Tesla cancels Cybertruck in Australia and NZ after 7 years of deposits
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. […]
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.
Not bad news, to be honest. I’m unlikely to ever encounter one if it did go on sale here, given how rarely I go anywhere, but I know what the roads in Sydney—which are bad enough as they are—would be like with them taking up even more space…
