Ford's F-150 Lightning outsold the Tesla Cyber truck in 2025, and Ford still killed the program because it wasn't selling enough. A Tesla stainless steel truck moved roughly 21,500 units globally last year, while the Lightning, a truck Ford publicly retired in December, delivered approximately 27,300 units in the US alone. Now you have a discounted vehicle outpacing an actively marketed 1. And that raises a question most Tesla bulls don't want to answer.
If Ford abandoned its EV truck at 27,000 units, what does that mean for a cyber truck stuck at 21,500? Now we're going to break down the actual sales numbers Tesla doesn't want you to see. Explain why SpaceX buying over 1000 cyber trucks still couldn't stop the bleeding, and look at what options Elon Musk has left. The data here paints a picture of a vehicle program running at roughly 10% of its intended production capacity, and we'll get right into that after this
very short break. Now, the cyber truck is now producing at a fraction of what Tesla planned, and the company is doing everything it can to hide the numbers Tesla bundles. It sails into two broad categories, Model 3 and Y, and other models. The second bucket includes the Model S, Model X, Cyber Truck and Tesla Semi, which makes isolating cyber truck performance an exercise in
reverse engineering. Model S and Model X have held relatively stable at low volume, hovering around 5000 to 6000 units combined per quarter globally. And if we allocate A generous 6000 units for S&X and quarter for 2025, that leaves roughly 5600 units for the Cyber Truck and Semi combined. The semi remains in pilot production with negligible volume, so we're looking at about 5500 cyber trucks for the entire quarter.
Now that number should alarm anyone who followed Musk's original production promises for the vehicle in Tesla Confirm in July 2025, the Cyber Truck sales had dropped to around 5000 units in quarter 2, and the recovery never materialized. The company cut prices, introduced a cheaper trim, and sales still cratered nearly 50% year over years. And for context, the original Cyber Truck reveal in 2019 promised 250,000 units per year at full production.
The current run rate suggests annual output closer to a measly 22,000 units. That's roughly 10%, less than 10% of stated capacity figure that would trigger program cancellation at any other automaker. Now, Ford provides a useful comparison point here. The F-150 Lightning launched A genuine enthusiasm and solid early sales, but Ford faced its own production challenges, battery cost overruns, and shifting consumer demand.
By late 2025, Ford announced it was ending Lightning production to pivot toward extended range EVs. The Lightning delivered about 27,300 units in the US for 2025, down 18% year over year as the company wound down the program and Ford looked at those numbers and decided the truck wasn't viable long term. Tesla is looking at worst numbers and calling it a success now. I've been digging through the analytics of the show and noticed that 37% of you are following the channel for you.
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It's crazy. Tesla released a cheaper strip down cyber truck variant to boost sales. The company cancelled it months later because it wasn't selling. Musk then had SpaceX purchase over 1000 cyber trucks in quarter 4 of 2025. Now that single purchase accounted for roughly 20% of Tesla's quarterly cyber truck sales. His own company he bought. He basically bought his own cyber trucks.
Even with his own company propping up the numbers, cyber trucks sales still declined more than 50% year over year. SpaceX cannot keep buying trucks to pad Tesla's quarterly reports, and eventually the financial engineering runs out of runway. Now the 4680 battery cells deserve scrutiny here as well. Tesla built the cyber truck around these proprietary cells, betting that in house battery production would reduce costs and improve performance.
The opposite happened. The 4680 cells contributed to higher vehicle prices than originally announced and delivered shorter range than the 2019 revealed promise. A cyber truck that was supposed to start at around 40,000 now starts well above that in the range. Figures fell short of early marketing, 50,060 thousand for some of those. And those broken promises eroded trust with people who would love to buy a Tesla truck.
They needed to convert those people and they just didn't do it. The price was too high. And also Elon Musk, his public persona is another viable factor in this equation. Brand perception matters, and when it comes to automotive consumers, Musk's political activities over the past two years have alienated a significant portion of potential buyers Out.
There have been surveys out there, and I'm not saying that they're perfect, but they consistently show that CEO behavior ranks among the top reasons consumers avoid Tesla. The company has no marketing department to counteract negative press, no dealer network to smooth over concerns, and no PR team to manage Elon Musk's controversies. Every Musk tweet becomes the de facto voice of the company, no matter what he says. It reflects on Tesla and all of
his other companies. And for a vehicle that already struggled with polarizing design and it's hot, it's metal and it's sharp, adding a polarizing spokesperson, Elon Musk, created compounding headwinds for the vehicle. Now the path narrows with each quarter at Tesla. Musk previously said Tesla would pivot to more traditional truck design of this cyber truck failed. But that pivot hasn't happened. There's no talk about it. Acknowledging failure would require Musk to admit the design
was completely wrong. And it's management style doesn't accommodate that kind of public reversal. The Cyber Cab and other projects continue to absorb engineering resources while the Cyber Truck line sits underutilized. Most automakers would have written off this program by now, absorbed the loss, and redirected capital toward viable products. Tesla appeared committed to running out the clock. Instead, Ford has officially killed the Lightning at 27,300 annual units.
Tesla is celebrating the Cyber Truck at 21,500 units. One company recognized when a product wasn't working, it just killed it, moved on, pivoted. The other company keeps buying its own inventory through the shell game with SpaceX transactions from other companies and they call it growth. But that's not how it is. They they needed to appease the people that were buying the stock. They needed those extra sales so it didn't look like it was a horror show of only 4000 units
sale sold in the last quarter. So Cyber Truck program now operates at about 10% or less capacity prices remain higher than promised, range fell short of announcements and the cheaper variant got cancelled. So unless something changes at Tesla, they may never do another cyber truck again.