The Ford Edsel has spent nearly seven decades as the auto industry’s gold standard for commercial failure. If Tesla’s Cybertruck stays on its current trajectory, it’ll own that title outright, a comparison Bloomberg recently drew as well. The irony is that, much like Ford’s infamous flop, the Cybertruck is far more interesting as an engineering exercise than its sales figures suggest.

 

Ford expected to sell around 200,000 Edsels during its first model year after launching the car in 1957. Instead, it managed less than one-third of that target before sales continued falling until the model was discontinued just two years later. Tesla’s numbers somehow look dramatically worse.