Tesla will sue you if you try to flip your low-VIN Cybertruck
Early Cybertruck owners will be prevented from reselling their vehicles until a year after they take delivery, according to an update to Tesla’s Motor Vehicle Purchase Agreement.
With the Tesla Cybertruck hitting the road at the end of this month, we’re gradually starting to learn more and more about it. We’ve recently seen it doing some offroading, wrapped in matte black, and seen a leak of every single dimension so we finally know how big it is.
And as hype has been building closer to release, an auction was held last month by the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, where an “early Cybertruck VIN” was auctioned off for the cool sum of $400,000.
So you may be thinking: I have an early Cybertruck reservation, maybe I’ll be able to get a low VIN and do the same?
Well, not if Tesla has anything to say about it.
Turns out, Tesla will stop anyone from reselling a Cybertruck in the first year, and if a situation comes up where you have to resell the car, Tesla demands that you give it first right of refusal for the sale before putting it up to the public. And if you do resell your car and don’t tell Tesla about it, the company threatens to sue you for $50k (or more) and may not sell you any future vehicles.
The clause was added to Tesla’s Motor Vehicle Purchase Agreement, which you can read directly on its website. Under the “No Resellers” section, which normally stops dealerships from buying Teslas en masse to resell them, a section has been added labeled “For Cybertruck Only,” and reads thusly:
For Cybertruck Only: You understand and acknowledge that the Cybertruck will first be released in limited quantity. You agree that you will not sell or otherwise attempt to sell the Vehicle within the first year following your Vehicle’s delivery date. Notwithstanding the foregoing, if you must sell the Vehicle within the first year following its delivery date for any unforeseen reason, and Tesla agrees that your reason warrants an exception to its no reseller policy, you agree to notify Tesla in writing and give Tesla reasonable time to purchase the Vehicle from you at its sole discretion and at the purchase price listed on your Final Price Sheet less $0.25/mile driven, reasonable wear and tear, and the cost to repair the Vehicle to Tesla’s Used Vehicle Cosmetic and Mechanical Standards. If Tesla declines to purchase your Vehicle, you may then resell your Vehicle to a third party only after receiving written consent from Tesla. You agree that in the event you breach this provision, or Tesla has reasonable belief that you are about to breach this provision, Tesla may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle or demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of $50,000 or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer, whichever is greater. Tesla may also refuse to sell you any future vehicles.
Note that there are exceptions available – if you do have good reason to need to resell your vehicle, you can notify Tesla, and if Tesla says okay, then you can sell the car back to the company. But that depends on what buyback price Tesla comes up with, and whether it even decides to accept your reasoning in the first place.
Tesla is no stranger to having popular vehicles that resell for well over sticker price on release. Several of Tesla’s previous vehicles have trickled out onto the road in limited numbers at first, with early owners having the chance to resell them for much more than they paid.
Some of these early models have ended up being bought by other automakers, presumably for reverse-engineering purposes. And we could see that being the case with the Cybertruck, which has many aspects that are a departure from traditional vehicle manufacturing (extra-thick stainless steel body, 48-volt electrical architecture, etc.), which will certainly be of interest to other automakers.
And it does make for a more chaotic release, with buyers scrambling to try to get an early car and scalp it for profits, and low-VIN cars that traditionally have more problems ending up in the hands of people who paid way too much and who don’t have a pre-existing relationship with the company.
Tesla tried to control this with the Model 3 release, with the first several months of vehicles going to employees rather than the public, and the first public cars mainly going to people who already had a Tesla, were close to the factory, and who had camped out overnight to reserve one.
So there are certainly reasons that companies might want to place some limits on early cars.
And despite that this might seem legally unenforceable at first glance, these sorts of clauses are actually relatively common in the rare car world. For example, wrestler John Cena was one of the first to get a Ford GT in 2017, but resold the car within a few months in violation of a clause in Ford’s purchase agreement disallowing resale for two years. Ford sued him and the case ended up being settled with an apology by Cena and donation of proceeds to charity.
Ferrari is also notorious for this sort of behavior – to buy Ferrari’s limited-edition cars, you pretty much need to be on a list of known customers, and the company will refuse to sell cars to certain people for various reasons. Ferrari also has a first right of refusal contract, and may even prevent you from wrapping its cars.
We’ve seen it in EVs, and even in EV trucks, as well, as the Hummer EV originally had a 12-month no-resale provision, later lowered down to 6 months.
But those cars are much more expensive and much more limited than the Cybertruck. Clauses like this are a lot rarer with vehicles that are meant to have mass appeal or to sell in large numbers – which Tesla has recently said is the case for Cybertruck.
Of particular note is that Tesla says Cybertrucks will “first be released in limited quantity.” While this seems like it would be true on its face for just about any vehicle, in Tesla’s Q3 update, the company said that it currently has production capacity of 125,000 vehicles a year.
While it perhaps will take a little time to ramp up to 125k from the start, this sounds like Tesla is promising to deliver six figures worth of cars in the next year. So early buyers may not be able to resell their cars until six figures worth of cars are out there.
Electrek’s Take
Regardless of how common or reasonable these clauses might be, it should be said that they are also quite unpopular. Nobody likes a scalper, but also nobody likes being told what they can’t do with their car.
Anyone who has walked into a Ferrari dealership can tell you that it’s not a great company to buy from. Unless they already know who you are, they act like you shouldn’t be there, like they couldn’t care less if you wanted to buy their car or not. They’re not selling the cars for you, they’re selling the cars for them.
It’s elitist, it’s haughty, and frankly, I think it makes a lot of people less interested in their cars, not more. And in the early days of the Roadster, one of Tesla’s sales tactics was to tell customers to head to the Ferrari dealership next door and see if they’ll even talk to you, then come back over here if they won’t.
So it’s disappointing to see a similar clause in Tesla’s purchase agreement, especially without any sort of explanation of why or how long it will be there. Hopefully not long.
One thing we don’t know is how long the clause will last. Will this only apply to the first month or two of deliveries, to everyone in 2023, or to everyone in the first year? If Tesla does plan to release five or six figures worth of trucks, it seems a little onerous to have a year worth of reselling provisions for that many owners. If it’s only for early employee/VIP purchases and will disappear as the floodgates open to wide delivery in significant production numbers, then that’s not so big of a deal.
We’d ask Tesla about this, but they have no PR department, so you’ll have to come up with your own explanation.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes the potential end of Rad Power Bikes, Tern’s new belt-drive Vektron, a semi-solid-state e-bike battery coming soon on a production e-bike, ALSO drops price on its entry-level model, a tilting flat-bed electric trike/truck, and more.
The Wheel-E podcast returns every two weeks on Electrek’s YouTube channel, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
We also have a Patreon if you want to help us to avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.
Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the Wheel-E podcast today:
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 9:00 a.m. ET (or the video after 10:00 a.m. ET):
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
For most of human history, currency was a direct claim on tangible, productive output. Before the abstraction of government fiat or cryptocurrency, value was stored in things that required real work and resources, bushels of grain, livestock, gold, assets with their own direct productive output: horses, and tragically, slaves.
These were the foundational assets of economies, representing a direct link between labor, resources, and stored value.
As we accelerate into an all-electric, all-digital age, this fundamental link is re-emerging, but with a new unit of account. The 21st-century economy, defined by automated industry, robotic, electric transport, and now power-hungry artificial intelligence, runs on a single, non-negotiable input: electricity. In this new paradigm, the real base currency, the ultimate representation of productive capacity, is the kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The kWh is the new economic base layer.
Last week, I was in Bijiashan Park at night overlooking Shenzhen, arguably the most technologically advanced city on earth, built over the previous few decades, partly on cheap electricity, cheap labor, and manufacturing innovations.
I could see the giant high-voltage power lines coming over Yinhu Mountain to power the constant light show that is Shenzhen at night. I couldn’t help but think about how cheap electricity and a strong grid have been critical to China’s exceptional economic rise.
As you stroll around the city, you see power everywhere. There are charging stations at every corner, including insane 1 MW charging posts, electric cars and trucks, trucks that carry batteries to electric scooter shops, which are also literally everywhere.
Everything moves on electric power. Industries are powered by electricity, and now, with the advent of AI, virtually everything is increasingly processed by LLMs, which are ultimately powered by electricity through power-hungry data centers.
In a world where everything runs on electricity, electricity itself becomes the currency of civilization.
It is measurable, divisible, storable, and universal – all qualities that a currency needs, but unlike fiat and crypto, it’s actually directly linked to productive output. No politics. No inflation. Just physics.
This concept is not merely academic; it appears to be the quiet, guiding principle in China. While others debate the merits of decentralized digital tokens, China is executing a multi-pronged strategy that treats electricity as the foundational strategic asset it has become.
First, China is building the “mint” for this new currency at an incredible, world-changing scale, and it has retained absolute state control over its distribution. Its deployment of new electricity generation, particularly from renewables, is staggering. The country met its 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of renewable capacity five years early, in 2025.
In 2024 alone, renewable energy accounted for a record 56% of the nation’s total installed capacity, with clean generation meeting 84% of all new demand.
Here’s a comparison of electricity generation between China and the US:
If this chart doesn’t scare the West. I don’t know what will. The trend is not reversing any time soon. In fact, it appears to be accelerating as China is doubling down on solar and nuclear.
State-owned monoliths manage this entire system, primarily the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the world’s largest utility. For better or worse, this centralized control allows the state to execute massive national strategies impossible in a liberalized market, such as building an Ultra-High-Voltage (UHV) grid to transmit power from remote solar and wind farms in the west to the power-hungry industrial hubs on its coast.
Second, China wields its control over the grid as a precision tool of industrial policy. China’s average electricity rate of $0.084/kWh is cheaper than most of the rest of the world, but its power lies not in the base price but in its strategic application. The government deploys a “Differential Electricity Pricing” policy: a “stick” that penalizes low-tech, high-consumption industries with higher rates, and a “carrot” that provides preferential pricing to incentivize strategic sectors.
The most potent example is in the AI sector. China is now offering massive electricity subsidies, cutting power bills by up to half, for data centers run by giants like Alibaba and Tencent. The condition for this cheap power is that these companies must use locally-made, Chinese AI chips, such as those from Huawei.
China is spending its “electricity currency” to directly fund the growth of its domestic AI chip industry and sever its dependence on foreign technology. This same logic applies to its global dominance in green tech, where state-subsidized firms like BYD benefit from a state-controlled industrial ecosystem built on reliable, managed power.
Third, and possibly the most explicit exemplification of China viewing electricity as the base currency is its moves against cryptocurrency.
In 2021, the government banned all cryptocurrency transactions and mining. While the official reasons cited financial stability, the move might have had a deeper, strategic intention.
From the state’s perspective, it was a tool for capital flight, allowing wealth to bypass government controls. But in a world where electricity rules, cryptocurrencies are, in effect, a competing “currency” that burns the foundational asset (electricity) to create a decentralized store of value.
By banning crypto, China simultaneously reclaimed its monopoly on economic control and shut down a massive, “wasteful” leak of its most precious resource. It freed up that generating capacity to be strategically allocated to its preferred industries, like AI and manufacturing.
China’s actions, viewed together, are a clear and coherent strategy. By massively investing in and securing total state control over its domestic electricity supply (the “mint”), using its price as a tool to fuel strategic industries, and banning decentralized competitors that consume the same resource, China is making a clear bet. It has been recognized that in an age where all productivity is powered by the grid, the ultimate source of national power is not gold, fiat, or crypto, but the state-controlled kilowatt-hour.
The Blockchain and Crypto: Ledger vs. Furnace
This perspective brings a critical nuance to the role of blockchain technology. In an economy where electricity is the base currency, the blockchain makes perfect sense, but only as a ledger, not as a store of value.
A distributed ledger is the ideal technological layer to act as the accounting system for this new economy. It can track the generation, transmission, and consumption of every kilowatt-hour with perfect transparency. It can automate complex industrial contracts and manage the grid’s load balancing without a central intermediary. In this sense, blockchain is the “banking software” for the electricity standard.
However, “Proof of Work” cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin face a fatal contradiction within this paradigm. They aim to serve as a store of value by burning the base currency (electricity) to secure the network. If the kilowatt-hour is the 21st-century equivalent of gold, then Bitcoin mining is akin to melting down gold bars to print a paper receipt. It destroys the productive asset to create a derivative token.
Bitcoin is quickly losing credibility as a classical safe store of value. It trades like a security, at least over the last year, and its value is only whatever the next moron is willing to pay, with no valuable asset behind it.
China’s strategy reflects this precise understanding. While they ruthlessly banned Bitcoin mining (the “furnace” that wastes the asset), they have simultaneously championed the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) and the Digital Yuan. They have embraced the ledger to track and control their energy economy, while rejecting the supposed asset that destroys it.
This is a trap that crypto fans often fall into. They recognize the value of the blockchain, which is real, but they mistakenly broadly assign the same value to cryptocurrency, which is simply an application of the blockchain.
Electrek’s Take
What I’m trying to explore in this op-ed is the idea that if the present is electric and the future is even more electric, then it makes sense for electricity to be the foundation of the economy.
If electricity is the backbone of global trade and the metric of productivity, the kWh ultimately becomes the real currency of a truly electrified world.
And I think China has figured this out, as evidenced by its new electricity generation surpassing the rest of the world combined and by its ban on cryptocurrency.
They are going to let the rest of the world hold the crypto bag while they have more electricity generation than anyone to power their industries, which are already taking over the world.
I think the rest of the world should learn from this. Instead of pouring capital into meme coins and made-up stores of value, we should invest in electricity generation and storage.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment3 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024