Tesla Raises Cybertruck Prices as SpaceX Absorbed the Volume

Tesla raised Dual Motor and Premium Cybertruck prices by $5,000 on August 24, with no change to range, towing, or acceleration. The Dual Motor all-wheel-drive truck is now $74,990, the Premium AWD is $84,990, and Cyberbeast stays at $99,990.

The company changed the numbers on its US configurator overnight and did not issue a product note. Car and Driver lists the Dual Motor at $77,235 once destination is included, the Premium at $87,235, and Cyberbeast at $102,235.

The $59,990 Dual Motor Lasted 10 Days

This is the same Dual Motor Tesla put on sale on February 20 at $59,990. Elon Musk said that launch price would hold for 10 days and that later pricing would follow demand in that window. On March 1 the Dual Motor moved to $69,990. Monday’s update adds another $5,000, so the truck is $15,000 above the February sticker in a little more than six months.

Tough as nails with ultra-low cost of ownership. Starts at $59,990. Dual Motor AWD with an estimated 325 miles of range.

Tesla Cybertruck account, February 2026 product post

Tesla tracker Sawyer Merritt reported on February 26 that new Dual Motor orders had a delivery estimate of April 2027, after the window had already stretched from June and then from September-October 2026. He later confirmed Tesla had started assigning VINs on those $59,990 orders in late May. People who locked that price still have it. Anyone ordering now pays the new number for the same coil-spring Dual Motor.

February 20, 2026 through this week is a short, ugly pricing tape.

1. February 20, 2026: Tesla lists a new Dual Motor AWD at $59,990 and cuts Cyberbeast to $99,990 from $114,990 by dropping bundled extras.
2. February 26, 2026: New Dual Motor delivery estimates move to April 2027 after a burst of $250 orders.
3. March 1, 2026: Dual Motor jumps to $69,990, a 16.7% rise, and Tesla pulls the 10-day teaser.
4. August 24, 2026: Dual Motor goes to $74,990 and Premium AWD to $84,990. Cyberbeast does not move.

Electrek editor Fred Lambert also noted Tesla sold a single-motor Long Range rear-drive truck at $69,990, then killed it after 173 sales. Car and Driver’s Caleb Miller put that short-lived rear-drive at $71,985 delivered when it appeared in 2025. The cheap Dual Motor was the second try at an entry truck. Tesla has now priced that try back toward the Premium it was meant to undercut.

What the Extra $5,000 Buys

Nothing on the spec sheet moved with the sticker. Dual Motor still lists 325 miles of range, 7,500 pounds of towing, and 4.1 seconds to 60 mph. Premium still tows 11,000 pounds. The Dual Motor uses coil springs with adaptive damping, 18-inch wheels, a textile interior, and no rear screen. Premium keeps air suspension, ventilated seats, and the extra screen. Those gaps were already there on February 20.

The current Dual Motor and Premium stickers sit on Tesla’s Cybertruck page with the same hardware copy as last week. Miller wrote that Tesla had promised, at the 2019 reveal, a rear-drive near $39,000 and a dual-motor near $49,000. Foundation Series trucks that reached customers in late 2023 stickered around $100,000, and some flipped higher. The August Dual Motor is roughly 50% above that original dual-motor number, and it still is not the $39,000 truck from the stage demo.

Premium Is Now $15,000 Under Cyberbeast

Holding Cyberbeast at $99,990 is the quiet part of the update. Premium sat $20,000 below the tri-motor truck last week. That gap is now $15,000, so a buyer already in the mid-80s is closer to the 845-horsepower halo. Tesla did not add range or motors to Premium to justify the extra $5,000. It made the step-up cheaper in relative terms while the two volume AWD trucks got more expensive.

That mix only works if Tesla would rather sell fewer Dual Motors at a higher average price than fill Gigafactory Texas. Lambert wrote that the line was built for up to 250,000 trucks a year and is selling fewer than 20,000, under 10% of that plan, with about 3,000 unsold trucks still in US inventory. Miller recorded Musk, in 2023, talking about 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertrucks a year once the plant was at full tilt. Three years into customer deliveries, Miller wrote, sales have not even eclipsed an estimated 100,000 units.

Owners who paid six figures early are already on the other side of that tape. MotorGPA’s residual file says Foundation trucks that stickered near $100,000 were trading in the $60,000s inside a year. A Foundation owner, Jeremy Judkins, said after 25,000 miles that a dealer marked his $100,000 truck at just over $73,000. Raising the new Dual Motor sticker does not restore those residuals. It does put anyone who ordered at $59,990 a full $15,000 under the current Dual Motor number, which is why those buyers have been the loudest people in the thread since Monday night.

First-Half Registrations Dropped to 8,473

Tesla does not break out Cybertruck deliveries. The proxies all point the same way. Drive Tesla Canada, using S&P Global Mobility, put US Cybertruck registrations at 8,473 in the first half of 2026, down about 34% from 12,831 a year earlier. Cox Automotive, cited by Car and Driver and Automotive World, estimated 7,263 US sales in that half, down 32.2%. Full-year tallies clustered around 38,965 to 39,000 trucks in 2024 and about 20,200 to 20,237 in 2025.

The volume tape:

• 2024 US tally: About 38,965 to 39,000 Cybertrucks, the high-water year after the 2023 launch trickle.
• 2025 US tally: About 20,200 to 20,237, a drop of roughly half, with Q4 registrations of 7,071.
• H1 2026 S&P: 8,473 US registrations, down about 34% from 12,831 in H1 2025.
• H1 2026 Cox: 7,263 estimated US sales, down 32.2% year over year.

Tesla’s own Q2 scorecard does not name Cybertruck. In the production and deliveries exhibit, Other Models (the bucket that holds Cybertruck plus the last Model S and Model X units) recorded Other Models deliveries of 12,364 against 8,822 produced. Other Models output was down 34% from 13,409 in Q2 2025. Tesla delivered more of that group than it built, which is an inventory draw, not a ramp.

Nearly One in Five Trucks Went In-House

S&P registration data that Bloomberg’s Dana Hull reported in April showed how much of the remaining US tape was not a retail buyer. SpaceX took 1,279 of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the fourth quarter of 2025, a bit more than 18%. xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink took another 60, bringing Musk-linked entities to 1,339, or about 19%. Strip those titles out and Q4 registrations would have fallen 51% year over year, Electrek calculated from the same file.

The same dataset did not stop at New Year’s.

• SpaceX, Q4 2025: 1,279 trucks, more than 18% of US Cybertruck registrations that quarter.
• Other Musk firms, Q4: 60 trucks across xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.
• January 2026: Musk companies registered another 158 Cybertrucks.
• February 2026: They registered 67 more, through the month of the $59,990 Dual Motor window.

A $5,000 Dual Motor and Premium hike lands on whoever still writes those checks, including the sister companies, and on the shrinking set of people who want the stainless shape at any nearby price. It does not conjure the customer Tesla sized the Texas line for.

Lightning Sales Beat Cybertruck, Then Production Ended

Ford did the thing Tesla is refusing to do. It stopped building the F-150 Lightning in December 2025 after the electric pickup failed to earn its factory. Lambert wrote that the Lightning still outsold Cybertruck in 2025, about 27,300 US Lightnings against about 21,500 Cybertrucks globally, and that Ford canceled it anyway. Ford has been selling leftover Lightning stock this year. Through July it moved 4,622 of those trucks, down 70.9% as the pipeline ran dry, including 141 in July.

Rivian’s R1T and leftover Lightning Platinum trucks, often at a discount, now sit in the same money as a Dual Motor at $74,990. Those rivals sell range and payload. Cybertruck sells the silhouette. Tesla’s answer to a year of falling registrations was to charge more for the silhouette and leave the $99,990 truck alone, which is the reverse of a clearance.

One factory-floor reading, passed along this week by Tesla interviewer Herbert Ong from Brian White, is that Dual Motor supply is tight and a higher sticker cools the queue while Gigafactory Texas makes room for Cybercab. That reading fits the February wait that ran into 2027. It sits beside Lambert’s 10% capacity figure and the 3,000-truck inventory pile. Both can be true if Dual Motor is back-ordered and other trims are the ones sitting in lots. Tesla did not say which.

A Business Deduction on a $74,990 Pickup

Tesla’s Cybertruck page is not pitching a $39,000 work truck. The banner on the official site still flags a business tax deduction through Section 179, and a gas trade-in still carries 2,000 free Supercharging miles. Tesla’s own commercial vehicle incentive notes are linked from that page. The Section 179 dollar limit and vehicle rules in IRS Publication 946 are what that banner is pointing at. For 2026, tax guides putting the statute in plain numbers cite a $2,560,000 overall Section 179 cap, a phaseout after $4,090,000 of qualifying property, and a separate $32,000 cap on certain heavy SUVs, with pickups that have beds long enough often treated more like work trucks than passenger SUVs. Bonus depreciation can cover the rest if the truck is used more than half the time for business. That is a tax office problem, not a tailgate problem, and it is the buyer Tesla is still willing to print a higher sticker for.

The same Texas plant is no longer only a Cybertruck plant. Tesla’s Q2 update said Cybercab production had begun at Gigafactory Texas, and that battery pack capacity was the limit on near-term vehicle volume. A Dual Motor that Tesla could not keep at $59,990, then could not keep at $69,990, now costs $74,990 with the same 325-mile rating. The cheap-truck test found a queue. The six months since that test found a higher price, a thinner registration tape, and a factory already starting the next product.