Happy Friday, and welcome to Critical Materials, your source for the biggest stories shaping the future of the auto industry.

Every Friday, we break down one big mobility story and recap the week’s must-read news on driverless cars, batteries, charging, and more.

Today, we kick things off with a take from InsideEVs Editor-in-Chief Mack Hogan on the demise of the Cybertruck and what went oh-so wrong for a vehicle Elon Musk once called Tesla’s best ever.

As always, for our news digest, skip down to 50% and beyond.

– Today’s email was written by Rob Stumpf and Mack Hogan, end edited by Tim Levin.

The Tesla Cybertruck is a failure. We’ve suspected this for quite some time, but CEO Elon Musk confirmed it on Thursday night. He announced that Cybertruck production will wind down next year, concluding after just over three years on the market. That seals its position as one of the greatest automotive failures in history.

That means it’ll live about as long as Ford’s Edsel—an automotive flop so epic that I learned about it in my high school history class.

What a tremendous waste. Let’s break down what went wrong.

If you haven’t seen it in a while, I recommend reading InsideEVs’ original story about the Tesla Cybertruck reveal in 2019. The event stirred up quite a bit of buzz, as Musk promised to fundamentally reset the electric truck race. On stage, he touted a $40,000 starting price and some jaw-dropping specs:

All of this in an electric truck that would beat every established automaker to the market; Tesla projected an on-sale date of 2021 for the single- and dual-motor versions and 2022 for the tri-motor flagship.

Every single promise listed there was broken, except the 0-60 time, by far the least important metric for truck buyers. Worst were pricing and delivery dates. Deliveries did not begin until nearly three years after the promised date. The Foundation Series, tri-motor version cost a staggering $120,000. That’s three times what the base model was supposed to cost and $50,000 more than the originally promised $69,900 price for the tri-motor.

Even the base dual-motor version was ten grand north of where the flagship model was supposed to sit. A $60,000 rear-wheel-drive version arrived late and didn’t last long. The cheapest Cybertruck model at the end of its run was $82,000, over double the initially promised price. (Tesla has stopped taking orders for that version.)

None of these models came close to 500 miles of range, either. Its maximum EPA rating of 325 miles may have been good enough for daily driving, but in a truck market that values towing, it wasn’t enough to win over EV skeptics. When the Cybertruck launched in 2023, Tesla announced a drop-in battery pack for the bed that was supposed to boost range to 470 miles. But that feature was scuttled last year before making it to production.

While Tesla couldn’t deliver that range, publicly calling that pushed other truck-makers to develop long-range electric options. Tesla may not have ever delivered a truck with over 400 miles of range, but Rivian did. Chevy sells a Silverado with 493 miles of EPA range, all for about the same as the dual-motor Cybertruck.

Of course, it’s worth noting that Rivian, Ford, and Chevy haven’t had much success in the segment either. Fundamentally, the EV truck wars were kickstarted by Tesla and Ford promising $40,000 battery-electric trucks. At that price, going electric seemed like an obvious advantage.

Neither could deliver in reality. Chevy never quite promised it, and Rivian always targeted the high-end market, but the simple fact is that no electric truck built to date could match the pricing of gas-powered alternatives. Given real buyer concerns around range, towing, and infrastructure, that alone made these tough sells.

The Ford F-150 Lightning, the best-seller in the segment for its time, died almost as quickly as the Cybertruck. Ford had planned to build up to 150,000 Lightnings per year; real sales never surpassed 35,000 units annually. GM's electric trucks, meanwhile, have also struggled. The company originally planned to build hundreds of thousands of electric trucks across two factories. Those plans changed; it's only using one facility, Factory Zero, and demand has been low enough that the company has idled the plant for two of the last 13 months. It's no surprise, then, that the company has reportedly postponed its next-generation of electric trucks. All of this happened amid a broader EV market pullback, driven in part by regulatory changes.

But even among these market-wide disappointments, the Cybertruck stands out. Musk publicly said that the Cybertruck could sell 250,000 to 500,000 units per year on its own. That wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky promise from the simpler days of 2019, either; he said it in 2023, on the eve of first deliveries.

Tesla never got close to those numbers. Despite claiming over a million preorders, the company moved just 38,965 Cybertrucks during its first full year of sales in 2024, per Cox Automotive estimates. Sales dropped a staggering 48.1% in 2025, a brutal showing for only its second real year on the market.

I wasn’t surprised when those 2025 numbers came out. First, Musk had destroyed the brand of the Cybertruck, with his political meddling making it the poster child for a tech-bro hard-right pivot. But it also launched with a bunch of quality issues, missing features, and extremely questionable durability.

Its success was concentrated more with Tesla fans than traditional truck buyers; I’ve seen far more wrapped in promotional liveries for marijuana dispensaries than actually hauling work equipment or trailers. And while there are enough of those types to fill reservation lists and overrun coastal California with gold-wrapped trapezoids, there aren’t enough to make a dent in the real truck market.

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After all, this vehicle was supposed to herald the end of the gas-powered pickup era. Musk implied it would make the Ford F-150 irrelevant. The reality is that Ford is on track to sell over 800,000 F-Series trucks this year. Cybertruck sales, meanwhile, won’t clear 20,000 units. Oy.

None of this is surprising. Tesla delivered a product that came in years behind schedule. It underdelivered on almost every key spec at a price that was far higher than promised. Its novel production method drove up costs and contributed to high-profile quality issues. Its durability testing was clearly less rigorous than truck buyers expect, and its design was more polarizing than attractive. Meanwhile, the man behind it became politically toxic to the exact buyers most likely to go electric, and lost his interest in the human-driven car business altogether.

This failure lies primarily with him. Musk’s culture of promising before thinking, and lying without shame, created the culture that built one of the most overhyped and under-baked products in modern automotive history. Its failure will be studied for decades to come as an example of executive incompetence, just like the Edsel. That much is written.

What’s unclear is whether Tesla and Musk will learn from this experience, tempering the bluster and focusing on execution. It’s certainly possible, but after years of covering this story, I’m not holding my breath.

-Mack Hogan, Editor-in-Chief

Ferrari's polarizing Luce made a lot of people's heads spin (and not in a good way). But despite the publish backlash by purists and pundits alike, the exotic automaker issued a reassuring "sorry, haters" by selling out its entire allocation throughout 2027. We discuss on this week’s Plugged-In Podcast.

Tesla Cybertruck production will "wind down" next year, according to CEO Elon Musk. Tesla says that it's making room to scale out the Cybercab in its push for driverless cars.

BYD’s world-beating supercar is even faster now. The Yangwang U9 was already the world’s faster production car, beating out Bugattis and the like. This week, it went 312.6 mph, breaking its previous record.

If you've got a Chevy or Cadillac EV, listen up: there's a new recall you need to know about. GM has issued a safety recall for 67,380 cars over a software glitch that could cause brake failure.

EV sales in the UK continue to thrive. Registrations are up 54% year-over-year, and its latest numbers show that nearly a third of all sales were fully electric models.

Back in the States, the real winner of the EV race is the used car market. We've got the skinny on the fastest-selling used EVs in recent months.

As for Volvo? Well, it's not doing so hot in the U.S. A lack of demand and profitability crisis is hitting hard, and with a customer sentiment at a "50-year low," according to the Swedes, it's rethinking how it sells cars in America.

The Toyota RAV4 Plug-In Hybrid just got a big update: NACS charging ports and 50-kW DC charging across the lineup.

China's stronghold on the EV battery ecosystem is iron-tight. Despite U.S. manufacturers winding down many of its planned battery plants over the last two years, America still wants to build a robust domestic supply chain. 

EVgo has begun using Tesla's Supercharger for Business program to help fuel its rapid fast charging expansion across the U.S. The first station went live this week in Chicago, and EVgo says hundreds more Supercharger stalls are coming to its network.

New BMW EV buyers will get $500 in free public charging. The i5, i7, and iX3 (2027 model year only) will receive the promotional credits, including $200 in credits exclusive to Ionna.

Some Volkswagen EVs will soon get battery preconditioning. Other EV owners have had this feature for years, but ID.4 owners have been on the charging struggle bus for some time. Finally, some good news for fast charging in the winter!

Waymo is ending its exclusivity deal with Uber in Atlanta and Austin starting in 2028, Bloomberg first reported.

Uber also revealed how quickly it plans to scale up its robotaxi fleet: 2,000-plus vehicles by the end of next year, about a tenth of what Waymo is reportedly planning.

Owning a connected car might feel like the opposite of privacy. Ford wants to change that by making its future vehicles able to opt-out of data sharing and offering a "quasi-80s mode" to dumb-down even the smartest of cars.

BMW is ready to take on Tesla’s FSD. Starting next year, it will bring navigation-guided level 2 driver assistance to city environments. The rollout starts in Germany, before hitting other markets.

Autonomous car companies are split—some look to replace drivers altogether in the name of profit (like ride sharing and freight companies), while others want to bring the convenience of personal autonomy to the car in your driveway. Nio says neither is the right approach, and that car companies need to target road safety instead.

-Rob Stumpf

On this week’s Plugged-In Podcast, we’re joined by Ray Minjares, the heavy duty vehicles program director at the International Council on Clean Transportation for a deep dive into EV trucks and buses.

Thanks for reading Critical Materials. See you next week!