Tesla Built a Factory for 250,000 Cybertrucks a Year. It Sold 70,000 in Total.

Tesla will stop building the Cybertruck at Giga Texas around mid-2027, three years after promising 250,000 a year. Roughly 70,000 were ever sold, and the factory is being handed to robotaxis.

On Friday morning, Elon Musk posted on X that Tesla will "be winding down" Cybertruck production at its Texas gigafactory around the middle of next year — about three and a half years after the first deliveries. The floor space, he said, is needed for the Cybercab.

That is the official reason, and it is the polite one. The truck Musk unveiled in 2019 and promised would reinvent the pickup is not ending because it ran its course. It is ending because the market never arrived.

The arithmetic is not subtle. Tesla built the Cybertruck line for 250,000 vehicles a year, and its latest shareholder letter still lists more than 125,000 units of installed capacity. Industry estimates put total deliveries at roughly 70,000 across three years. In the United States, Cox Automotive counted 20,237 Cybertrucks sold in 2025 — down 48% from 38,965 in 2024. By the third quarter of 2026, the whole "Other Models" bucket that also carries the Model S, Model X and Semi had fallen to 8,295 deliveries, the lowest since 2021.

Price did not rescue it either. The 2019 reveal promised a truck starting just under $40,000. The dual-motor version now starts at $74,990, after a $5,000 increase in August. A cheaper rear-wheel-drive trim arrived in 2025 and was pulled months later. And the truck cannot be sold in Europe or most right-hand-drive markets; Tesla cancelled it for Australia and New Zealand two weeks ago, per Electrek.

Now the "making room" argument. Giga Texas is more than 10 million square feet by Tesla's own count, and the Cybertruck line was running at roughly a quarter of its installed capacity — most of it idle. As for the Cybercab, Texas had 463 of them registered as of late October, and Tesla built a separate line for its "unboxed" assembly process, as InsideEVs reports. There was never a queue for the floor space. There was a queue of one: a stainless-steel body, its own castings, its own supply chain, amortised over roughly 30,000 trucks a year.

What kept the program alive longer than demand did was Musk's own constellation. SpaceX bought 1,279 Cybertrucks in the fourth quarter of 2025 and spent $131 million on them at Tesla's suggested retail price, according to a SpaceX financial filing cited by CNBC. Musk's companies accounted for about 19% of US Cybertruck registrations that quarter. Without that, the truck would probably have died a year earlier.

It also had a recall problem: 11 voluntary recalls on the 2024 model, according to NHTSA, from a trapped accelerator pedal cover to an inverter fault that could cut drive power.

But the Cybertruck's real problem was never engineering. It was meaning. The truck became a political flag — Wired wrote last October that no object felt more emblematic of Trump's return to the White House — and buyers who wanted a pickup got a statement instead, with the social cost that implies. A vehicle that polarising can have a devoted niche and still never be a product line.

So this is the second time in a year that Tesla has closed a line to make room for a robot. Model S and Model X production ended in April to free Fremont for Optimus. Now the Cybertruck line goes to the Cybercab. Musk used to say he would build a conventional electric truck if the Cybertruck failed. He has stopped saying that. The company's future, as he tells it, is autonomy: robotaxis, humanoids, and the compute to run them.

Musk told a reply on X that "the Cybertruck fleet will be around for a long time." True. Fleets outlive the factories that made them. But the factory belongs to robots now, and the most recognisable vehicle of the decade is heading for the used lot.

Sources: Electrek — Tesla to end Cybertruck production as sales stall at ~10% of plan, InsideEVs — Tesla Is Killing The Cybertruck To Make Room For More Robotaxis, CNBC — Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production in Texas next year to ramp Cybercab, Musk says