Electric Pickups: Tesla Ends Cybertruck Plans for Oceania
After nearly seven years of waiting, reservation holders in Australia and New Zealand have been notified that their orders are being cancelled with full refunds.
By Mei Lin ·
The long wait for Tesla’s stainless steel pickup truck in the Southern Hemisphere has officially ended without a single vehicle being delivered to the region.
Today, Tesla sent emails to reservation holders in Australia and New Zealand confirming that production plans for the Cybertruck in these markets have been discontinued. The notification states that the company can no longer fulfill the orders and that all deposits will be refunded within 30 days. To soften the blow, the automaker is offering a free one-year subscription to its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) feature for those who switch their orders to a Model 3 or Model Y. This move effectively converts a stalled pickup reservation into a sale of a car that is already built for right-hand drive markets.
The timeline for this decision stretches back to November 2019, when Australian consumers began paying A$150 to reserve the vehicle. For almost seven years, these customers held onto their deposits while Tesla delayed the launch. The uncertainty began to solidify in May 2022 when the company quietly closed the Australian reservation page, replacing the order button with a simple request for updates. At that time, no refunds were issued, leaving thousands of people in limbo. Although Elon Musk told shareholders in 2024 that certification for other markets might happen "next year," that year passed without a right-hand-drive version appearing.
The primary obstacle has always been the vehicle’s design. The Cybertruck is manufactured exclusively in left-hand drive. This creates a significant engineering and financial hurdle for markets like Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Japan, which require right-hand drive configurations. Australia also has specific design rules that require separate certification. For a truck that is already facing demand challenges in North America, the cost of re-engineering the platform for just two smaller markets was likely too high to justify.
Market data further supports the decision to pull back. While Australia was once considered a significant market, representing about 3% of global reservations in 2020, the numbers have not translated into sufficient volume. In Q3 2026, Tesla delivered just 8,295 units in the "Other Models" category, a segment that now consists almost entirely of Cybertrucks since production of the Model S and Model X ended. Industry estimates place Cybertruck sales at between 7,000 and 8,000 units last quarter, equating to an annual pace of roughly 30,000 units. This is far below the 250,000 units per year that the production line was designed to handle, making a specialized right-hand-drive program financially difficult to defend.
Tesla’s international strategy for the Cybertruck has remained strictly limited to left-hand-drive regions so far. Deliveries began in South Korea late last year and in the UAE in January, with configurators launching in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Israel. The truck remains blocked in the EU, primarily due to pedestrian safety regulations. This cancellation confirms that the Cybertruck is becoming a niche, mostly American product, with international expansion focused on finding buyers for existing left-hand-drive inventory rather than developing new regional variants.
Source: Electrek
