Hundreds of Tesla Cybertrucks have been spotted being delivered Elon Musk’s private companies, SpaceX and xAI, as Tesla is having issues selling the electric pickup truck.
Cybertruck turned out to be Tesla’s first real commercial flop.
After planning for a production capacity of over 250,000 units per year, Tesla is currently selling the pickup truck at a rate of ~20,000 units annually.
A ~10% utiliation rate of a production line is a terrible situation for an automaker as much of the capital invested in the vehicle program becomes sunk cost.
But things are even more difficult with Tesla, as even with much lower production, the automaker often ends up having inventory build-ups for the Cybertruck.
Elon Musk has a solution: he had his private companies buy hundreds if not thousands of Cybertrucks.
Several truckloads of Cybertruck were spotted being delivered to xAI’s offices this weekend.
Furthermore, SpaceX has taken delivery of hundreds of Cybertrucks at Starbase of the last week and it is expected to take delivery of hundres, if not thousands more in the coming weeks.
Wes Morrill, the Cybertruck lead engineer, commented on the delivery and said that SpaceX, along with Tesla, is replacing its support fleet with the Cybertruck:
Love to see the ICE support fleets from Tesla and SpaceX get replaced with Cybertruck. When we were engineering it, this was always part of the dream. Never imagined how hard the fleet photos at starbase would go. Looking forward to more of this.
He didn’t elaborate on how many vehicles SpaceX is expected to buy.
Electrek’s Take
As soon as it became clear that there was clear demand issues with the Cybertruck, I always wondered Tesla is not using them for its service fleet.
It looks like SpaceX is doing it before Tesla, or at least on a larger scale, though Morrill is also saying that Tesla is transitioning its own support fleet to the Cybertruck.
Here’s what I bet happened. Elon knew Q4 is going to be rough due to the demand being pulled forward because of the tax credit.
However, there was a provision that if you lock in orders with unrefundable deposits before the end of September, you could still deliver vehicles in Q4 with the tax credit.
I bet Elon had SpaceX and xAI order thousands of Cybertrucks before the end of Q3 to get these deliveries in for Tesla in Q4.
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