A Preposterous, Overpriced, Beautiful Disaster of a Car

The most important Cybertruck ever built is probably still parked somewhere on the grounds of Mar-a-Lago. In August 2024, Donald Trump stood on the driveway of his Palm Beach club and circled a custom version of Tesla’s notorious, angular electric truck. Wrapped in a giant photo of his bloodied face after the assassination attempt that summer, the car was a gift from the MAGA influencer Adin Ross during a livestreamed interview. “Wow, that’s an Elon!” Trump said.

When Trump returned to the presidency, Elon Musk’s truck became a defining symbol of his second term—a MAGA hat on wheels. Like the president himself, the Cybertruck is thought of differently by different people: brash, unsophisticated, or badass. And like the world’s richest man and former head of DOGE, the Cybertruck moves fast and breaks things with little regard for anything in its way. If nothing else, the Cybertruck is unique: Here is a car that is marketed as bulletproof and has a windshield wiper (only one wiper) that Musk has compared to a “katana.” Now the Cybertruck is about to be something else: discontinued. Early this morning, Musk announced on X that he will wind down production of the Cybertruck by the middle of next year to free up factory space to make Cybercabs, the robotaxis that Tesla is attempting to roll out across the country.

No matter how you feel about it, the Cybertruck will go down as a tremendous flop in Silicon Valley history. When the car was first released, in November 2023, Musk called it the “best product” that he’s ever released. As Musk bankrolled Trump’s 2024 presidential run and then joined him in Washington, MAGA supporters enthusiastically embraced the Cybertruck. Fast-forward to 2026, and almost no one wants to buy one. The shift has been telling: The midterms were disastrous for Musk, who blew nearly $500 million boosting unsuccessful Republican candidates, especially in Texas, where Tesla is based. Musk’s discontinuation of the Cybertruck may be seen, among other things, as political triage, a way of wiping his hands clean of a car that liberals have branded as the “Deplorean.”

[Read: My day inside America’s most hated car]

Still, it would be a mistake to remember the truck as nothing more than the apotheosis of two years of Trumpian (and Muskian) excess. The Cybertruck was a meme and a culture-war totem, but it was also just a car. And on that front, Musk’s creation was especially a letdown. When he first announced the car in 2019, it was a revelation, no matter how ugly: After proving that electric cars could be more than just souped-up golf carts, his car company would now bring EVs to the masses. The Cybertruck, Musk promised, would start at just $40,000, a fraction of the cost of Tesla’s other cars at the time. By the time the Cybertruck was actually for sale, it came with a sticker price of $100,000.

In some ways, the truck was doomed from the beginning: Building a vehicle that ignores the principles of basic aerodynamics isn’t exactly cheap or easy. Dogged by one problem after the next—stainless-steel panels that can fall off, a faulty accelerator pedal that can get stuck and turn the car into a cruise missile—the Cybertruck did not entice very many people to actually put up the money for one. Within a week of the vehicle’s unveiling, Musk said that 250,000 had preordered one. But in three years, he has sold a total of only 70,000 Cybertrucks.

In spite of all the problems, the Cybertruck actually is a pretty fun car. It’s difficult to maneuver and more than a little impractical. But you can’t take a Zoom call from the front seat of a Toyota Camry, or have that vehicle make fart noises when a passenger sits down. Musk’s creation was absurd, but it was different. Few other vehicles can say that.

America desperately needs what the Cybertruck could have been. Electric cars offer the possibility of redesigning vehicles from the ground up. In China, you can buy EVs with built-in fridges and headlights that can project movies. In the U.S., however, automakers have mostly just duped the gas cars we’re all familiar with. Even during this moment of high gas prices, Americans have been stubbornly unwilling to go electric. It’s hard not to wonder how many more electric cars would be on the streets if the Cybertruck had actually lived up to its original promise.

The Cybertruck was not the best product Musk ever made—not even close—but it’s the product that reveals the most about his motivations and impulses. It is a cautionary tale of Musk’s habit of overpromising and under-delivering. (Data centers in space! Robots that can water your plants!) Most of all, the Cybertruck is another reminder—in this case, a nearly 7,000-pound one—that the influence of the world’s richest man does have limits.