Demand for the angular electric pickup has continued to falter in the first quarter, making room for a new king.
The Tesla Cybertruck has lost the top spot on the list of best-selling electric pickup trucks in the United States. After finishing 2024 as a best-seller, Tesla’s only pickup has fallen to second place in the first quarter of this year.
After the first three months, the Cybertruck had amassed 7,126 registrations. The Ford F-150 Lightning overtook it with 7,913 registrations, according to the most recent data from S&P Global Mobility. The Chevrolet Silverado EV finished the first quarter in third place, followed by the GMC Sierra EV, Rivian R1T and GMC Hummer EV.
Tesla’s always been more hype than actual good products
It was EVER? 🤔
News on car sales are always presented as monthly or by quarter.
That way, everyone gets a participation trophy by breaking the records in the period that they actually deliver a new model to the tarmac.
I don’t blame the news outlets. Reporting on record car sales is kind of boring when the 1966 Toyota Corolla is still the most sold car.
I have no doubt that Tesla actually managed to peak for a while in the category “American sales of electric pick-ups trucks”.
It wasn’t then, sure. But it also isn’t now.
I feel like the F-150 Lightning not beating the wankpanzer out of the gate has more to do with ford production bottlenecks more than actual popularity.
And yet ford is still garbage.
Ford’s right shit but even the least reparable, shittiest built, oversized Ford is better than anything Tesla has built. Ford is a car company meanwhile Tesla is a stock manipulation scheme with a tech company paint scheme pretending to be a car company.
Also before anyone makes accusations I prefer pre-2005 Toyotas and 90s Chevy Jeeps, I fucking hate almost all modern cars.
And people who wants big truck also don’t care about ev’s. It doesn’t even make big noise and smoke.
I get the sentiment, but the braindead coal rollers are a pretty small minority. I don’t doubt there’s a demand for ev trucks, in fact the increased torque is pretty appealing, but one of the common concerns I’ve read is how towing anything substantial kills their range. This evaluation showed all trucks tested attaining less than half their non-towing range. Probably still enough for folks towing to the next town over and back, but it’d give me pause if I was hauling equipment to a worksite an hour or so away.
for me, I wish there were a reasonable sized, 2 door EV pickup with an 8’ bed. I don’t want an SUV with a tiny bed but it seems that even in ICE vehicles, they only want to make gigantic 4 doors with small beds. You can find actual pickups but they’re kind of rare.
Didn’t realize the Cybertruck was selling at all. In the last three years since it went on sale, I can count on one hand the amount of Cybertrucks I’ve seen in person.
I live near Sacramento and I see multiple of these shit piles daily. Never fails to make me laugh either. Can’t get over just how fucking dumb they look. The trucks look stupid too.
Shout out, Elk Grove resident here!
Auburn here but work in sac mostly
They were all over Southern California as well last time I was there.
Yeah there’s no lack of idiots with more money than sense here.
Come here to Texas. They are fucking everywhere.
Or Arizona
They’re riding high off the early adopter sales spike, and now it’s dropping fast.
I see them annoyingly frequently in my part of Texas, although I guess my experience is skewed, because I live near their factory in Austin and I also travel for work.
The number of cars they’ve left rotting in the factory’s back yard grows day by day, though. Which warms my heart.
I see at least 3 or 4 a day in Modesto. Seems everyone who bought them is in California. Specifically the central valley.
Before I left the US, I was seeing a good 2-3 per day
I had a Lightning. Loved the electric part. Hated the software. The Sync 4 system is crap. Constantly locking up or not connecting. The intellisense cruise sucked. It constantly misread signs. Bluecruise worked when it wanted. The instument cluster went blank for a while. These are all known and documented. They sync issue is not isolated to the lightning. My dad’s 2021 f150 has the same system with the same problems. Ford has said “a fix is expected next quarter” for years now. Not that i will ever own a tesla anything.
I have such high hopes for the Slate.
I don’t want any fucking software. At all. I just want a regular-sized electric truck.
That’s going to be the question: is it regular size or tiny? As a larger guy not interested in a truck, this is a great idea and I was tempted to put down a deposit. However there are vehicles I can’t comfortably use and this could be one of them. Also, I like the customization bits but those didn’t have pricing so could make the vehicle much more expensive
Todays regular or 1980’s regular size?
Chevy Luv sized from the looks of the pictures.
Have you seen pics of it? It looks about the size of an old Toyota pickup.
Brushless DC motors are the most efficient way to make an EV. The controllers on those require software. Battery charge balancing also needs software; it’s dangerous to just feed voltage to lipos.
You can’t have anything like a modern EV without software of some kind. You can make a glorified golf cart, but its range/efficiency would be shit.
You could run basic brushless motor and BMC firmware on a 99 cent 8 bit Atmel ATMega 328. That code requires almost nothing to run. It’s all the extra shit baked in that needs all sorts of processing power.
I also want a basic barebones infotainment-delete vehicle that just has power windows,locks,AC, cruise, and 4x4/awd. I don’t want some proprietary gps system or a dashboard where I have to hit 3 menu buttons on a screen I have to look at, just to change a setting (how my wife’s car operates and it’s a complete shit user experience).
Going a step further, one could, with a bit of difficulty, build the logic out of discrete parts (or packaged ICs) and have it simply work as an electromechanical device. Like things in cars used to.
Complexity and propriety make for good income when it comes to fixing your broken fancy stuff; there’s a good incentive to keep it that way. I praise the companies that make long lasting, well designed, and serviceable goods.
You could run basic brushless motor and BMC firmware on a 99 cent 8 bit Atmel ATMega 328. That code requires almost nothing to run. It’s all the extra shit baked in that needs all sorts of processing power.
So what you’re saying is, there’s software.
Technically it’s not software, it’s firmware, because it’s a microcontroller that runs code directly.
To my point, you don’t need all the fancy bullshit that’s baked into the car, the actual control systems require very little compute power.
Firmware is just software. I’ve done this stuff, it’s all just software.
When it comes to writing code, perhaps. But specifically, I disagree on principle. There’s a big difference between Firmware embedded directly into ROM that requires nothing beyond the MCU to run, versus Software that requires both a host environment to compute it, host hardware to store and manipulate it, and IO peripherals to make it useful. Totally opposite ends of the OSI model.
Did you really not know what they meant?
Yes, they don’t want any fucking software, at all. That’s a very absolute statement.
That response was part of a thread of conversation. That original post talked about shortcomings of the computer controlled displays and infotainment system. The prior post adds context the indicates the post you’re responding to was not making an absolute statement.
The ev part was great. It was all the other software that sucked. Most of that is shared among other fords.
Some day, car companies will figure out that they are software companies with a manufacturing arm.
They know it. That’s why they make such shit software, just like the big software companies
No they won’t. New companies like Tesla will show up and the old ones will be stuck in their ways until they die off.
At aome point the old companies will just buy the new ones.
Is the lighting using Android Automotive yet? (not to be confused with Android auto)
No, despite Ford’s claims, I don’t expect it to until the next gen F150s across the board make the switch.
Totally agree. That’s how most auto manufacturers roll. OTA updates are for maps and really critical bugs that could get them sued.
If your head unit is constantly crashing while you pick a song, they’ll let that slide.
I don’t know tbh. A search says they unveiled it for 2024. My lightning was a 2023.
Yeah, I think this vehicle is still Sync 4. Which, as I recall, is BlackBerry’s QNX operating system. (Yeah, I know.)
Ford is following Volvo and some other automakers and is migrating to Android Automotive because their existing OS is dog shit and is updated at a glacial pace.
Sync is awful and definitely not isolated.
I’ve had much better luck with uconnect.
Insane it’s still the 2nd most sold in USA, when the Heil gestures were January 20th.
I bet many Americans don’t even care about it, the failing sales are as much a result of how flawed Tesla cars are, both by design and in manufacturing.Of course we don’t have the stupid Cybertruck in Europe, but here Tesla sales are down 50% compared to last year. While USA only has managed a measly 13%!
Not many in USA are willing to do a lot to protect democracy?! 🙄
2nd most electric pickup. There’s limited competition. Just based on history, the F150 Lightning isn’t likely to reliquish the title now that it has it.
Obviously and also pickuptruck, I didn’t think it was necessary to repeat that.
I could see Slate giving the F-150 Lightning a run for its money in 2027.
Nah, even if it’s popular, there’s no way for them to make enough to compete with Ford. It would be years before they can get the capital investment to spin up that kind of output.
I have a deposit on a Telo, and they’re talking about a few thousand models in the first year. I’m around 6000 on the list, and I don’t expect to get one until the second or third year of production. Ford sold over 7000 F150 Lightnings this past quarter, and their market is still growing.
77 million people voted for Trump.
I am not at all surprised people are buying cybertruck regardless of what shit Musk does.
Have you seen who they elected to rule their country in the past… Forever?
First, I would like a Ford F-150 Lightning. I looked at one once but there’s no way I could afford it.
The other think I wanted to say is, GMC Hummer EV…? An EV Hummer? Really? Who is buying these? Someone who feels the need to take up as much space and use as many resources as possible but still wants to hang out with the cool kids who want to save the planet?
Plus, it is still a ford. Hard pass.
Hummer EV is a halo car. They’re intended as “hey, look at me!” and nothing more. Its 0-60mph time is listed near an Ariel Fucking Atom. Which isn’t just ridiculous on its face, but seems downright dangerous considering the weight and driver visibility of a Hummer.
Best headline I saw for it was “the EV for people who hate EVs”.
Its headlights were above the roof of my veloster, and then there was another foot above that to the hood…
The electric Hummer is close to 100k starting price. Only people with fuck you money are going to buy it so it tracks.
Have you sat in a Lightning before? I liked a lot of aspects of it, but after sitting in one, it is HUGE. My guess is that it’s at least as big or bigger than the EV Hummer. I wish they had one that was in similar size to the F150 of the nineties.
I see the Hummer EV once or twice each day I commute. When you spot it, other than it screaming that the owner is a huge douche, it gives you that “jesus, that’s a massive tank filling up that lane” feeling. The F150 does not. It looks like all the other large passenger trucks on the road. So, maybe the Ford is longer or something, but that Hummer is deffo bigger. And obscene. I do not like them.
They’re making the ranger, who knows when that will go electric though. I’ve been really happy with my Rivian, it’s an R1T and I only leased it because buying a Gen1 electric is insane but I think Rivian has what it takes to be a real contender and it is smaller than the lighting
No I haven’t, actually. I was stopped by the price-tag before I ever got near one. I didn’t realize they were that big.
It’s 1:1 size to an ice f150. I liked it on test drive, but wanted a much smaller truck, or at least cheaper
The Slate truck might be something you’re interested in, the reservation price is super low
Looks good but I’ll wait till I can test drive one.
Remember the whole off-grid and prepper movement people love EVs and have a good number of people where the environment is just not a priority.
I imagine people thinking they’re gonna be the king in a mad max apocalypse are buying those
I’m something of a prepper I suppose.
Preppers who buy vehicles specifically for doomsday are buying pre-catalytic converter trucks that guzzle fuel but have a reputation for reliability, ease of maintenance, and resistance to EMP events. There is a level of distrust for newer manufacture vehicles, which is not wholly unwarranted.
There’s some movement towards accepting ebikes and electric dirtbikes, though. You even see those in the Ukraine war.
The kids who want to save the planet are on bikes and trains…and a few Amish horse and buggy types.
Edit: not evs, unless you mean a bus.
I just want a small pickup with a 4cyl. Like a Mazda B series or VW Rabbit pickup.
I don’t need to tow trains. I don’t need to haul tonnage. I just want a small truck to do normal truck things that I can actually work on when it breaks.
The $20k compact EV pick up by Slate (new start up) may be of interest https://electrek.co/2025/05/12/slates-20k-electric-pickup-suv-100k-reservations/
It’s no frills, there isn’t even a center console to speak of
What sold me was the manual crank roll-up windows, which is a no-frills option I’ve wanted back in vehicles for almost two decades now.
That and would someone please bring back fly windows.
It also doesn’t exist yet. I’m very skeptical that it’s going to be actually offered at the $27,500 price point.
Deliveries expected in Q4 2026, which means we’ll probably get a few trucks rolling out in their premium price point in early 2027, and maybe get some of the base models in 2028.
I also don’t see a backup camera screen (might be one in the rear view, but they don’t say) which means it can’t be sold as advertised. They list a whole bunch of customization stuff, which means it’s going to need a lot of modification hard points, how is it going to handle crash tests and rollover tests?
They’re early specs are wildly out of line with current offerings, which means they either need an unprecedented team of engineers, or it’s not going to be even close to how it’s listed when actually sold.
We put in a preorder for a Telo. It’s more expensive, but the extra range alone makes it worthwhile.
My wife drives a Mini EV, which has around the same range as the base Slate. It’s enough to get them to work, but I had to do a long range trip a while back and I’d never choose to do that again.
We really like our Ioniq 5 for longer road trips, the new models come with an NACS port too. The lack of good CCS chargers has a draw back, but now it seems a simple adapter can enable supercharging with NACS
I had to do a long range trip a while back and I’d never choose to do that again.
What happened?
Needed to make two charge stops in the Chicago area. The first stop wasn’t too bad.
Second stop was a disaster. Went to a dealership, but you had to go inside and ask the staff to turn it on, but they were closed on a Sunday. Went to a casino resort that supposedly had a charger, but they had moved it to the employee-only lot after offering it to the public for awhile. Went to a grocery store, and the app wouldn’t work. Went to another grocery store, and that one finally did it.
Now, some of that is just bad charging infrastructure that can be fixed, but making two 30 minute stops on this journey isn’t ideal even if the chargers all worked properly. At 100 miles of range, you pretty much have to for this distance, and that’s only one way.
At around 200 miles of range, I wouldn’t have needed any stops on the way there, but would on the way back. At 350 miles, I could have made it there and back no problem. I think that 350 mile number is the sweet spot. If you calculate off 20% for cold weather and 30% to stay within the ideal 10-80% charge range, then you can still get far enough that you ought to be taking a 30 minute break, anyway.
That’s why I want a Prius. Plug in at home, burn gas when the battery is flat, still gets 50 MPG highway and city without grid power
I am really interested in seeing how Slate does and the cool things people, and possibly Slate itself, come up with to modify it.
If I needed a truck it would top my list of options.
I’m in more or less the same boat, so I’m waiting to see if the Slate truck lives up to the expectations. On paper it seems like a great solution: under 30K, small electric customizable pickup. It remains to be seen if Slate can actually deliver. Hopefully that question is answered before my current vehicle breaks down to the point I can’t fix it anymore.
Plus those were some of the best looking trucks.
Company name and model is truck or Txxx.
I want a Nissan hard body 80s early 90s. Small and useful for what I need. I don’t need to compensate for something else if you know what I mean.
You’re describing the Ford Maverick
Hyundai Santa Cruz.
I saw one a while ago and had to look them up.
Not sure how self repairable they are tho
i had a b2300 for like 15 years…that or the tacoma i have now would be what i drive in a zombie apocalypse
How about a small electric?
We’re at least 2 years out from seeing any on the road, much less generally available.
As much as I like my EV car, I understand why trucks are a much harder sell. It’s really difficult to get an electric truck to do everything a gas truck can do, and the demographic for trucks is very different than cars.
Not sure what it’s going to take to change this trend, maybe they need to stop selling “do everything” trucks and focus on work vans?
Most trucks have zero reason to be as big as they are.
Slate has been getting a shit ton of advertisements for just starting out and they seem suspect. But something that size with a hot swap battery would sell very well.
But Slate also swaps between a small “kei truck”, cargo van, “SUV”, and hatchback.
It’s all modular kits attached to the base truck.
They don’t have hot swap batteries tho.
Slate has been getting a shit ton of advertisements for just starting out and they seem suspect.
Bezos can pay for a lot of publicity.
Are you getting your billionaires confused? That’s easy. They’re all reprehensible in one way or another.
Ah. Thanks!
Most trucks are the size they are because US fuel economy standards scale inversely with the size of the vehicle. It’s hard to make a 45mpg small truck, but large trucks only need to hit 22mpg so poof, all your trucks are now big trucks.
It’s not just that, they literally get bigger every year because it’s a figurative dick measuring contest.
They didn’t just hit that limit and stop, they continue to get larger
Removable batteries aren’t going to happen. The extra mechanical parts needed to make it happen take up space that could be more battery. This isn’t a couple of AA batts, here; the voltage and weight mean everything has to be chonky.
Doubly so for a company like Slate that wants to keep things cheap. They need to pick existing parts off the shelf as much as possible. Removable EV battery parts don’t exist.
Smaller EV pickups would probably work well as the Range used to and the Maverick is currently. Economic haulers of miscellaneous bullshit. All my local NAPAs have phased out Colorados for Mavericks. Many pest control trucks are also Mavericks here now, too. These compact rummage haulers have historically been more of a local vehicle rather than a long distance traveler. I assume the problem is that the monetary cost of EV tech and the space required for batteries is better blended into larger vehicles. F150s were already hovering around 60kUSD average with a range of like 45-110. So, for now, as evidenced by the general lack of even gas compact pickups, ev pickups are large.
As a compromise of cost, limited bullshit hauling needs, and range for a “do it all” commuter, the Maverick hybrid may very well be in my near future. I don’t actually have much range anxiety because I know the most my commuter must do is 45 miles/day, but I’m trying to not rely on my spouse’s car for every potential trip. The Maverick seems like it has just enough utility without penalizing me for it. What I need most at this point is ease of transport of 4ft wide and/or 8ft long wood, which is not really feasible in a typical hatch or suv. Maverick owners boast about that capability, even coming from Rangers and such
Not having really researched the topic, I understand electric vehicles in general have more torque and power than ICE vehicles. Given that the major brands have made EV trucks that have very similar packaging to their ICE counterparts, the only holdback is the range and charging anxiety. For anyone not towing heavy loads long distances, an EV truck should be more than capable as a work truck, and in some ways even more capable (job site power) or preferable (maintenance cost reduction and fleet charging at the office) over their counterparts.
Edit: there is a second holdback of the “my truck absolutely needs to make smog and noise because I’m insecure about myself” crowd.
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