Tesla is now providing a free-for-life supercharger for Foundation series Cybertrucks purchased as stock vehicles, suggesting that it is struggling to get rid of very limited edition vehicles.
Tesla has often introduced vehicles with a limited-edition early series, such as the Founders’ and Signature series for early Roadsters, Model S and Model X. It didn’t do the same for the more everyman-focused Model 3 and Y, but brought back the practice for the Cybertruck with the Foundation series.
The Foundation Series is a full-featured debut model with a $20,000 markup on base costs and adds several default options. Delivery began at the end of November 2023.
The vehicle sold well, and while Tesla’s limited editions typically only last a few months and a few thousand vehicles, the Foundation series went on for nearly a year, as Tesla only began accepting non-Foundation configurations in October. As a result, Tesla sold around 30,000 Cybertrucks Foundation Series, far more than its previous limited editions.
But eventually, the number of consumers willing to pay more than $100,000 for a truck advertised with a base value of $40,000 has dried up, and Tesla now wants to find creative tactics to remove those cars from inventory.
Recently, Electrek reported that Tesla is even going to the lengths of buffing Foundation series badges off of trucks and then sending them to Canada to sell them as non-Foundation trucks.
Even that, however, seems not to have been enough, as Tesla is now taking the limited amount of Cybertrucks left in inventory and offering free lifetime supercharging for those who purchase them – a perk that original Foundation series trucks did not get.
Lifetime supercharging is an old advantage that Tesla introduced in its early days, either to incentivize acquisition or because it’s easier than building a payment formula around a network they had just built. The advantage went through several iterations, but it eventually became too big and Tesla ended the era of free lifetime supercharging in 2018.
However, it recently regained the advantages of promoting Model S stock amid a sharp drop in Model S sales, and it looks like Tesla is willing to reopen the Pandora’s box of loose supercharging if cases call for it. And now, two weeks after doing this for Model S vehicles, it does it for Cybertrucks as well.
You can locate those cars on Tesla’s online stock page and search for cars near you. Currently, there are 7 available here in Southern California; not many, but this is just one region of the country.
To qualify, you’ll need to purchase a new Cybertruck Foundation Series after December 27, 2024, which means that original Foundation Series owners who were the first to spend $120,000 on this truck won’t get retroactive advantages from this advantage. Free Supercharge benefits are tied to your Tesla account and are not transferable to any other user or vehicle.
You still have to pay idle and congestion fees at Superchargers, and you can’t use the car to run a taxi service (as the original Tesloop round trip service did, which was one of the reasons the car disappeared. original benefit).
Finally, a Cybertruck purchased this way is not eligible for the Powershare coupon included with other Foundation Series trucks. So it turns out you’re trading off some perks (although Powershare can end up costing much more than that, for some installations).
This is another sign that Tesla isn’t seeing quite as much demand as once expected for the polarizing vehicle.
After it was first unveiled in 2019, the Cybertruck managed to tally over 250k pre-orders in less than a week, later reaching a peak of potentially 2 million reservations according to crowdsourced data.
But when the truck hit the road, things didn’t go exactly as planned. The vehicle was launched late and over budget, and also lacked some of the originally promised specifications. The first “Foundation Series” styles to hit the market started at $100,000, a far cry from the promised starting price of $40,000. It’s now available for a base value of $79,000, but a long-term base rear-drive model promised for $61,000 recently disappeared from Tesla’s website.
Despite all this, it is still the best-selling electric pickup truck in the United States and the third best-selling electric vehicle with a very high average transaction price, which represents a good replacement percentage for the company.
I don’t see this newest incentive helping to move leftover FS inventory. The $100k/$120k Cybertruck’s will be extremely tough to move after January 1st, 2025, just 2 days away.
I don’t see a wealthy customer getting excited about an FS truck collecting dust in the back of a service center with a VIN assembled months ago. The VINs of the latest Cybertruck are around 60. xxx.
But nevertheless, demand seems much lower than the sky-high expectations for the vehicle. That ~2 million vehicle backlog only lasted for about 30,000 vehicles, when Tesla started allowing orders without a reservation in October.
Tesla also recently shut down its Cybertruck line for 3 days and has not made any public comments as to why. Several theories have been floated as to why, but at a time when Cybertruck sales don’t seem to be going as planned despite it being a critical time for the company in terms of deliveries, a sudden stop is suspicious.
But given the Cybertruck’s polarizing design, high price, and its clear association with Elon Musk who is becoming more and more distasteful by the day, it’s not a big surprise that there are fewer customers for the vehicle than projections might have suggested 5 years ago.
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Jameson has been driving electric cars since 2009, and covering EVs, sustainability and policy for Electrek since 2016.
You can contact him at jamie@electrek. co.