Tesla cancels Cybertruck in Australia and NZ after 7 years of deposits
Cyberbeast / Source: Tesla.com
Tesla has officially cancelled the Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand. Reservation holders are getting emails today telling them their orders are void and their deposits will be refunded.
Australians started putting down A$150 to reserve the electric pickup in November 2019. That’s almost seven years of waiting for a truck Tesla now says it won’t build for them.
“Plans… have been discontinued”
The email, which reservation holders started sharing on social media and Reddit this morning, is short.
“After careful consideration, plans to produce Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand have been discontinued,” Tesla wrote. “As a result, we’re unable to fulfil your reservation and it will be cancelled.”
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Tesla says customers will get a full refund for any payments made, with refunds processed within 30 days. As a consolation, the automaker is offering a free one-year subscription to FSD (Supervised) to reservation holders who order a new Model 3 or Model Y instead.
Tesla is trying to convert a dead Cybertruck reservation into a sale of a car it actually builds in right-hand drive.
The emails went out a day after Tesla reported its Q3 2026 earnings.
Seven years of “next year”
Australia wasn’t a small market on paper. A crowdsourced survey of reservations from 2020 put it third behind the US and Canada, with about 3% of all Cybertruck reservations. Tesla never confirmed regional numbers, but by 2023, crowdsourced tracking put total Cybertruck reservations at around 2 million.
Tesla quietly closed the Australian reservation page in May 2022 and replaced it with a “Get updates” button. It didn’t refund anyone at the time. People who had already reserved just kept waiting.
Then in 2024, Tesla shipped a Cybertruck down under for a display tour, and Elon Musk told shareholders that year: “We might be able to certify it for other markets sometime next year.” Next year came and went, and the truck never got a right-hand-drive version.
That’s the core problem. The Cybertruck is built only in left-hand drive. Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Japan all need right-hand drive, and Australia also requires certification under its own design rules. That’s a big bill for a truck with a truck that is already having demand issues in North America.
The Cybertruck can’t justify the investment
Tesla’s few international Cybertruck launches all share one thing: they’re left-hand-drive markets. Deliveries started in South Korea late last year and in the UAE in January, followed by configurators in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Israel. The truck remains blocked in the EU, mainly for pedestrian safety reasons.
And the volumes don’t support a right-hand-drive program. Tesla delivered just 8,295 “Other Models” in Q3 2026, a category that’s now almost entirely Cybertruck since Model S and Model X production ended. We estimate Cybertruck sales at 7,000 to 8,000 units last quarter, roughly a 30,000-per-year pace for a production line Tesla built for 250,000 units annually.
At that rate, no CFO would sign off on re-engineering the truck for two markets that together have about 33 million people.
Electrek’s Take
This was the obvious outcome for a while, and Tesla should have said so years ago.
Taking deposits in 2019 for a truck that was supposed to start at $39,900 was one thing. Closing the order page in 2022 and letting thousands of people sit on refundable deposits for four more years without a word, while the CEO kept dangling “next year,” is another.
To be fair, a lot of Australian reservation holders likely already canceled their pre-orders. The Cybertruck that showed up in 2023 isn’t the one they reserved. It’s more expensive, has less range than promised, and its US sales have collapsed from about 39,000 in 2024 to a fraction of that today. Paying a premium for an import-ready version would have made it even worse value down under.
But it also confirms what we’ve been saying: the Cybertruck is now a niche, mostly American product. Tesla isn’t likely to invest more in it, and the international expansion is just about finding buyers for the existing left-hand-drive trucks.
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Source: electrek.co — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.