Here's How Much Cybertrucks Have Depreciated Since They Were New
Vehicles lose value the more they are driven. No surprises there, right? However, there are Cybertruck owners who appear to have thought they were buying money-printing machines. In fact, very early in its pixelated life cycle, someone actually flipped and sold a limited edition Foundation Series Cybertruck for nearly twice its MSRP at $244,000.
The Cybertruck's value wasn't meant to last, though. The controversial truck from a controversial company run by a controversial man is subject to the law of gravity of depreciation as much as the next set of wheels. The question is, though, how much has it depreciated since the first geometric truck hit the streets?
We reported in 2024 that the overall Cybertruck depreciation curve is really quite poor. Now, CarGurus is showing even more of a drop in the past year from April 28, 2024 to April 29, 2025, which is the day of writing this article. In that time, Cybertruck prices went from $168,543 down to $84,470 -- a 49.96% decline. The past 30 days have seen a 5.51% drop. So, not great!
Read more: These Are The Fastest Depreciating Cars, So Buy Them Used And Save Thousands
Digging in a little further, according to TopSpeed, the average depreciation for all cars across three years (longer than the Cybertruck has even been out) is just 30.5%, and among pickup trucks specifically, it's just 23.7%. That puts the Cybertruck's near 50% decline in the last year in the far bottom tier for the category.
By contrast, according to Kelly Blue Book, a 2022 Rivian R1T, also an EV pickup truck, has only lost 39% of its starting price. KBB also says that the 2023 model of the great-granddaddy of all pickups, the Ford F150, has dropped a mere 33% in the same amount of time the Cybertruck has been around.
Predicting where prices will be in a few years is a bit tricky here, since unlike the F150, the Cybertruck is too new to have hard data on how it usually performs over the long term. However, TopSpeed estimates that it will fall by 59.5% in five years, and a whopping 72.5% in 10. Those numbers aren't surprising given the current state of the company's sales.
There are more storm clouds on the Cybertrucks' horizon, too, and they don't look good for resale value. Thanks to a recall earlier this year, we know that Tesla has only delivered around 46,000 Cybertrucks to date. While that number doesn't look too bad in a vacuum, CEO Elon Musk was initially claiming that he had over a million preorders for these low-res-looking trucks.
Worse, Tesla dealerships appear to be sitting on over $200 million worth of Cybertruck inventory that they just can't shift. Word is that things have deteriorated to the point where said dealerships won't even take Cybertrucks -- their own vehicles! -- as trade-ins anymore for fear they won't be able to sell them again. None of that is good for resale numbers, and pushing it down further is the simple fact that Tesla keeps slashing the price of new Cybertrucks, down to around $75,000 for a base model from an original price of $100,000.
Furthermore, the fact that political backlash against Musk's handling of the federal government bureaucracy has led to vandalism against Teslas, and particularly Cybertrucks, across the country. If a potential buyer is worried that a Tesla might be a target, they're not likely to buy a used one for a high price, if at all.
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The Washington Post did not lose licenses for any of stations, said Feldstein, author of 'Poisoning the Press,' a book about Nixon's relationship with the media. 'Trump is doing what Nixon would have liked to have done,' Feldstein said. 'Even Nixon didn't take it as far.' The differences between Nixon and Trump in their approach to federal enforcement and investigative power extends to their core motivations. Nixon, as Dean and other close observers of his presidency agree, wanted to retaliate against individuals or institutions he thought opposed or looked down on him. Trump certainly shares that inclination. But Trump's agenda, many scholars of democratic erosion believe, pushes beyond personal animus to mimic the efforts in authoritarian-leaning countries such as Turkey and Hungary to weaken any independent institutions that might contest his centralization of power. 'Although some of it was (motivated by) revenge, the huge difference here is most of what Nixon did was to protect himself, politically and personally,' said Fred Wertheimer, who served as legislative director of the government reform group Common Cause during the Watergate scandal. 'Trump is out to break our democracy and take total control of the country in a way that no one ever has before.' One telling measure of that difference: Trump is openly making threats, or taking actions, that Nixon only discussed in private, and even there with constant concern about public disclosure. Trump's willingness to publicly deliver these threats changes their nature in several important ways, said David Dorsen, an assistant chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee and former federal prosecutor. Simply exposing an individual or institution to such an open threat from the world's most powerful person, Dorsen noted, can enormously disrupt their life, even if the courts ultimately prevent Trump from acting on it — a point recently underscored by Miles Taylor in an essay for Politico. And because Nixon's threats were always delivered in private, Dorsen added, aides dubious of them could ignore them more easily than Trump officials faced with his public demands for action. Maybe most important, Dorsen said, is that by making his threats so publicly, Trump is sending a shot across the bow of every other institution that might cross him. 'Trump is legitimizing conduct that Nixon did not purport to legitimize,' Dorsen said. 'He concealed it, he was probably embarrassed by it; he realized it was wrong.' As the IRS pushback against the enemies list demonstrated, Nixon's plans faced constant resistance within his own government, not only from career bureaucrats but often also from his own appointees. 'He failed in getting key officials in the government to do what he wanted,' said Wertheimer, who now directs the reform group Democracy 21. If that kind of internal stonewalling is slowing Trump's sweeping offensives against his targets, there's little evidence of it yet. Congress was another constraint on Nixon. Not only did the administration need to fear oversight hearings from the Democrats who controlled both the House and Senate, but at that point a substantial portion of congressional Republicans were unwilling to blink at abusive actions. Ultimately it was a delegation of Republican senators, led by conservative icon and former GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who convinced Nixon to resign during Watergate. By contrast, Trump today is operating with 'a completely compliant Republican Congress' and has filled the federal government, including its key law enforcement positions, with loyalist appointees who 'operate as if they are there to carry out his wishes, period,' said Wertheimer. As Feldstein pointed out, Trump also can worry less about critical press coverage than Nixon, who governed at a time when 'there were just three networks and everybody watched those.' That leaves the courts as the principal short-term obstacle to Trump's plans. In Nixon's time, the federal courts consistently acted across party lines to uphold limits on the arbitrary exercise of federal power. Three of Nixon's own appointees joined the unanimous 1974 Supreme Court decision that sealed his fate by requiring him to provide Congress his White House tapes. John Sirica, the steely federal district judge who helped crack the scandal, was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Today, federal district and appellate courts are mostly demonstrating similar independence. The New York Times' running tally counts nearly 190 rulings from judges in both parties blocking Trump actions since he returned to office. 'I think we've seen the largest overreach in modern presidential history … and as a result, you've triggered a massive judicial pushback,' said Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group fighting many of Trump's initiatives in courts. 'I won't say democracy has won so far, because of the damage that Trump and his ilk have done, but I will say Trump lost.' But even if courts block individual Trump tactics, the effort required to rebuff his actions still can impose a heavy cost on his targets. And, on the most important cases, these lower court legal rulings are still subject to reconsideration by the Supreme Court — whose six- member Republican-appointed majority has historically supported an expansive view of presidential power and last year voted to immunize Trump against criminal prosecution for virtually any actions he takes in office. So far, the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals by ruling to restrain Trump on some fronts while empowering him on others. 'We haven't found out yet what the Supreme Court is going to do when … they get the really big cases,' said Wertheimer. Those decisions in the next few years will likely determine whether Trump can fulfill the darkest impulses of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign for his actions in office.
