If Tesla’s April 22 earnings report made something clear, it is that Cybertruck gross sales are within the crapper. Lower than two years after the extremely anticipated truck arrived, its 1,000,000+ reservations have been run via with fewer than 50,000 precise deliveries, and now the truck is piling up on Tesla vendor heaps. Cox Automotive estimates that simply 6,406 Cybertrucks had been offered within the first quarter of 2025. Due to that, Tesla has quietly been repositioning the Cybertruck and what it stands for. It hasn’t labored, but it surely’s actually trying to make its stainless-steel pile of horse excrement extra of an everyman’s car.
Enterprise Insider seen a wierd pattern in Cybertruck advertising and marketing. Over the previous few months, it has tried to domesticate a extra working man’s aesthetic for the truck. The Austin, Texas-based automaker has modified its web site, dropping out-of-this-world aesthetics for footage that present the Cybertruck hauling work tools and towing an Airstream trailer. A gross sales employee at Tesla stated the corporate wants it to attraction to conventional truck patrons because it turns into more durable and more durable to get off gross sales heaps.
Altering the Cybertruck’s picture
This is what gross sales employees advised Enterprise Insider:
“Pitching it to truck folks is extra in regards to the performance,” stated one salesperson who works within the South. “They wish to know the way a lot it may well tow, how a lot can match within the truck mattress.”
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Two Tesla gross sales employees advised Enterprise Insider that they’ve seen a push to market the car extra towards the standard truck purchaser since late final yr. The gross sales employee who works in a Southern state stated the truck’s flashy exterior has made it tough to search out folks keen to purchase it.
“Many of the check drivers aren’t actual truck patrons,” they stated. “It is extra of a novelty factor.”
Earlier this month, Tesla’s web site nonetheless had renderings of the Cybertruck in a weird Mars-like ambiance and advert copy that stated it was “constructed for any planet” with a “cabin as quiet as outer area,” in accordance with BI. Nicely, that is all gone now. Typically in the course of this month, Tesla redesigned the Cybertruck’s touchdown web page for the primary time since its launch. The futuristic, outer area aesthetics have been changed by renderings of development employees and household outings.
Making the unappealing interesting
From the appears of it, Tesla has fully aped among the footage Ford has on its F-150 web page, and it is trying to take a bit of the F-150 Lightning’s pie with a less expensive, stripped-out mannequin, in accordance with BI:
The lead picture for each truck’s webpages featured Airstream trailers, and each included pictures of truck beds crammed with wire.
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The cheaper, scaled-down model of the Tesla truck, which launched in April, can also be related in worth, vary, and towing capability to Ford’s electrical F-150.
Regardless of claims that the Cybertruck had a “bulletproof” exterior, Tesla has struggled to market the truck as being succesful at a worksite and sturdy. The actual fact its been — rightfully — clowned on-line hasn’t helped, both. Although the standard truck proprietor would not work on a farm or development website, they usually wish to cosplay as somebody who does, and that is not what the Cybertruck has been providing.
This repositioning may be clearly seen as an attraction to extra conservative truck patrons — people Tesla wasn’t actually focusing on earlier than CEO Elon Musk determined to dive headfirst into politics. It stays to be seen if this technique will work, and what number of of these folks have round $100,000 to spend on a truck that is not superb at doing truck issues.