickup trucks in the US market.” The pickup is an American institution, Kim acknowledges, and it makes perfect sense for Tesla to go get “a piece of that market.” Still, he says, the Cybertruck “seems more of a love letter to Tesla’s fanboys than a serious attempt at disrupting the truck market.” Pickups, Kim adds, “are all about function, even to the many casual truck owners in America who don’t do ‘truck things’ with their vehicles.” If, instead, Cybertrucks mostly appeal to extroverts rather than traditional pickup buyers, there are far fewer of them, and it’s more likely Tesla will be able to satisfy this smaller demand, albeit at a huge and unrecoverable R&D cost. On a recent earnings call, Musk signaled the potential for production snafus. “We have dug our own grave with the Cybertruck,” the billionaire entrepreneur warned, predicting “enormous challenges in getting to volume production.” Optimistically, Musk estimated Tesla’s “best product ever” would “take 12 to 18 months to be a significant positive contributor to cash flow.” The Cybertruck is an “inherently high-cost product with its stainless steel body panels and unconventional construction,” says Kim. Olav Sorenson, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at UCLA Anderson School of Management, agrees. “Tesla has invested a lot into the R&D behind the Cybertruck," he says. "The company has also most likely been investing a lot more into figuring out the manufacturing equipment and processes for producing it at scale. So, whether they end up making money on the vehicle will depend on whether they sell enough units.” Higher-than-promised prices will dampen demand, warns Simcoe. “It is a law of nature that demand curves slope down, so a higher price will certainly mean fewer sales. The basic economics Henry Ford figured out—higher volume means lower cost—are no different in the electric truck market.” A Frankenstein DeLorean? If Tesla can’t make enough Cybertrucks to marry with Musk’s optimism, or if critical problems with the first batch of trucks get widely reported, then selling 250,000 units will be a “tough challenge,” agrees AutoPacific’s Kim, querying whether “there are that many people who want to drive such an extroverted vehicle. Vehicles that sell in volume tend to be much more palatable to mainstream tastes.” There’s no way of confirming Tesla’s breakeven point, but “even a traditional car might need 200,000 units per year to cover the design costs,” says Sorenson, estimating that the initial costs of Cybertruck’s groundbreaking manufacturing might require as many as 300,000 sales per year. Sell many fewer, and Cybertruck will be an almighty flop. If so, this won’t come as a surprise to industry insiders. Toy industry insiders, that is. Lego reacted to Cybertruck’s 2019 launch by tweeting a picture of a single plastic brick on wheels, riffing that “the evolution of the truck is here. Guaranteed shatterproof.” British car designer Adrian Clarke has described the Cybertruck as “a low polygon joke that only exists in the fever dreams of Tesla fans that stand high on the smell of Elon Musk’s flatulence.” On social media, the Cybertruck is frequently criticized as a Frankenstein DeLorean or like a 4-year-old’s drawing of a car. Auto journalist Daniel Golson recently saw Holzhausen park a preproduction model at a Malibu car event and told Jalopnik he was “baffled” with the car’s shoddy build: “I’ve been around hundreds of prototype cars in my career, ranging from early test mules to near-production prototypes, and I’ve never seen an automaker proudly present something of this poor quality, especially not this late in development.” A bog standard car promo video aired at Thursday’s delivery event—featuring the $100,000 highest performance variant—but there were no product close-ups. Aside from a mumbling Musk speaking from a Cybertruck bed, his face shrouded in darkness, the event’s other lowlight was a petrified Holzhausen, former design director at Mazda North America, soft-throwing a baseball that somehow didn’t shatter the Cybertruck’s side window. Future From the Past