I doubt it.
It’s stainless steel skin, which is hard to work, and the chassis is a single casting. If that’s damaged, the truck is totaled.
I mentioned in an early post that I was in charge of assembly lines that built components for the automotive industry. When something goes end of life, a standard calculation is made as to how many will be needed over the next ten years and they are required to either make them all and store them or retain the ability to produce them for ten years. Typically, you’d rather scrap or repurpose the equipment after making a final run or maybe you split the difference and run them for five years and then make a final run.
You are almost certainly right from the perspective of your industry, I’m mostly replying from the POV of someone who used to hand off a LOT of Total Loss claims to our specialty team when handling insurance claims.
I think we’re both right, just from different perspectives.
Agree completely.
8-10 years from now there will be more Cybertrucks in junkyards than on the road. Spare parts won’t be a problem.
ISTM the unsold unused fleet dwarfs the entire sold and operating fleet. That’s your 10 years of spare parts right there on the hoof so to speak. They just need to be stored carefully.
Modulo that I have no clue how much real world experience Tesla has with parts failures, as opposed to collision damage.
If there are now parts which are known to fail early, more can be made now to cover for the undesigned-for demand. But if some parts prove to be unexpectedly life-limited at some point in the future, there’s not a good way to make the required 10 years’ worth when that’s more than have ever already been made. And with near zero commonality with any other automotive product, Tesla or otherwise, those parts will be what retires the fleet early.
We get into the same problem in the aviation biz where after enough years, every functioning example of special part #123456 for some older airplane has been consumed even after X number of rebuilds, refurbishments, etc. And once there are no more Part 123456s, with very few exceptions all those airplanes are scrap even if the rest of each plane is in good shape.
Hmm. Ordinarily the ten year rule happens after a much longer lifecycle than a couple of years so you’ll have significantly more data on how long parts will last. As was noted, it will be more for crashes than wear most likely.
… and they still have the commercial layer in between to fine-tune supply and demand …
they might be on the hook to provide spare parts, but - at least to my knowlege - they can charge how much they please…
So, the price of the [ clears throat ] “Fetzer-valve” - which Tesla might be running short of - might just by chance go up from $1,000.00 to $6,969.00 … and henceforwardly fewer people might purchase them …
So let the market’s invisible hand help sort things out.
Looks like a lot of Cybertruck buyers are going to get bitch-slapped.
Who knew invisible hands could sting that much?
the 3-stooges-eye-poke springs to mind
Oh, wiseguy, huh?
Nyuk nyuk nyuk!
Quiet, you.
This is my thought, too. Add in all the parts in the cars that get totaled due to high repair costs, and i think there will be plenty of used parts knocking around.
One of my friends was an early adopter of a Tesla … I forget which, but one of the popular ones. It was sideswiped recently when it was parked on the street, and the insurance company totaled it. He’s now driving a Kia. (Still all electric, despite not having a place to charge at home.) But his totaled car was still drivable. Lots of useful parts there.
It turns out my premise was flawed.
Google AI informs me that some 70 to 85% of CTs ever built have been sold to somebody. The wide variance is attributable to both normal vagaries in industry sales reporting and to the evidence that something around 20% of all sales are “sales” to other musk-controlled companies.
Assuming e.g. SpaceX or whoever is actually driving them, not just storing or crushing them, they would still represent vehicles accumulating normal wear and tear through use plus exposure to accident damage. And as such would not represent my assumed source for pristine spare parts on the hoof.
Sorry to mislead folks.
Google AI's Research Results
Tesla has manufactured close to 71,000 Cybertrucks since production began in late 2023. Of those vehicles, roughly 61,000 have been sold/delivered, while more than 10,000 remain unsold and are sitting in inventory lots across the United States. [1, 2, 3]
The Breakdown
- Total Manufactured: ~71,000 vehicles.
- Total Sold / Registered: ~61,000 vehicles. (Industry estimates from automotive research groups like Kelley Blue Book and S&P Global Mobility place total cumulative sales at roughly 70,788 units. However, this includes thousands of trucks that are technically “unsold” to the public, as outlined below).
- Total Unsold Inventory: 10,000+ vehicles. This stagnant backlog represents an estimated $800 million in tied-up inventory. [1, 2, 3, 4]
The “Internal” Sales Asterisk
A significant caveat to Tesla’s sales figures is that nearly 1 in 5 Cybertrucks registered recently did not go to regular consumer buyers. Because consumer demand stalled heavily following its initial launch window, Tesla began offloading its excess inventory internally. Reports indicate that thousands of unsold Cybertrucks have been purchased by and delivered to other companies Elon Musk controls, primarily SpaceX and xAI. [1, 2]
Due to these steep sales declines and mounting unsold inventory, Elon Musk officially announced that Tesla will wind down and end Cybertruck production by mid-2027 to pivot factory capacity toward the upcoming Cybercab. [1, 2]
Not exactly related to the above but adjacent …
Any time any vehicle model ends up with a truncated production run, the issue of spare parts comes up shortly thereafter. Although people can certainly buy and install junkyard parts on their own, most insurance companies are reluctant to authorize (read “pay for”) repairs using them for fear of their own liability for any later problems.
I don’t know how the insurance industry (or the aftermarket warranty repair industry) resolves this conundrum when used parts become the main (or only) source while the vehicles are still new enough that many / most are insured / warranteed.
If it becomes widely known that insurers won’t pay for junkyard parts and those are (nearly) the only kind, many CT owners will jettison their comprehensive / collision coverage. Which they may do anyhow if the resale value has also tanked.
I don’t see any reason to assume that. I think the other companies bought them mostly to prop up the image of the cybertruck, not because they had a need for them.
For sure the reason they bought them was simple: musk said so. Economic logic be damned.
But once they were stuck with them, and we’re talking around 10K vehicles, their own management presumably had some discretion in what to do with them next (other than promptly dump them on the used market). Some small number can be used as company fleet vehicles around their various factories and whatnot. They could also offer more of them as company cars to a lot of employees. Both of those things would be cheaper, and hence more attractive to management, than renting (and securing) giant storage yards to park them nose to tail indefinitely.
I touched on this upthread, but a bit more detail as it applied when I was an adjuster (Please remember I only worked for two carriers, and each did things somewhat differently, and this is more than a decade ago now!) -
If you want repairs done through a carrier affiliated shop, you normally get quite a few guarantees of repair quality and performance, sometimes as much as 5 years for the parts and labor. In exchange, the carrier demands a degree of fixed pricing from the shop, and parts - generally with the assumption of “like kind and quality”. For a vehicle less than a year old, it was new OEM more often than not. But after a year, certified used OEM parts or some non-OEM new parts would be common, as long as they met all the OEM specifications.
If you instead chose to go with your own particular shop, or a shade-tree mechanic who would do it on the cheap for you (or a professional shop as a trade or friend of friends deal), the procedure was very different.
If your vehicle was not a total loss (and those costs were determined by saying what the cost would have been to do a repair at an in-network shop), we’d generally say “This is how much it would cost us to repair. If you want to go somewhere else where their prices are higher or use only new OEM parts that’s your choice, but this is what we’re paying” and cut you a check.
What you do after taking that check is entirely up to the driver. Keep the money and drive the car if it’s functional. Keep the money and unload the damaged vehicle on the market, fine. Find someone who will kludge the damage as much as possible and keep any extra cash? Quite common.
At that point, the insurance carrier gives no promises about the quality of the parts and repairs and that’s all on the vehicle owner and possibly the mechanic that does the future repairs.
Though given Tesla’s requirements for care and treatment for the Cybertruck, you may well be voiding unknown numbers of service agreements if you don’t have it all done within their network or to their specifications, at their costs. So, yes, I’d expect the number of totals to skyrocket, as I mentioned earlier.
If SpaceX or wherever has them, they may as well use them. Some are certainly used as utility vehicles as intended and others just to drive across the campus. They can do that as well as a Honda Civic just at three times the price or whatever.