Musk once predicted he could sell 250,000 Cybertrucks a year. Tesla sold 70,000 in three years and lost $1.9 billion in the process, according to Quartz, as reported by the Guardian.
The angular electric pickup became a stand-in for Musk during his rise in the Republican Party. Like its creator, it was highly divisive: eccentric, heavily promoted and, in the end, well short of the promises attached to it.
Like many of Musk's projects, the truck was massively promoted, heavily delayed and ultimately fell short, the Guardian reported.
The truck reached the road as Musk led the Department of Government Efficiency, known as Doge. The Guardian described him taking a chainsaw to the federal government in that role, and said the effort shared the truck's habit of empty promises.
Musk said Doge could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. Its website now claims cuts of $215 billion.
Hundreds of thousands of government workers left through workforce reductions, early retirement and other reasons. Many were later rehired, a reversal the Guardian likened to the Cybertruck's recalls.
The trucks were subject to 11 recalls amid technical problems, including a loose pedal that could stick and cause unintentional acceleration.
At the unveiling, Musk tried to show the truck's durability by having a designer throw a ball at a window. The glass cracked. Tesla later showed that the vehicle could withstand bullets, which fed a sense of a militarized machine.
Neil, quoted by the Guardian, said Tesla's wager was that buyers"were emotionally immature and it looked like a toy-slash-weapon."He called the Cybertruck both a"failure of management"and"a phenomenal piece of engineering.".
Experts said the truck had real strengths. Many of the engineering problems that were solved were"self-imposed,"driven by the need to fit Musk's design choices, the account said.
The Guardian traced a line back to the Hummer H2 of the early 2000s, another oversized vehicle tied to aggressive masculinity. Neil said that truck"became a lightning rod for pro and con militarism,"bought"as a political statement as much as a style statement."A similar reading, the paper said, clung to the Cybertruck.