Tesla to Wind Down Cybertruck Production in Mid-2027 to Make Room for Cybercab

Tesla will wind down production of the Cybertruck at its factory in Austin, Texas, starting around the middle of next year, CEO Elon Musk said Friday, ending the run of the electric pickup as the company shifts factory space to its driverless Cybercab.

Musk announced the change in a post on X, writing that Tesla “will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production.” The Austin plant is the only factory that builds the truck.

It is not yet clear whether Tesla will move Cybertruck production to another plant or stop building the vehicle altogether. The truck’s lead engineer, Wes Morrill, appeared to signal the end in a post of his own: “Cybertruck was an incredible technology development platform and lives on through Cybercab.”

Sales fell short of early targets

At Tesla’s 2023 shareholder meeting, Musk said his “reasonable guess” was that Tesla would be making 500,000 Cybertrucks a year. Tesla has never reported Cybertruck sales separately. Sales of its “other models” this year total fewer than 37,000, a figure that also includes the discontinued Model S and Model X.

The Cybertruck is the latest Tesla vehicle to give way to the company’s push into self-driving cars and robots. Tesla halted production of the Model S and Model X at its California plant to make room for Optimus, the humanoid robot it plans to sell.

A turn toward robotaxis

The Cybercab is a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel and no accelerator or brake pedals. Musk has said Tesla would soon be making the Cybercab in greater number than all its other vehicles combined.

Tesla’s robotaxi service now runs in seven cities, four in Texas and three in Florida, behind competing services such as Waymo, the Alphabet unit. Musk had promised the service would be providing fully autonomous rides to half the country by the end of last year. Tesla has not reported the service’s profits or revenue in its quarterly results.

The announcement closed a rough week for Musk. The nearly $500 million he gave in campaign contributions in the midterm elections came to nothing as Republican candidates lost across the country, and Tesla shares fell more than 12 percent in the first two days of trading since the vote. The drop cut Musk’s net worth by $113 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, though he remains by far the richest person in the world.

Reporting based on coverage by CNN.