Now that EV tax incentives have gone up in smoke, Tesla is expected to disappoint once again with its Q4 sales.
Despite a pessimistic sales forecast, Tesla’s shares have skyrocketed and are up almost 50 percent over the last six months — showing yet again how the company’s $1.5 trillion market cap is largely untethered from the success of its core business.
But that hasn’t stopped Tesla CEO Elon Musk from seemingly putting his thumb on the scales. As an insider source told Electrekthe billionaire’s space company SpaceX has bought over 1,000 Cybertrucks from Tesla, a number that could rise to 2,000 over time.
In other words, one of Musk’s other companies has allegedly spent north of $100 million on Teslas that it’s hard to imagine it finding a use for — and in what looks an awful lot like an embarrassing ploy to save face for the EV maker.
A video circulating on Musk’s social media platform, X, shows an enormous number of Cybertrucks parked outside of SpaceX’s facilities in South Texas.
Considering the pickup EV has been an enormous commercial flop, only selling barely a fraction of Musk’s promised 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertrucks a year, there’s a good chance Tesla is using the mercurial CEO’s other venture to boost the numbers ahead of the end of an otherwise disastrous year.
As Musk continues to alienate his customers following his embrace of far-right ideologies, the company is struggling to close sales. Tesla’s US sales dropped to a nearly four-year low in November, as Reuters reported last week. A cheaper, stripped-down version of its Model Y SUV failed to reverse the downward trend.
According to registration data, the company sold just 5,385 Cybertrucks in the US in Q3, a precipitous drop of 62 percent compared to the same period last year.
Apart from being a major commercial flop, the Cybertruck has also been recalled eight times for sometimes-glaring design issues, and criticized for its relatively low range and much higher than originally advertised price.
Nonetheless, Musk is adamant that the truck is a success story, tweeting earlier this month that it’s an “incredible vehicle” and “our best ever from Tesla.”
How committed the EV maker still is to producing the stainless steel monstrosity remains to be seen. Musk has been trying to transition Tesla away from selling traditional vehicles, doubling down on a robotaxi service and humanoid robots instead.
In the meantime, Tesla’s core business is looking worse for wear. Beyond drying up demand, the company is facing fresh regulatory headwinds, with California threatening the company with a 30-day car sales ban in the state for misleading its customers with the term “Autopilot.”
Despite its erroneous marketing terms, Tesla vehicles — at least the ones being sold to the public — are not able to fully drive themselves, and require the driver to be able to take over control at any time.
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