Tesla Cybertruck Loses Sales Lead to Ford. It Was Always Going to Happen
Apparently, there's far less pent-up demand for Tesla's electric pickup truck than its boosters predicted. The post Tesla Cybertruck Loses Sales Lead to Ford. It Was Always Going to Happen appeared first on The Drive.
The Tesla Cybertruck may have entered the 2025 electric pickup race in pole position, but the advantage it had last year has already evaporated, analysts said earlier this week after tabulating vehicle registrations for the first quarter of the year. So far, it’s not the Tesla, but the old-fashioned F-150 Lightning leading the battery-powered pickup sales charts.
The advantage was not immense—Tesla accounted for 7,126 new registrations to the Lightning’s 7,913, Automotive News says—but Tesla boosters may find cause for concern in the truck’s overall trajectory. A sales rate of ~7,150 per quarter puts the Cybertruck on pace for fewer than 30,000 total sales in 2025, which would be a drop of nearly 40% from its first year on the market.
Politics aside, this has been a challenging sales environment for Tesla’s aspirational electric truck. Not only did its initial sales fall dramatically short of the company’s widely publicized reservation figures, but Tesla also faced the embarrassment of being publicly confronted with its sales shortfall when it was compelled to share delivery data as part of a recall earlier this year—a campaign some owners and fans say is still putting a drag on the company’s deliveries.
Tesla’s total share of EV sales has been slipping for the better part of a year, forcing the company to find sales in a steadily narrowing slice of the broader market. Second place is still nothing to sneeze at, granted. Most automakers would kill to have the second-most-popular pickup truck in virtually any segment of the U.S. market. Generally speaking, that’s an advantageous (and profitable) position, and Tesla can certainly pat itself on the back for beating out several established competitors—the Chevrolet Silverado EV, GMC Sierra EV, and the Rivian R1T.
If Tesla can hang on to any good news here, it’s that it is still doing better than Stellantis. Conspicuously absent from that list, Ram’s electrified entries remain stuck in development hell with a 2027 on-sale date now being floated. But hey, at least we might get the Hemi back before the year is out?
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The post Tesla Cybertruck Loses Sales Lead to Ford. It Was Always Going to Happen appeared first on The Drive.
