Tesla falls short of sales goal for its Cybertrucks
Tesla Inc. has missed CEO Elon Musk’s target for sales of the new Cybertruck during the third quarter.
Musk said earlier this year the company would deliver its first electric pickup truck between July and September from its the Austin-based Gigafactory Texas. But the quarter has closed with Tesla fans still waiting to get behind the wheel of the company’s latest electric vehicle model.
Tesla has been installing equipment at its factory in Austin for assembly lines and body shops. As the company focused on upgrading factories around the world in the third quarter, it slowed or stopped production of its vehicles.
Tesla said Monday it sold 435,059 vehicles worldwide in the third quarter, down from 466,140 in the second quarter.
“A sequential decline in volumes was caused by planned downtimes for factory upgrades, as discussed on the most recent earnings call,” Tesla said in a statement. “Our 2023 volume target of around 1.8 million vehicles remains unchanged.”
Despite the sales slowdown, Tesla, the world’s largest electric-vehicle maker, reported a 26% increase in sales compared to third quarter 2022, when it sold 343,830 vehicles.
It has continuously teased the Cybertruck as a profitable addition to its global sales and to the well-being of its Texas factory, which had struggled with supply chain troubles and limited production amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tesla has pushed to scale up its headquarters since moving to Austin from Palo Alto, Calif., in 2021. By the end of 2022, the company said it had spent $5.81 million on developing the plant.
In January, it said it was planning to spend another $775 million on five construction projects covering 1.5 million square
feet of land. Along with improvements for Cybertruck, the company announced it was building a facility to make cathodes, a key component for the batteries that power its vehicles.
Amid the large infrastructure projects, Tesla has been on a hiring spree to become one of the largest employers in Central Texas. The company now employs 20,000 people at its Austin factory and has plans to potentially triple its workforce there in the coming years.
It’s added more than 7,700 employees since the start of 2023, when the site had just shy of 12,300 workers. It reported about 3,500 employees were there in 2021.
Tesla earlier this year reported reaching a production milestone
of 5,000 Model Ys per week — a pace that put it on track to top its annual target of 250,000 units from the site.
Despite its success, Tesla remains behind schedule to produce its Cybertruck. Musk first showed a prototype of the wedge-shaped electric vehicle in November 2019 and said production would start in 2021.
In July, Tesla said the company had begun production of its Cybertruck and posted a photo on X, formerly Twitter, of Gigafactory Texas workers in safety vests and hard hats posing around the vehicle.
“First Cybertruck built at Giga Texas!” Tesla posted, including a cowboy hat-wearing emoji. Musk retweeted the post.
But the excitement was shortlived.
Tesla cleared up the confusion during a news conference after releasing its second-quarter
earnings, saying it was still installing equipment at the plant and testing its model. The company said factory tooling remained
on track and that it expected to begin producing and delivering the vehicle this year. It was then only producing vehicles
for internal testing.
Musk blamed the Cybertruck’s parts and technology for the delays. The vehicle is expected to be stainless steel and bulletproof.
“I do want to emphasize that the Cybertruck has a lot of new technology in it, like a lot,” he said. “It doesn’t look like any other vehicle because it is not like any other vehicle.”
Musk said he expected fullscale production to start in 2024 and that he expected to sell 250,000 to 500,000 of the vehicles per year once production begins. It was originally supposed to start at $39,900 in its single-motor configuration, with prices up to about $70,000 for the tri-motor version.
Tesla’s stock price closed at $251.60 per share Monday afternoon, up $1.38 from Friday’s close. The company’s stock has gained more than 106% in 2023.