Reservations cancelled after a long wait
Tesla has ended plans to produce the Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand, according to notices sent to reservation holders and reported by Electrek. Customers who placed deposits are being told that their reservations will be cancelled and that payments will be refunded within 30 days.
Australian customers were able to place A$150 reservations beginning in November 2019. Tesla later removed the country’s reservation option in 2022, replacing it with a request for updates, but people with existing deposits were left waiting. The latest notice closes that process nearly seven years after reservations opened.
Electrek reported that Tesla is also offering affected customers a one-year subscription to Full Self-Driving (Supervised) if they instead order a Model 3 or Model Y. That incentive would move customers toward vehicles Tesla already produces for right-hand-drive markets. Tesla’s message, as reproduced by the publication, did not provide a detailed engineering or commercial explanation for abandoning the pickup launch.
Right-hand-drive version never arrived
The Cybertruck is produced in left-hand drive. Australia and New Zealand use right-hand-drive vehicles, meaning Tesla would have needed a market-specific version as well as local certification before regular sales could begin. Although Tesla brought a Cybertruck to Australia for a display tour, it never opened a configurator or announced a delivery timetable for either country.
The company has expanded sales to some markets outside North America where left-hand-drive vehicles are standard. The report pointed to launches in South Korea and several Middle Eastern countries, contrasting those moves with the absence of a right-hand-drive program. That pattern does not by itself establish Tesla’s internal reasoning, but it illustrates the additional work required for Australia and New Zealand.
The cancellation also highlights the limits of an early vehicle reservation. A refundable deposit can register interest, but it does not guarantee that a manufacturer will complete the engineering, certification and sales work required for a specific country. In this case, customers held reservations through years of changing Cybertruck plans before receiving a definitive answer.
Tesla had not disclosed how many active reservations remained in Australia or New Zealand in the evidence supplied for this report. Crowdsourced reservation estimates cited by Electrek are not company figures, so they do not provide a reliable count of affected customers. The confirmed outcome is narrower: the regional program has been discontinued, existing reservations are being voided, and deposit refunds are promised within 30 days.
