They promised us a $50,000 truck. This week it quietly became an $85,000 one.

November 2019. The window shattered on stage, and the price on the screen was the real headline: $39,900 for the single-motor Cybertruck, $49,900 for the dual-motor most people wanted. That number is why a million people put down deposits. A working truck, at a working price.

As of this week, ordering the one all-wheel-drive Cybertruck Tesla sells costs $84,990. The single-motor never shipped and the cheaper trims got discontinued along the way, so the entry price isn't just higher than the promise, it's higher than what the top trim was promised at. We say this as people who wanted one at the 2019 number and still check the price like it might come back. It keeps going the other way, and this week it went the other way by $5,000 in one quiet, unannounced move.

Here's the part that tells you where real demand sits. On August 6, Tesla listed the biggest batch of used Cybertrucks in our records, 91 trucks in one night, dozens of them near-identical with similar mileage, the shape of lease returns or a fleet coming home, though Tesla never says. If this truck were priced where its buyers live, that flood would have been a feeding frenzy.

It wasn't. Nobody showed up cash-in-fist fighting over them. The pool sold down at a walk: three to four trucks a day, every day, for three weeks, and almost perfectly in price order, cheapest first. The $62,700 trucks went immediately. The $90,000 ones sat. That's not weak demand, and it's not strong demand either. It's price-sensitive demand: a line of willing buyers who each have a number, stepping forward exactly when a truck crosses it. The market spent three weeks telling Tesla what the Cybertruck is worth to actual people, one purchase at a time.

Cheapest used Cybertruck listed by Tesla. August 6 is the wave's opening floor from our daily records; today's was read at publish time.

So what do you do with a market that just demonstrated it buys eagerly at the bottom and reluctantly at the top? Tesla's answer, recorded hour by hour in our tracker: Monday around 2 PM Eastern, the last two affordable used trucks got marked up $4,200 and $4,400 apiece. By Tuesday at 5 AM both were gone. The same week, the new truck's base price rose from $79,990 to $84,990, its first move since December, surfacing not in an announcement but in the fine print of Tesla's own offers page, where the "lease from $949/mo" advertisement quietly disappeared the same night. We verified the new price on the configurator ourselves before writing this.

From where a buyer stands, the read is hard to avoid: fewer trucks were selling at the top, the cheap ones were gone, and the price went up anyway, because the people still in line at that altitude will pay it. Tesla can run its flagship that way if it chooses. The Model Y L launched at $61,990 last month and hasn't moved a dollar in our daily watch, because the volume sellers get price stability. The halo truck gets squeezed. Our job isn't to like it or excuse it. It's to write the numbers down where buyers can see them.

The scoreboard as we publish, checked against Tesla's own listings this morning: eight used Cybertrucks left in the whole country, seven of them Cyberbeasts, the cheapest at $75,800. The affordable trims aren't scarce anymore. They're gone.

The 2019 figure is the dual-motor price announced on the unveil stage, the configuration most reservation holders chose. Today's is the only AWD Cybertruck Tesla currently sells, as of this week's increase.

If you're one of the buyers this page is for, there's one crack in the wall this week. Inventory listed before the increase keeps its old pricing, and as we write, a new All-Wheel Drive sits in Tesla's inventory at $79,380, which is $5,610 under ordering the identical truck from the configurator today. Tesla doesn't call it a discount. It's old-price stock the calendar turned into the best value on the board.

The last three weeks are your guide to how long that lasts: this market clears from the cheapest ask upward, in order, without mercy. If the old-price stock fits your number, it won't wait for December.

Here's the prediction worth making now, in writing, while the raise is fresh. Year-end is discount season: inventory pushes, quarter-end delivery drives, holiday "savings." If a Cybertruck discount appears in November or December, the first question every buyer should ask is: savings measured from what? A $3,000 "holiday discount" off a base that just rose $5,000 isn't a deal. It's August's increase, handed back at 60 cents on the dollar and gift-wrapped.

We don't know that's the plan. We do know we log every price, every day, with timestamps nothing can rewrite, which means when year-end arrives we won't have to wonder. If the discount is real, measured against the whole year's record, we'll say so. If it's the raise dressed up as generosity, we'll say that instead, with the receipts. Either way, we'll call it in December. That's the difference between tracking this market and taking Tesla's word for it.

Whether $84,990 holds or the deleted lease ad returns wearing a new number. Whether the below-base leftovers get repriced upward the way the used survivors did, or sell through first. And the next wave: a used pool of 8 is deep in the range where every previous batch has landed within days, and the next one arrives into a market where every reference price just moved $5,000.

One honest note on our own performance, because keeping it real cuts both ways: our tracker recorded Monday's markups to the dollar and the hour, and we still noticed a day late, by asking the data instead of the data telling us. That's fixed. The platform now pages us the hour a listing's price rises, a wave lands, a floor jumps, or a trim goes extinct. The next move Tesla makes in this market gets reported when it happens. That's what we're here for.

Where this all comes from: our tracker watches Tesla's inventory around the clock and writes down every listing and every price the moment it changes, and those records never get edited after the fact. The markups, the middle-of-the-night exits, the floor, all of it is read straight off those records, and we re-checked the pool against Tesla's own listings the morning this published.

A truck disappearing from the listings isn't the same as a truck selling. Tesla doesn't tell anyone the difference, and when two vanish in the same minute we treat it with suspicion rather than celebration. So this report only ever claims what you could actually buy, at what price, on what day.

The new base price we checked three separate ways, because a $5,000 claim deserves it: Tesla's own fine print, their configurator, and the configurator again the morning we published. The 2019 figures are the ones Tesla put on stage at the unveil; the cheap trims those prices promised either never shipped at that price or were discontinued along the way. The Model Y L comparison comes from our daily watch on its page, where the price hasn't moved since launch.

The opinions here are ours, and we've tried to make it obvious where the facts end and our read begins. Where we're guessing, like the December question, we've said we're guessing, and we've put a date on when we'll know.

Times are Eastern. The cartoon is ours.