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Tesla now has ready-to-deliver Cybertruck inventory, demand issues?

Tesla now has ready-to-deliver Cybertruck inventory, demand issues?

Tesla is now offering ready-to-deliver Cybertrucks in its new vehicle inventory as it clearly isn’t working with a reservation backlog anymore.

Despite its polarizing nature, we have often noted that we can’t deny the Cybertruck is popular considering the fact that Tesla had over 1 million reservations for the vehicle.

However, we had some doubts about how serious were those potential buyers as Tesla lowered the deposit to just $100 for the first time with the Cybertruck program.

On top of the shakiness of the buying commitment, the fact that the production version of the Cybertruck was much more expensive and has less range than what Tesla originally announced has certainly affected the size of the backlog.

We recently reported that Tesla appears to have exhausted its US Cybertruck backlog as someone without a reservation can place a new order and take deliver within roughly a week.

Tesla also started deliveries in Mexico and Canada to help work through its increasing production capacity.

Now, we get our best example yet to show that the backlog is exhausted: Cybertrucks are now available in Tesla’s new vehicle inventory:

Right now, there are only Foundation Series Cybertruck, but some have spotted regular Cybertrucks as well. Both Dual Motor and Cyberbeast configurations are available for immediate delivery.

When a new Tesla vehicle program is offered in new inventory, it’s generally means that Tesla doesn’t have any backlog of orders for it anymore.

It looks like Tesla got there with about only ~50,000 or so deliveries in the US.

Electrek’s Take

I think Tesla is going to have a hard time selling 250,000 Cybertrucks per year, which has been the planned production capacity.

There’s still the $60,000 model coming next year, but all the reservation tally showed the base one as being the least popular one. However, that has likely changed with the price increase.

If Tesla is already having inventory build-ups for the vehicle after only delivering about 50,000 units and having built up reservations and orders for years, it could quickly prove difficult.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla starts to offer discounts on the Cybertruck in the coming months.

Tesla said that it achieved positive gross margins on the Cybertruck in Q3. Therefore, one could argue that Tesla can afford to reduce prices, but I think the positive gross margin was mostly due to Foundation Series deliveries and Tesla appear to have focused on the more expensive tri-motor version in Q3.

It’s not impossible to see the program going back into negative gross margins in Q4 with the $20,000 cheaper non-Foundation Series version.

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