Tesla to End Cybertruck Output in About Eight Months, Refund Deposits

By Rebecca Stone

Tesla will end Cybertruck production in about eight months and will “have to return deposits for a lot of people,” CEO Elon Musk said in an X post on Monday.

The announcement fixes a deadline, not a rescue plan. Musk said the order rate for the steel-clad pickup far exceeds production, so Tesla will try to build as many vehicles as possible before the roughly eight-month cutoff. His defense of the truck did not rest on a claim that Cybertruck is unprofitable.

“The opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production,” Musk said. Last week, he said Tesla plans to use the factory space for more two-seat Cybercabs, the robotaxis that now stand to gain the capacity.

What changes at the factory?

Tesla’s post gives no Cybercab capacity number, refund total or delivery schedule beyond the production window. It does make the factory allocation the commercial issue. Under Musk’s account, the Cybertruck’s complexity consumes resources that would otherwise go toward Cybercab output, so the company is choosing the production opportunity it values more.

That is a management rationale, not a reported revenue gain. The post does not specify how many Cybercabs will replace the departing truck or what the conversion will earn. The eight-month timeline puts the burden on the robotaxi program to deliver the incremental value Musk has claimed.

Why did 1 million reservations not translate into sales?

Tesla began delivering the Cybertruck to customers in November 2023, when the steel pickup looked capable of becoming a breakthrough hit for the company. Musk said reservations had reached 1 million, and he predicted annual sales of about 250,000. Those were his projections, not Tesla-reported sales.

Comparable sales never followed those reservations. Tesla does not break out Cybertruck deliveries, so industry experts’ estimate of about 71,000 trucks sold since the November 2023 start of deliveries is not a company-confirmed total. Against that estimated cumulative figure, the earlier 250,000-a-year forecast remains out of reach.

Sales also lagged for months after deliveries began. Musk did not attach a current backlog figure to the production-ending post, and the original 1 million reservation count cannot show how many orders remained active by the time Tesla announced the shutdown.

How large were Musk’s companies’ Tesla orders?

SpaceX, now known as SpaceXSI, bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025, according to Tesla’s S-1 registration statement ahead of its IPO. Musk also leads SpaceX, Tesla’s largest shareholder. The disclosed figure is purchase value, not a vehicle count, so it does not show how many trucks went to the space company.

xAI, another Musk company, bought $430 million worth of Tesla Megapacks for its data centers before merging with SpaceX. That order involved Megapacks rather than Cybertrucks, but it documents the scale of hardware purchases that companies within Musk’s network can place with Tesla.

Can a final production rush change the demand picture?

The run will not stop immediately. Tesla has eight months to maximize output, and Musk said the company will try to build as many Cybertrucks as possible before the cutoff.

Scarcity could produce a final sales bump, but even that increase is unlikely to lift demand to the earlier projections. The shutdown announcement offers no price guidance or volume forecast for those remaining vehicles.

The deadline also sharpens the factory competition between two very different products: a polarizing steel pickup and a two-seat robotaxi. Over the next eight months, the commercial test is whether Tesla can turn the Cybertruck’s freed assembly space into incremental Cybercab output quickly enough to justify giving up the truck’s remaining orders.