Tesla Kills the Cybertruck: Musk Ends Production at Gigafactory Texas

Tesla will stop building the Cybertruck around the middle of next year, Elon Musk announced on X: "Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas [the only factory that makes it] around the middle of next year." Gigafactory Texas is the sole plant that assembles the vehicle, so the date marks the end of the line entirely.

The cancellation closes a six-year arc that began in Los Angeles on November 21, 2019. At launch, Tesla promised a $39,900 price tag and 2021 delivery. Two of the vehicle's allegedly unbreakable glass windows shattered during its first public appearance, an early signal of the gap between promise and product.

Why the design could not scale

Industry designers warned in January 2023 that the polygonal body could never be mass-produced reliably. The angular design demanded sub-10-micron, Lego-like precision across body panels, a tolerance that is next to impossible to achieve in any current car factory.

Tesla ultimately relaxed its accuracy standards and shipped the truck to customers in late 2023 at $60,990 — more than $20,000 above the announced base price — with visibly misaligned doors. Each unit differed slightly from the next. Musk himself confirmed the diagnosis in a leaked internal email: "Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb."

What defects did owners actually face?

The defect record spans nearly every subsystem of the vehicle:

• chronic panel misalignment and recurring trim detachment;
• accelerator pedals prone to jamming;
• front trunks capable of amputating fingers;
• windshields defeated by hail;
• borderline autopilot behavior, including hard braking for vehicles on the other side of two-lane highways;
• dead-on-arrival deliveries;
• systemic rust on the allegedly stainless steel body.

Recalls followed a similar pattern. The list includes an over-the-air recall for warning-light font size, a 3,878-unit recall for soap-lubricated accelerator pedals, a March 2025 recall of 46,096 trucks whose trim panels detached at highway speed, and a May 2026 recall of 173 vehicles whose wheels could fall off. One advertised feature, the locking differential, perpetually displayed a "Coming Soon" message and never shipped.

Veteran car designer Adrian Clarke assessed the vehicle bluntly: "The Cybertruck is a low-polygon joke that only exists in the fever dreams of Tesla fans that stands high on the smell of Elon Musk's flatulences."

How steep was the sales collapse?

Registrations peaked at 5,175 units in July 2024, then fell to 2,000 by April 2025. Full-year volume reached roughly 20,237 — and that figure counts questionable "sales" made to SpaceX, Musk's other company. That total equals barely 8% of the 250,000 annual sales Musk had promised.

What does this change for Tesla? The company tried discounting the vehicle, but demand did not recover, and Musk admitted defeat. The Cybertruck did set one record before dying: the steepest EV sales decline ever recorded in the United States.

What remains after the shutdown

The wind-down leaves roughly 40,000 owners with a discontinued vehicle, alongside a Roadster sibling that Tesla has shown as a jumping piece of vaporware. Musk, whose flying Roadster was reportedly an advertisement for a SpaceX-Tesla merger, now needs a new narrative to convince the stock market to keep financing his next idea.

Production at Gigafactory Texas is scheduled to end by mid-next year, and no successor to the Cybertruck has been announced.