Elon Musk's SpaceX and xAI companies are buying unsold Cybertrucks from Tesla

Hundreds of Tesla Cybertrucks have been spotted being delivered to Elon Musk's private companies, SpaceX and xAI, as Tesla struggles to sell the electric pickup truck. The Cybertruck has turned out to be Tesla's first real commercial failure, writes UNN with reference to Electrek.

Details

After planning a production capacity of over 250,000 units per year, Tesla is currently selling the pickup truck at a rate of ~20,000 units per year.

A production line utilization rate of ~10% is a terrible situation for an automaker, as a significant portion of the capital invested in the vehicle production program becomes sunk costs.

But for Tesla, the situation is even more difficult, as even with significantly lower production volumes, the automaker often faces a buildup of Cybertruck inventory. Elon Musk has a solution: he has forced his private companies to buy hundreds, if not thousands, of Cybertrucks.

Several Cybertruck pickups were spotted being delivered to xAI offices this past weekend. In addition, last week SpaceX received hundreds of Cybertrucks at Starbase, and is expected to receive hundreds, if not thousands, more in the coming weeks.

Wes Morrill, lead Cybertruck engineer, commented on the delivery and said that SpaceX, along with Tesla, is replacing its support fleet with Cybertrucks: "It's great to see Tesla and SpaceX's ICE support fleets being replaced by Cybertrucks. When we designed it, that was always part of the dream. I never imagined how difficult it would be to get photos of the fleet at Starbase. I look forward to continuing."

He did not specify how many vehicles SpaceX plans to buy. It seems that SpaceX is doing this earlier than Tesla, or at least on a larger scale, although Morrill also stated that Tesla is converting its own support fleet to Cybertrucks.

Addition

Tesla introduced new, more affordable versions of the Model 3 Standard for $36,990 and the Model Y Standard for $39,990 in the US, which are $5,500 and $5,000 less than previous prices, respectively. The discounts turned out to be smaller than analysts expected and do not compensate for the loss of tax benefits of $7,500.