It’s been just over a year since Tesla delivered its first Cybertrucks, and just a couple of months since reports said that basically everyone who wanted a Cybertruck already had one. Last month the company started trying to move unsold units by offering lease deals, and now we’re seeing the final stage of a car that’s outsold its interest: Tesla is telling Cybertruck factory workers not to bother coming in to work.
Business Insider got its hands on a memo from Tesla to Cybertruck line workers earlier this week, telling them their services wouldn’t be needed until Friday. Workers also told BI that, when they do get to show up to work, they’re not always actually building trucks:
Factory workers on the Cybertruck line said their schedule had been inconsistent since late October. Four workers told BI that several times after arriving at work, they’d either been sent home or given additional training exercises or cleaning duties to fill their scheduled work hours.
At least one worker expressed frustration with the schedule changes.
“When I started at Tesla you could expect to get overtime pay, now I feel lucky to get 40 hours,” said the worker on the Cybertruck line, who’d been with the company for several years.
Tesla doesn’t break down its sales numbers by model, so it’s not entirely clear exactly how many trucks the company has sold thus far. We know there were nearly 12,000 Cybertrucks in the world at the end of June, and the latest sweeping recall for the truck listed 27,185 possibly affected trucks back in September — a number that very nearly lines up with Tesla’s announcement of 1,300 Cybertrucks per week. Dragging that very rough estimate out to today, we’d be looking at total Cybertruck production of just about 40,000 units, far from the 125,000 per year that Tesla is targeting.
Given how Tesla’s had to sandbag Cybertruck production in recent months, it seems the market simply won’t bear the kind of volume the company wants to sell. There just isn’t enough interest in such a weird vehicle to sell 125,000 of them every year at current pricing — especially not one that can be damaged by a “This Car Climbed Mount Washington” bumper magnet. Do you think it’d even make the climb?