Elon Musk’s favorite truck isn’t selling very well. In addition to that, Cybertrucks don’t seem to be very good at convincing drivers that their wheels won’t fall off.
Two years after the Cybertruck recall made Tesla’s angular EV a popular joke (remember the unnecessary foot pad that could slip, because soap, and jam the accelerator?), the automaker is recalling all models with 18-inch steel wheels that it sold at the time. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that cracks can form in wheel rotors, eventually separating them from the hub, especially when driving over “severe road irregularities.”
If you’re keeping score, then add bad roads to the things that Musk’s “apocalypse-ready” car may not have been better equipped to handle when it was launched – a list that really includes soap and glue, and may, some owners report, include car washes. Our extensive list of Cybertruck recall reasons is here, but the TL;DR of faulty parts includes windshield washers, inverters, tire pressure monitoring systems, backup camera, and metal panels that may fall off.
Neither the NTSB nor Tesla knows what wheels actually came off any Cybertruck buyer. But what should bite Tesla is that this may have little value on the roads, negative or otherwise. Only 173 Cybertrucks with 18-inch steel wheels were sold between 2024 and 2026, the national recall said. It includes the cheap $71,000 rear-wheel drive Cybertruck, which was announced in April 2025 and quietly discontinued in Sept. 2025.
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That’s not the total number of Cybertrucks sold, but it’s not as far off as you might think. We’re a long way from Musk’s claim that Tesla would sell a million Cybertrucks a year, or Tesla’s official expectation of 250,000 sales by 2024. Just ask Kelley Blue Book, which estimates that 38,965 Cybertrucks will be sold by 2024. the world of EV.
Tesla recently tied the knot with Elon Musk, for better or worse. (Probably worse.)
And that decline came despite Musk selling off a large amount of automation. Since i Los Angeles Times points out, more than 1,300 of the 7,100 Cybertrucks registered in the US in the last quarter of 2025 were owned by Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX.
And now? In the first quarter of 2026, Blue Book says, Cybertruck sales continued at roughly the same rate we saw between 2024 and 2025. That is, a decrease of 48 percent year-on-year. Ironically, that’s the same decline seen in all Tesla cars in Germany in 2025, after Musk threw his support behind the far-right AfD party. (There’s no sign yet that Tesla will ever sell the Cybertruck in Europe.)
In short, Musk’s politics aren’t helping him with left-leaning or moderate consumers in Europe or the US, and his expensive, problematic truck isn’t helping him get consumers in the red states of the US either. What is left? Tesla, increasingly relying on its calculations on the unproven future of Optimus robots that may fall and the self-driving taxis that have just started production, will have to answer that question sooner or later.
