The Tesla Cybertruck has to be ranked among the greatest vehicular flops of all time. The first production examples weren’t delivered until almost 2024 – in November of 2023 – and here it is only 2026 and Elon just pulled the plug. That’s about a two-year production run and during that time, about 70,000 of the got sold (whole fleets to Elon’s SpaceX grift, which is his way of getting the taxpayers to pay for them).
Who could have predicted this?
It’s such a good-looking thing, for one. Practical, too. It has a “bed” that isn’t useful for carrying things and a tow rating that’s only viable if you don’t need to tow very far. Some say it looks “futuristic” – and in a way, it does. It looks like the future depicted by Ridley Scott in the original Blade Runner, which came out in 1982. Today, it just looks dystopian. It is deliberately ugly in a brutalist way. It has been compared – accurately – to a dumpster. It has certainly been a dumpster fire for Tesla. In comparison, the Pontiac Aztec was a smash hit. About 120,000 of them were sold over five years.
The thing is, does Tesla – does Elon – care?
Maybe the Cybertruck was never meant to actually sell, except as a curiosity. Maybe other Tesla models were never meant to sell, either – except insofar as selling the public on electric cars. Both the Model S and the Model X have been cancelled; the Model 3 and the Model Y have yet to be significantly updated. The Model 3 is one of the oldest new vehicles on the market. The current (2026) model is basically the same as the 2017 model, the year this model made its debut. This is unusual because most vehicles get a significant refresh about every four years and a complete makeover long before they reach ten. There’s nothing much new or even interesting about the Model 3 anymore. It’s just one of many electric cars now – as opposed to being one of just a few electric cars back in 2017. It begs the question: Why hasn’t Tesla updated it – or the Model Y? Why did it not update its flagship Model S either? Tesla no longer has a top-of-the-line model, which is odd for a company that is supposedly wanting to be a major player in the car business.
Maybe not, though.
Maybe that was never the plan. Maybe the plan is the one Elon has been telling us all about lately, which is to sell Cybercabs – i.e., robo-taxis – rather than cars. The Cybercab is a car you rent to ride in. It is fully “autonomous,” to use the Orwellian language that distorts the truth about almost everything. When people hear “autonomous,” they think independent, as in on your own, under your own control. The Cybercab is the antithesis of both. It is a software-controlled, Hive Mind connected device. It operates in accordance with the Hive Mind’s directives rather than any individual wishes and – unlike other Tesla vehicles so far – there isn’t even the pretense of anyone driving.
It is driven. Just not by people. Well, not by people in the Cybercab.
“As Tesla grows,” Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy explained, “we’ll mainly deliver fully designed autonomous vehicles to our customers and Cybercabs will be the first. We’re trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year – 2026. As we start small this year, and we learn . . . about delivery and ownership and fleet management of autonomous vehicles in customer hands, we’ll continue to scale that.”
The “customers” Moravy speaks of are not individual owners. The Cybercab’s customers will be fleet operators who sell rides – and don’t employ drivers. The interior of this “autonomous” device has a large screen but no steering wheel.
Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, says that the company “plans to deploy Cybercabs as fast as they can produce them” and that it is “one of the easiest products to scale in terms of manufacturing . . . I think the key thing which we are trying to make sure is that we have all the regulatory approvals where we can start deploying the Cybercabs as fast as we can produce them.”
Behold the aim all along – which was to get people out of vehicles by using electric vehicles to get them used to devices rather than vehicles. Note that one of Tesla’s great talking points has been its “self-driving” capability. Well, why bother with owning a car you don’t drive? It’s kind of like owning a house you don’t actually live in but maybe stay in sometimes. Why bother with that when you could just a rent a room when you need a place to stay?
Maybe some like that idea. Especially if it’s a nice room. Maybe some like the idea of not having to deal with a car, including finding a spot to park it. It just drops them off and whenever they need it again, just tap the app to summon another. It sounds benevolent, assuming you believe that ceding control over your ability to go places farther than you can walk to a centralized technocracy managed by corporations run by billionaires is benevolent. 
The best part – for Tesla – is that it’s a continuous revenue stream and more than just one. When an individual buys a Tesla, the revenue stream is singular – and only for as long as it takes to pay the device off. There are multiple revenue streams with a Cybercab that people (plural) pay to be ferried around in and which they never stop paying for, so long as they need to be ferried around.
The Cybercab is also probably the Mark II iteration of what the original Teslas were in that its purpose is to normalize something new. This time around, it’s not battery-powered devices.
It is driverless devices.
. . .
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