Residents of Farmington Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, were left baffled last week when their local shopping center was overrun with unattended Tesla vehicles, mostly Cybertrucks.
Some residents, who estimate they’ve seen up to 100 Cybertrucks left in the shopping center’s parking lot, initially assumed the trucks were unsold inventory from a nearby dealership.
However, Tesla employees who spoke with CBS Detroit insisted the vehicles have already been sold. They say the company is merely storing these units at the shopping center, which shares an owner with a local Tesla service center, until it can deliver them to their new owners.
City officials, however, say Tesla never got their approval to use the lot, and that doing so is a clear violation of local policy.
Charmaine Kettler-Scmult, director of planning and community development for Farmington Hills, told CBS Detroit that the city had already reached out to the shopping center about removing the Cybertrucks, explaining that “storage of vehicles is not a permitted use” of the parking lot.
Outside of Farmington Hills, however, Cybertrucks seem to be a tough sell. Only about 40,000 Cybertrucks have sold since the model launched in 2023, a far cry from the 250,000 units Musk once predicted Tesla would sell annually.
Beyond Cybertrucks, overall Tesla sales have crashed across Europe, where even consumers interested in electric vehicles are increasingly disinterested in buying from Musk.
In April, Tesla was dethroned for the first time ever as Europe’s top-selling electric vehicle manufacturer, being outsold by Chinese company BYD.
Then in May, Tesla’s sales fell 29 percent in Spain, 53.7 percent in Sweden, and a staggering 67 percent in France. Meanwhile, in Germany, Europe’s largest car market, sales of Tesla vehicles have been in a nosedive for five consecutive months.
The sharp decline in Tesla’s sales isn’t surprising, considering Elon Musk’s stint with DOGE severely damaged his business reputation. Last month, the annual Axios Harris poll revealed that Tesla, which once ranked eighth in respondents’ list of their 100 most trusted American companies, had fallen to 95th place.
Just last week, CNN obtained a letter to Musk from a group of Tesla investors in which they criticized him for “divert[ing] his time and attention from actively managing Tesla’s operations.” The letter also demanded that he spend at least 40 hours a week working at Tesla.
Though he initially lashed out at the investors behind the letter, Musk himself has hinted that he knows his time in the White House hurt his other business dealings. In an interview with Ars Technica, Musk admitted that his “relative time allocation… probably was a little too high on the government side.”
Musk departed his White House position with a bizarre press conference on May 30, so it’s too soon to know if doing so has helped to stymie Tesla’s free fall.
For now, the company maintains that its unapproved use of the Michigan parking lot is merely storage for the few trucks that have sold.
