Tesla recalls Cybertruck to fix faulty windshield wipers, loose trim
The Tesla Cybertruck is unveiled at Tesla’s design studio on Nov. 21, 2019, in Hawthorne, Calif.
Ringo H.W. Chiu | AP
Tesla has issued two more recalls for its Cybertruck pickups in the U.S., as the automaker continues to face challenges with its newest electric vehicle about six months after beginning deliveries.
The latest recalls — the third and fourth for the Cybertruck — involve physical repairs that would typically require booking an appointment with Tesla service. One is to fix problems with trim pieces, which can loosen and fall off the trunk, and the other is to address faulty motor controllers in the front windshield wipers.
A recall report dated June 19, and posted on the website for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says that if a trim piece “separates from the vehicle while in drive, it could create a road hazard for following motorists and increase their risk of injury or a collision.” Tesla plans to “replace or rework” that trim piece, to ensure “sufficient adhesion,” the report said.
According to a second safety recall report on the NHTSA site, on some vehicles, “the front windshield wiper motor controller may stop functioning due to electrical overstress to the gate driver component.” The report said a “non-functioning windshield wiper may reduce visibility in certain operating conditions, which may increase the risk of a collision.” Tesla plans to replace the motor controller in the Cybertruck windshield wipers for customers.
The electric vehicle maker didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Four years after CEO Elon Musk first unveiled the Cybertruck and two years after production was supposed to begin, the vehicle hit the market — with limited deliveries — in November at a launch event in Austin, Texas.
Musk described it at the time as a “better truck than a truck, while also being a better sports car than a sports car in the same package.” He frequently touts the truck as a vehicle that “looks like the future.”
An earlier Cybertruck recall was issued to repair an accelerator pedal issue. The pedal could come loose and get trapped in the interior trim of the vehicle, causing “unintended acceleration,” a problem seen in a viral TikTok video made by a Cybertruck owner.
The recall disclosures for the windshield wiper issue said that from Nov. 13, 2023, to June 6, 2024, there was a “vehicle population” of 11,688 Cybertrucks. The number suggests an initially slow start for the Cybertruck, Tesla’s first entry in the U.S. pickup market, where it’s going up against the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T.
In its first-quarter shareholder update, Tesla said Cybertruck production capacity exceeded 125,000 per year. At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this month, Musk said the company hit a record of 1,300 Cybertruck shipments in a week.
Beyond the Cybertruck troubles, it’s been a tough first half of the year for Tesla. The stock price is down 25% year to date, and sales have been declining due to an aging lineup, increased competition in China and brand deterioration that a recent survey attributed partly to Musk’s “antics” and “political rants.” The company is undergoing a broad restructuring that’s included cutting headcount by at least 14%.
Tesla is expected to report second-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers as soon as early July.
Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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