- Tesla is offering 0% APR financing on the Cybertruck.
- The move comes amid slipping global sales and is the first big end-of-quarter incentive for the model.
- Sales of the Tesla Cybertruck continue to be weaker than expected when compared to the number of total reservations.
It’s almost the end of a quarter, so you know what that means: it’s fire sale season at Tesla.
Right now, the automaker is putting Cybertrucks on a fire sale—but rather than give them a big discount, the automaker is instead subsidizing interest. That means you can finance Tesla’s stainless steel doorstop at 0% APR, so long as you take delivery by the end of the month and also buy a significantly expensive add-on.
Photo by: Tesla
Here’s the gotcha: in order to qualify for Tesla’s 0% financing offer, you also need to equip the Cybertruck with Full Self-Driving.
FSD isn’t free. It’s an $8,000 upgrade add-on which, admittedly, is cheaper than interest over the life of a 60-month auto note. At 5.54% (the rate Tesla quotes on its site), the subsidized interest offsets the total cost of the loan between $11,475 and $15,891, depending on the trim level financed.
It’s also important to point out that if you want any form of lane keeping in your Cybertruck, you’ll need to purchase FSD. It turns out that Tesla officially removed the Autosteer lane-keeping functionality from its base Autopilot suite last month and made it a part of FSD instead. Early versions of the owner’s manual promised both Traficc-Aware Cruise Control and Autosteer as part of its base Autopilot suite; however, sometime in October 2024, it quietly changed the Cybertruck’s manual and removed references to Autosteer.
Basically, if you want your Cybertruck to have Autosteer, you’ll have to fork over another $8,000 anyway.
You might be wondering why Tesla is trying to sell off Cybertrucks like it’s peddling a mattress as part of a summer holiday sale. It turns out that these hunks of metal aren’t selling as well as a vehicle with nearly two million supposed pre-orders should.
And that five-year backlog Tesla expected? Well, that’s not so much of an issue for buyers anymore. As Electrek points out, Tesla currently has an estimated 3,700 unsold units—about $300 million—sitting in parking lots. Perhaps that’s why Tesla reportedly shut down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas for a week.
This move could convince some fence-sitters to finally bite. For others, it’s just another nail in the cybercoffin that even CEO Elon Musk himself once admitted could “flop.”
Tesla still needs to overcome other issues that could be pulling buyers away. For instance, the failure to deliver the range or price of the Cybertruck that it originally promised. There’s also the problem of brand damage caused by Musk’s political meddling, which, ironically, has finally blown up (and very publicly at that).