Siddhant Awasthi, the engineer who turned Elon Musk’s stainless-steel fantasy into a street-legal pickup, is leaving as the Cybertruck faces its toughest road yet
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
For a truck built to be indestructible, the Cybertruck has seemed pretty fragile this year. Now, its lead engineer is out. Siddhant Awasthi, the Tesla $TSLA executive and head of the Cybertruck program tasked with turning stainless-steel spectacle into rolling reality, is leaving after eight years at the company — and at a moment when the truck’s momentum looks as dented as its panels.
In a LinkedIn farewell post, Awasthi thanked Elon Musk, senior mentors, and “rockstar colleagues” for an “incredible run” that took him from intern to program chief. He cited pride in ramping the Model 3, launching Giga Shanghai, and bringing the Cybertruck to life — but offered no hint of what comes next or why now. He made no mention of the internal strain, the inventory pile-up, or the scaling back of sales targets.
“This decision wasn’t easy, especially with so much exciting growth on the horizon,” Awasthi wrote. “Tesla vehicles are incredibly complex systems that often don’t get the credit they deserve, but I’ve witnessed firsthand how they’ve changed lives.”
He offered no detailed reason for his exit — just confidence that Tesla will “nail its next big mission (especially after last week).” His LinkedIn bio already reads “Ex-Tesla.”
Awasthi’s departure lands exactly when Tesla’s pickup fantasy meets cold reality. U.S. registrations for the Cybertruck plunged about 63% year-over-year in Q3, landing near 5,400 units — a sharp fall for a vehicle once floated as a 250,000-unit-per-year vehicle. At the same time, major recalls have piled up: In March, over 46,000 units were recalled because exterior trims could detach during driving; in October, almost 6,200 were recalled because of a loose off-road light bar. Inventory is leaking, too — discounts of several thousand dollars (around $3,000 to $10,000) have quietly appeared in Tesla showrooms.
Right now, the Cybertruck is fighting through industrial reality. The pickup — first unveiled in 2019 with shattered windows and swagger — has turned into a manufacturing headache and a financial drag. Tesla has built narratives around speed and scale as though they were virtues in themselves. But when discount-hunting replaces reservation racing, the narrative fractures. The Cybertruck’s stainless-steel shell still turns heads; what it reveals under the skin is a tougher story about scalability, cost, and consumer appetite.
The Cybertruck now resembles a high-cost experiment with unresolved flaws: heavy weight, limited range, and manufacturing shortcuts lurking behind futuristic styling. The Cybertruck was supposed to widen Tesla’s profit moat — a luxury-tier pickup that could tap Ford $F and GM’s most lucrative segment. Instead, the Cybertruck is fast becoming a line item that tests the limits of Musk’s promise machine.
Awasthi’s exit also echoes a broader wave of departures at Tesla. This year, senior engineers, including longtime software VP David Lau (now at OpenAI) and others tied to battery and robotics programs, have exited. Leadership fatigue is now part of the narrative. The innovate-fast mantra that once defined Tesla risks being replaced by scramble-faster.
A recent study from Moorepay showed that Tesla ranks last among its major tech peers in retention (2.4 years) and Glassdoor rating (3.5 out of 5). Tesla is chasing everything at once: robotaxis, humanoid bots, the next-gen mass-market chassis, and it still needs its core vehicles to run smoothly. When the people who hold critical program knowledge step away amid production mess, it becomes more than attrition — it becomes a signal.
Awasthi’s move caps an impressive arc — from intern to chief responsible for one of the most talked-about (and controversial) vehicles in recent memory, with the Model 3 ramp (since July) under his belt. But his move raises a simple question at Tesla: Exactly who is steering this truck now? The next person in that seat inherits more than design and manufacturing tasks; they inherit the job of salvaging faith in a product whose promise was literally bulletproof but now appears vulnerable. The next Cybertruck engineer won’t just inherit CAD models and factory lines — they’ll inherit this reckoning.
If Tesla can somehow figure out how to stabilize Cybertruck quality, clear the recalls, and reignite real demand for a clearly fading product without leaning on price cuts, Awasthi’s departure may fade into the background. If not, it becomes a symbol: of ambition exceeding execution, of engineering promises breaking sooner than panels. Either way, the stainless-steel dream is still very much a work in progress — and its lead architect just jumped out of the driver’s seat.
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