Congratulations, Cybertruck! You finally outsold the DeLorean.
If you want to know how many Cybertrucks Tesla has sold, just wait for the next recall.
Two months ago, Elon Musk's extremely angular EV was recalled because a pad on the accelerator came off, thanks to the soap used, and jammed the pedal to the medal. Result: all 3,878 Cybertrucks then on U.S. roads had to go back to the dealers. And the whole world learned just how many had been sold in the first six months.
Given that Musk has been predicting — nay, betting the future of the company on — 250,000 Cybertruck sales a year, this number was almost as embarrassing as the soapy pedal pad itself. Releasing it via a recall was about as unforced as errors get.
But with the latest Cybertruck recall, this time thanks to the windshield wiper, there's good news on sales! Well, not good news if you're a Cybertruck owner who now has to worry about both soap and rain. But good-ish news for Tesla: this time, they're recalling 11,688!
In other words, now that the accelerator definitely won't turn it into a death trap, an extra 7,810 Americans have been convinced that this child's idea of a car is the truck for them. And that has nudged the Cybertruck past an important milestone: More have sold in eight months than DeLorean Motor Company sold in its entire three years of existence.
If you don't know the DeLorean ... well first of all yes you do, it was the time machine with the weird gull-wing doors in Back to the Future. That hit movie, alas, arrived two years too late for John DeLorean and his troubled company.
Just under 10,000 were sold between 1981 and 1983, when DeLorean went bankrupt. Reportedly, more than 6,000 of them are still on the road today.
The DeLorean was the last beautifully-designed stainless steel vehicle ever put on the market. Then came the Cybertruck, which is also made of stainless steel. To be fair, both companies found out how incredibly difficult it is to work with that material, and both were accused of shoddy production.
So with nearly 12,000 sales, Cybertruck mania is off and running, right? Naysayers might point to Musk's sales goal, or they might wonder what happened to the two million alleged pre-orders. But hey, naysayers have no place in the new Tesla, where shareholders have so much blind faith in Musk they just voted to give him an extra $45 billion.
"If you want to know whether Cybertrucks are cool or not, ask a kid," Musk said at that shareholder meeting. "Kids have no filter, right?" Right! They also usually have no wallet. Not to mention an understanding of how much of a pain it is when your new vehicle has to keep going back to the dealer.
The Cybertruck was also recalled this time because of a weird piece of trim in the truck bed that could fly off and hit other motorists. But hey, once you've got your new accelerator, your new wiper, and your new trim that won't kill anyone, what else could possibly go wrong? Just make sure you pay no attention to the stories about rust spots (just perfectly normal grime!) or software errors that can leave you stranded, or car washes that turn this truck into a stainless-steel brick.
And if you do, well ... maybe buy another one before the recall, to goose the sales figures? After all, given the massive drain on its accounts known as Elon Musk, Tesla needs all the cash you can give it.