Tesla’s Cybertruck backlog is depleted – can now be ordered without reservation

The Tesla Cybertruck is now open for orders to anyone – whether or not you were one of its millions of reservation holders.

Tesla first revealed the Cybertruck in 2019, and the unconventional vehicle attracted lots of interest – measured by the number of reservations the vehicle got.

At the time, Tesla was taking refundable $100 deposits to reserve a place in line to order the truck when it came out, which had a promised release date of late 2021 and starting price of $39,900.

Plenty of people decided to throw a few bucks into the pot, and the Cybertruck managed to tally over 250k pre-orders in less than a week, later reaching a peak of potentially 2 million reservations according to crowdsourced data.

But when the truck hit the road, things didn’t go exactly as planned. The vehicle came out late and over budget, also missing some of the specs that were originally promised. The first available “Foundation Series” models started at $100k – a far cry from the promised entry-level $40k.

But despite that, it’s still selling relatively well, becoming the best-selling electric pickup in the US and the third best-selling EV with a very high average transaction price, bringing in a good chunk of change for the company.

And recently, Tesla started taking orders for a “cheaper” model starting at “just” $79,990, which should open it up to even more sales. Tesla previously said a future $61k base RWD model would eventually be available, but recently removed that from its website.

So with sales going well and a new lower price point, the controversial truck seems to be getting off to a good start… or does it?

We’ve seen reports all along that Tesla was working through the Cybertruck backlog pretty fast, with Foundation series models quickly becoming available with little lead time. That’s part of why the $80k trim came into being.

But even though that new lower price point only came available two weeks ago, it’s already available for near-instant delivery, and with no need to have a 5-year-old reservation.

Today, Tesla changed its “Design your Cybertruck” page to allow anyone to configure a vehicle and order it now. The site now says “Order Now,” where just a couple weeks ago reservation holders were waiting for invites to be able to configure their vehicles. Availability is listed as October-November – so, basically, a month or less if you order today.

Accompanying this change is the end of the Foundation Series, the limited-edition early trim, which is no longer available as of today.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla’s quick ramp of the Cybertruck has been impressive. It’s outselling similarly-expensive vehicles that have been in the market and ramping for years now. This shows that Tesla remains in a dominant position in the EV market (thanks to it actually taking EVs seriously, which other automakers aren’t).

But the fact that a 2 million-strong reservation list has been worked through so quickly is troubling.

While we don’t know exact numbers, Tesla has sold something on the order of 30,000 Cybertrucks so far. And if the company had 2 million reservations, that means it has only converted 1.5% of those into sales.

There are surely a number of reasons for this, and probably chief among them is the change in pricing. The Cybertruck currently costs twice as much as promised, which is going to turn off a lot of potential buyers.

The F-150 Lightning saw something similar when a base model was originally promised at $40,000 but that price never saw the light of day. That too turned off a lot of buyers, and Lightning sales have been less impressive than hoped for ever since.

And the Lightning could be another reason for the Cybertruck’s lack of conversions – at the time it was announced, it was supposed to beat other electric pickups to market. It ended up coming out after several other models, so there are now other more traditional options available that buyers can choose from.

But there’s another reason that I think may be part of it: the tarnished sheen on Tesla lately, concomitant with its CEO’s increasingly bizarre behavior. This has turned off a lot of customers from its vehicles, and this effect is perhaps more apparent with the Cybertruck.

While the Model 3 and Y are common vehicles that are seen as “normal,” the Cybertruck is quite clearly a “statement vehicle.” That statement is heavily tied to the persona of the CEO who pushed such a, let’s say, “iconic” vehicle into the market – and thus, the more bizarre that CEO’s behavior, the more customers may not want to be associated with that statement.

At the very least, I can’t imagine it helps – and a 1.5% conversion rate certainly shows that some part of the strategy hasn’t been a tremendous commercial success.

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