I mean, plenty of people are selling their cybertrucks in flagrant violation of the provision, the market is extremely liquid and the clearing price is approaching the retail price which is an indication that the pre-order queue is almost exhausted.
In reality, Tesla is not going to actually sue anyone who sells their cybertruck, the bad PR fallout far outweighs any benefit they would receive. The only real lever they have is the nebulous promise that they can find the people who are reselling and ban them from buying future Teslas.
Tesla arrogantly assumed that demand for the Cybertruck would be so high that the market price for them would be $200 - $300K for multiple years and therefore it became a status symbol to those who owned them that they had an “in” with Tesla which would self-reinforcingly justify the price. They thought they could play with the big boy luxury manufacturers who don’t even let you buy one of their special edition cars unless you’ve bought several of their lower tier cars first, hence the language about how they’ll sever their relationship with you if you have the temerity to let go of your car for mere money.
Instead, the opposite is happening. The initial cybertruck resale market was fairly quiet as people were afraid of the resale provision but as the sale prices started drifting lower and lower, all of the speculators who bought the car as an investment rather than to drive realized that Tesla couldn’t sue them all and started fleeing towards the exit before their cars became massively depreciated, dropping the price even further and reinforcing the feedback loop.
The thing is, apart from a small minority of people, even very wealthy people making a $100K purchase decision are very influenced by depreciation projections. If you put your name in the queue for a cybertruck 4 years ago and think you can buy it for $100K now and sell it for $120K 4 years later, then, in your mind, you’re basically driving a truck for free so why not take advantage of your place in the queue. If you think you’re buying it now for $100K and and it’s going to be $45K in 4 years, then why the fuck am I in the queue, lemme just wait a few months to buy it retail when I have more info.
Given that we know exactly how many cybertrucks are on the road now (given they had to recall all of them for the steering pedal issue) and how many pre-orders Tesla is boasting about, and how close the 2nd hand price is to the retail price, I’m imagining they’re seeing horrific numbers of people choose not to take delivery and the queue shrinking at an alarming rate every single day.
The problem for Tesla is that perception can become reality very severely. Part of your calculus for buying a cybertruck is how many people you think will want a used cybertruck at the time you’re prepared to sell it and if you think it’s not many, then you won’t buy it, leading to other people to perceive noone wants it leading to even less people buying it. Fisker just faced this same challenge where news of their instability meant that plenty of people started dumping their Fiskers because they didn’t want to deal with a car from a bankrupt company which meant that more people interested in Fiskers were picking them up on the used market which meant that it was hard to move new Fiskers which lead to further bad press until they ultimately went insolvent.
