Tesla Scraps Cybertruck Plans for Australia and New Zealand, Refunding Deposits After Nearly Seven Years

Tesla has formally cancelled the Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand, ending a wait of almost seven years for people who put down deposits on the electric pickup. Reservation holders began receiving emails on 23 October informing them that their orders are void and their money will be returned.

Australians could reserve the truck from November 2019 with a A$150 deposit. The email, which customers shared on social media and Reddit, is brief. "After careful consideration, plans to produce Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand have been discontinued," Tesla wrote, adding that it is "unable to fulfil your reservation and it will be cancelled."

The company says customers will receive a full refund of any payments made, processed within 30 days. Reservation holders who instead order a new Model 3 or Model Y will be offered a free one-year subscription to FSD (Supervised). The offer appears aimed at turning a dead reservation into a sale of a right-hand-drive vehicle Tesla actually builds. The emails arrived a day after Tesla reported its third-quarter 2026 earnings.

Australia looked like a meaningful market on paper. A crowdsourced survey of reservations in 2020 placed it third behind the United States and Canada, with about 3% of all Cybertruck reservations, although Tesla never confirmed regional figures. By 2023, crowdsourced tracking put total reservations at roughly 2 million.

Tesla quietly closed the Australian reservation page in May 2022, replacing it with a "Get updates" button, and did not refund anyone at that point. In 2024 it shipped a Cybertruck to Australia for a display tour, and Elon Musk told shareholders that year: "We might be able to certify it for other markets sometime next year." No right-hand-drive version followed.

That is the central obstacle. The Cybertruck is built only in left-hand drive, while Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan all require right-hand drive. Australia also demands certification under its own design rules, a costly undertaking for a vehicle already facing weak demand in North America.

Tesla's limited international rollout has been confined to left-hand-drive countries. Deliveries began in South Korea late last year and in the UAE in January, with configurators later appearing in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Israel. The truck remains blocked in the EU, mainly over pedestrian safety concerns.

The sales numbers do little to support a redesign. Tesla delivered 8,295 "Other Models" in the third quarter of 2026, a category now made up almost entirely of the Cybertruck since Model S and Model X production ended. Electrek estimates quarterly Cybertruck sales at 7,000 to 8,000 units, or roughly 30,000 a year, against a production line built for 250,000 annually. Australia and New Zealand together have about 33 million people.

Electrek argued that the outcome had been apparent for some time and that Tesla should have said so years earlier. It noted that many Australian reservation holders had probably already cancelled, since the truck that arrived in 2023 was more expensive and had less range than promised, and that US sales have fallen sharply from about 39,000 in 2024. The outlet concluded the Cybertruck is now a niche, largely American product, with international expansion limited to finding buyers for existing left-hand-drive trucks.