Tesla Pulls Plug on Cybertruck for Australian and New Zealand Buyers
The automaker is voiding deposits and refunding money after years of waiting for a right-hand-drive version that never arrived.
By Dmitri Sokolov ·
Tesla has canceled plans to deliver the Cybertruck to customers in Australia and New Zealand, notifying reservation holders via email that their orders are void. The company confirmed that all payments made toward the vehicles will be refunded, with the money returned within 30 days. The message arrived to buyers on Thursday, October 23, 2026.
The correspondence from the automaker stated, “After careful consideration, plans to produce Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand have been discontinued.” Tesla added that it is consequently unable to fulfill the reservations. For those who wish to switch to a different purchase, the company is offering a free one-year subscription to FSD (Supervised) for anyone who orders a new Model 3 or Model Y instead.
The cancellation concludes a lengthy wait for consumers in the region. Australian buyers began placing A$150 deposits to reserve the electric pickup in November 2019, a timeline spanning nearly seven years. Tesla closed the Australian reservation page in May 2022, replacing it with an update button, but did not issue refunds or cancel existing orders at that time. Instead, customers continued to hold reservations while awaiting news.
The delay persisted through 2024, when Elon Musk told shareholders that certification for other markets might be possible “sometime next year.” That deadline passed without a vehicle being produced. The fundamental barrier to delivery has been the vehicle’s configuration: the Cybertruck is manufactured exclusively in left-hand drive, whereas Australia and New Zealand require right-hand-drive vehicles for their road networks.
Despite the cancellation, interest in the vehicle has historically been significant in the region. A crowdsourced survey of reservations from 2020 ranked Australia as the third-largest market for the truck, following the United States and Canada, and accounting for approximately 3% of all reservations. By 2023, crowdsourced tracking indicated total reservations for the pickup had reached roughly 2 million globally.
Tesla has successfully delivered the Cybertruck to other international locations, including South Korea, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Israel. However, all of those markets utilize left-hand-drive vehicles. The company has also faced regulatory hurdles in other regions, including the European Union, where pedestrian safety regulations have kept the truck off the road.
Sales volumes in the United States suggest that expanding production for right-hand-drive markets is not currently a priority. Tesla delivered 8,295 units in its “Other Models” category for the third quarter of 2026, a figure that now consists almost entirely of Cybertruck sales. This indicates a production rate far below the facility's capability of building 250,000 units annually, making the investment required for new tooling difficult to justify for smaller markets.
Tesla’s decision follows its report on third-quarter earnings, released just prior to the cancellation emails. The company is currently attempting to transition these canceled reservations into sales of the Model 3 and Model Y, vehicles that are already manufactured in right-hand drive for those regions.
Source: Electrek
