Tesla scraps Cybertruck plans for Australasia

Tesla has formally withdrawn its Cybertruck from the Australian and New Zealand markets. On October 23, 2026, reservation holders received email notifications stating that their orders are now void and that their deposits will be fully refunded. This announcement comes one day after the company reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2026.

The core of the issue is mechanical and logistical. The Cybertruck is currently manufactured only in left-hand-drive configurations. Australia and New Zealand require right-hand-drive vehicles to comply with local traffic laws. Additionally, Australian regulations mandate specific design certifications that the truck has not yet met. Tesla stated that after careful consideration, plans to produce the vehicle for these regions have been discontinued.

The timeline of this decision is long and somewhat opaque. Australian customers began paying A$150 deposits in November 2019 to reserve the electric pickup. For nearly seven years, they waited for a delivery that never materialized. In May 2022, Tesla quietly removed the reservation page from its website, replacing it with a simple button to receive updates. At that time, no refunds were issued, leaving thousands of customers in a state of limbo.

During 2024, the company shipped a Cybertruck to the region for a display tour. CEO Elon Musk told shareholders that year that the vehicle might be certified for other markets the following year. That next year arrived and passed without a right-hand-drive version appearing. Now, with the official cancellation, Tesla is attempting to convert these dead reservations into sales of vehicles it actually produces in right-hand-drive, specifically the Model 3 and Model Y.

As a gesture of goodwill, Tesla is offering a free one-year subscription to its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software to any reservation holder who purchases a new Model 3 or Model Y. Refunds for the original deposits are expected to be processed within 30 days of the notification.

The market size was never negligible. A 2020 survey suggested Australia held the third-largest share of global reservations, behind the United States and Canada, accounting for roughly 3% of the total. By 2023, crowdsourced tracking estimated that approximately 2 million Cybertruck reservations had been made worldwide. However, Tesla has never officially confirmed these regional figures.

Financial data suggests the decision was driven by low demand. In the third quarter of 2026, Tesla delivered only 8,295 units categorized as 'Other Models.' Since production of the Model S and Model X has ended, this category is now almost exclusively the Cybertruck. Analysts estimate that 7,000 to 8,000 of those units were Cybertrucks, representing an annual pace of about 30,000 vehicles. This is significantly lower than the 250,000-unit annual capacity of the production line.

The truck has faced challenges in North America, with sales dropping from approximately 39,000 units in 2024 to a much smaller figure today. International launches have been limited to left-hand-drive markets, including South Korea, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Israel. The truck remains blocked from the European Union, primarily due to pedestrian safety concerns.

For the combined population of Australia and New Zealand, which totals about 33 million people, the cost of re-engineering the truck for right-hand drive likely did not justify the expected volume. The cancellation confirms that the Cybertruck is now a niche product, largely confined to the American and other left-hand-drive markets.