The Cybertruck: From a Broken Window to a Hard Sales Reality

On the night of November 21, 2019, Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen stood on stage at the company's design studio in Hawthorne, California, next door to SpaceX headquarters, holding a metal ball. Earlier in the demonstration, the door of the flat-sided stainless steel pickup behind him had taken a blow from a sledgehammer. Now Elon Musk asked him, "Could you try to break this glass please?"

Von Holzhausen threw the ball at the driver's window, which Tesla had been describing as "Armor Glass." It shattered. He tried the rear window, and that one cracked too. Musk said "maybe that was a little too hard," then pointed out that "it didn't go through" and added, "There's room for improvement." The pickup finished its debut with two spiderwebbed windows.

Musk later offered an explanation on Twitter: "Sledgehammer impact on door cracked base of glass, which is why steel ball didn't bounce off." Whatever the cause, the image of the broken glass became the defining picture of the night, and it traveled further than any spec sheet could have.

The shape that confronted the audience owed as much to materials as to style. Musk described the body as "ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless-steel," roughly 3 millimeters thick, and said it was the same material as the shell of SpaceX's Starship rocket. Because that steel is so hard, it cannot be pressed in a conventional stamping die without breaking the press, which is why the truck is made of large planar surfaces and sharp creases. The panels also carry structural loads, an arrangement Tesla calls an exoskeleton, and in 2023 the company applied for a patent titled "Ultra-Hard Cold-Worked Steel Alloy" covering the material.

The styling had pop-culture roots as well. Tesla's designers drew on the flying cars of Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner and on the Lotus Esprit that turned into a submarine in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Musk had bought that actual Bond car in 2013 for close to $1 million, after a couple found it in a Long Island storage unit they had purchased along with its contents. At the time he said, "I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform."

The promises at the reveal were bold. Tesla quoted a starting price of $39,900, up to 500 miles of range for the top tri-motor version, a 0 to 60 mph time under 2.9 seconds for that model, a 3,500-pound payload and towing capacity of up to 14,000 pounds. Anyone could put down a fully refundable $100 deposit.

Deposits poured in despite the broken glass. Over the following days Musk posted a rising count on Twitter, starting at 146,000 and moving through 187,000 and 200,000, and on November 27, 2019, he put the figure at 250,000. Reporters were quick to note that these were refundable $100 reservations rather than purchase orders. By Tesla's third-quarter 2023 earnings call, Musk said more than one million people had reserved the truck.

Building it took far longer than planned. Tesla originally aimed to start production in late 2021. The target slipped to the end of 2022, then to early 2023, and then to mid-2023, as the company prioritized Model Y production at its new Gigafactory Texas outside Austin, where the pickup would be built. Assembly-line robots for the truck were delivered to the plant well before production started.

On July 15, 2023, Tesla posted a photo of the first Cybertruck built at Giga Texas, surrounded by workers in helmets and yellow vests, nearly two years behind the original schedule. Musk shared it with the words "Congrats Tesla Team!" Three months later, on the October 2023 earnings call, he tried to reset expectations. "We dug our own grave with Cybertruck," he said, pointing to the difficulty of manufacturing an unusual vehicle with new processes, and he told investors that it would take "a year to 18 months" before the truck was "a significant, positive cash flow contributor." On the same call Tesla said the line had capacity for more than 125,000 Cybertrucks a year, and Musk spoke of a potential 250,000 a year in 2025.

Tesla handed over the first trucks at Giga Texas on November 30, 2023, at an event that started at 1 p.m. Central time. Musk personally ushered the first owners into their trucks, and more than 10 were delivered during the livestream.

The numbers announced that day were different from 2019's. The All-Wheel Drive model was priced at $79,990 with an estimated 340 miles of range and a 0 to 60 mph time of 4.1 seconds. The tri-motor Cyberbeast cost $99,990, made 845 horsepower, reached 60 mph in 2.6 seconds and was rated at an estimated 320 miles. An optional range extender pack was promised to push those figures past 470 and 440 miles. A rear-wheel-drive version at $60,990, with about 250 miles of range, was listed for 2025. The $39,900 truck of the reveal did not appear.

The early months of production brought two recalls that between them touched nearly every truck on the road. In April 2024, Tesla recalled all 3,878 Cybertrucks built from November 13, 2023, to April 4, 2024, because the accelerator pedal's trim pad could come loose and get trapped in the surrounding interior trim while the pedal was pressed, leaving the accelerator stuck. According to Tesla's filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an unapproved production change had introduced soap as a lubricant to help fit the pad onto the pedal, and the residue weakened its grip. Tesla received customer reports on March 31 and April 3, decided on a recall on April 12, and was installing a redesigned pedal part on new trucks by April 17.

In March 2025 came a larger one. Tesla recalled 46,096 trucks built between November 13, 2023, and February 27, 2025, because a stainless steel exterior trim panel called the cant rail could detach and become a road hazard. The panel was held on with adhesive, and in some trucks the adhesive failed. Tesla had spotted the issue on January 7 while monitoring field repairs, opened the recall on March 11, and counted 151 warranty claims by March 14. The fix was a free replacement panel.

For a while, the truck sold well by electric pickup standards. Cox Automotive counted 38,965 Cybertruck sales in the United States in 2024, enough to make it the country's best-selling electric pickup that year and the fifth best-selling battery-electric model overall. That lead did not last: Ford's F-150 Lightning passed it in the first quarter of 2025.

The slide in 2025 was steep. Cox Automotive's figures show about 20,200 Cybertrucks sold that year, a drop of roughly 48 percent and the largest decline of any electric model in the country, with fourth-quarter sales falling from 12,991 to 4,140. Cox pointed to the end of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit and to a narrower pool of buyers once early adopters had their trucks. In April 2025 Electrek estimated that Tesla was holding roughly $200 million worth of unsold Cybertrucks. Tesla added a Long Range rear-wheel-drive version at $69,990 in April 2025, then removed it from its U.S. website in September after less than five months. In August 2025 it raised the Cyberbeast price by $15,000 to $114,990.

In 2026 Tesla tried a different approach. On February 19 it launched a Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive truck at $59,990, cut the Cyberbeast back to $99,990, and said the lower launch price would last only ten days. On March 1 the new trim went to $69,990, and on August 24 Tesla added another $5,000, putting it at $74,990 and the Premium All-Wheel Drive at $84,990. U.S. sales kept falling in the meantime, to 3,519 trucks in the first quarter of 2026, down 45.1 percent from 6,406 a year earlier, as buyers waited for the cheaper version, whose deliveries were not expected to begin until June.

Almost seven years after the window broke, the Cybertruck is a real product, built by the Giga Texas team, sold by the tens of thousands, and instantly recognizable on any street. It is also a long way from the one million reservations and the 250,000 trucks a year that were once part of its story.