Tesla drops Cybertruck from Australia and New Zealand markets

Tesla has ended plans to sell the Cybertruck in Australia and New Zealand, leaving deposit holders waiting for years. Reservation holders are receiving emails today confirming that their orders will not be fulfilled and their deposits will be refunded. Australians began placing deposits in November 2019, marking almost seven years of waiting for a pickup truck that Tesla now says it will not produce for them.

The email, which reservation holders have shared on social media and Reddit, is brief. It states that after careful consideration, plans to produce Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand have been discontinued. As a result, reservations will be cancelled.

Tesla says customers will receive 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” have passed since the first deposits were made.

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.

This was the obvious outcome for a while, and Tesla should have said so years ago.