Poor Elon Musk Can't Even Sell As Many Cybertrucks As Ford Sold Edsels
Probably makes more sense to compare them to the Ford Pinto, for obvious reasons.
Elon Musk and Henry Ford have a lot in common. They’re both are (were, in the case of Ford) absurdly wealthy car company owners with extremely questionable political views, seeking to use their wealth and power to reverse social progress and encourage the oppression of their most disfavored minorities, while claiming that those minorities are responsible for oppression of people like them.
Well, now they have something else in common: making embarrassing cars that no one wants to buy.
The Ford Edsel is one of the most famous car failures of all time, for reasons I admit I don’t totally understand. I mean, I kind of like the fact that the front of the car is a tad yonic and thus not entirely unlike driving around in a giant Georgia O’Keefe painting.
But, as it turns out, Tesla, in three years, hasn’t even sold as many Cybertrucks as Ford sold Edsels in its first year on the market.
Via Bloomberg:
Ford’s Edsel, unveiled in 1957, was pitched as an entirely new kind of car, with an oval-shaped front grille likened to a horse collar. The company predicted it would sell 200,000 units in the model’s first year on the market. Ford ended up selling less than one-third of that target, and the Edsel’s design became the butt of jokes.
Tesla started delivering its unusually angular Cybertruck in 2023. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk called it the company’s best product ever and estimated the carmaker might build more than 250,000 annually, depending on demand. Tesla sold less than one-sixth of that number in its first year, and the truck’s blocky looks became a punchline.
Edsel sales dropped each year the model was on the market, and Ford discontinued the car in 1959. Cybertruck sales are off to an even worse start. Only 7,133 have been registered in the US this year through May, according to S&P Global Mobility data provided to Bloomberg News. That count is buoyed by Musk’s other companies, with SpaceX building out a fleet of Cybertrucks.
Ford had predicted that it would sell 200,000 Edsels in their first year, but ended up selling only 68,000. In the Cybertruck’s first full year on the market, 2024, only 39,000 were sold, followed by 20,237 in 2025 and 7,133 this year — about 66,000 total. If you counted the Cybertrucks purchased by Musk’s own companies, it might be significantly less than that.
The truly impressive thing, I find, is that we know Americans actually do like buying hideous spitemobiles. You may recall that during the Iraq War, when we were all shouting “No War For Oil!” and scientists and environmental activists were all suggesting everyone cut down on gas consumption, every right-wing weirdo out there who could went out and immediately bought a gas-guzzling Hummer. There were pink Hummers for the ladies, Hummer limos for the most obnoxious high schoolers to ride to prom or their Super Sweet 16 in, Hummer everything.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
And then, well, the 2008 recession happened, gas went up considerably and, you know, you didn’t see them so much anymore. But for a time, they were the thing.
Want to send us money in an entirely different way? Click here or join our Patreon!
I had actually forgotten about Cybertrucks completely until I saw one the other day. It seems even those who have them don’t want to drive them around very much, maybe because they do seem to have a Ford Pinto-esque tendency to blow up and/or catch on fire. They also might not want to let strangers in on the fact that they are enormous douchebags.
It’s unlikely that Musk, who just recently became the world’s first trillionaire, is all too upset about this on the financial side, but I think we can probably assume that he’s at least a little embarrassed by it. He’s taken great pains to convince himself that he is beloved by the whole world, more or less whittling Twitter down to just his very own acolytes, human and robot alike, and yet even they do not want to be seen in his ugly ass cars.
It’s almost as if it was really, really stupid for someone who runs an electric vehicle company to piss off the kind of people who actually drive electric vehicles.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The yonic design of the grille failed, because too few men could find and properly stimulate the latch to open the hood. In honour of our dear friend who I absolutely know would have something to comment on an article about crap cars, I'll say that there was actually another car proposed that year, the Ford Bellend, which was ultimately scrapped because it came before its time.
I've mentioned this before: the first time I saw a wankpanzer in the wild, it was parked next to a building being renovated, and I thought it was the dumpster placed there to haul off the debris.