Tesla Halts Orders of Cybertruck Outside North America Amid Increased Demand

Tesla Halts Orders of Cybertruck Outside North America Amid Increased Demand
Tesla's Cybertruck is displayed at Manhattan's Meatpacking District in New York City, on May 8, 2021. (Jeenah Moon/Reuters)
Katabella Roberts
5/17/2022
Updated:
5/17/2022
Tesla is no longer taking orders for its upcoming and highly-anticipated Cybertruck pickup truck outside of North America, according to its official website.

Up until recently, the Cybertruck, which will be built at Tesla’s new Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, could be ordered in Europe and Asia.

However, as of this week, the electric vehicle maker is now only taking reservations for the Cybertruck in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, its official website shows.

When attempting to order the vehicle from countries outside of North America, customers are able to get updates about the product but no “order” button is visible.

The Epoch Times has contacted Tesla for comment.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said last week that his company would start production of the Cybertruck next year at its plant in Austin, and noted that demand for the vehicle had exceeded production.

“We have more orders of the first Cybertrucks than we could possibly fulfill for three years after the start of production,” Musk said at the FT Future of the Car 2022 conference.

The billionaire businessman, who is set to take Twitter private, added that demand for some of Tesla’s vehicles exceeds production “to a ridiculous degree” and said it could stop taking orders for the foreseeable future.

Less than a week after the Cybertruck was unveiled in November 2019, Musk wrote on Twitter that Tesla had already received over 250,000 reservations for it.
That number had risen to over 650,000 in June 2020, according to a report by the investment firm, Wedbush Securities, and to over 1 million in May 2021. The Cybertruck is now widely reported to have had close to 1.5 million reservations.
Tesla previously delayed production of the Cybertruck to 2023, having already delayed it from 2021 to late 2022, amid supply chain issues.

“We will not be introducing new vehicle models this year. It would not make any sense because we’ll still be parts constrained,” Musk said on a call with analysts at the start of this year.

Musk added that additional products “would then require a bunch of attention and resources on that increased complexity of the additional product, resulting in fewer vehicles actually being delivered this year.”

The billionaire said he hopes to get production of the Cybertrucks to a quarter-million annually but noted that doing this would take some time owing to the introduction of new technology.

In April it was announced that Musk would take social media platform Twitter private for $54.20 a share, putting the firm’s value at about $44 billion.

However, the deal has already hit roadblocks after Musk said that the deal was “temporarily on hold” until detailed information comes to light supporting Twitter’s claims that bots or fake accounts make up fewer than 5 percent of users on the platform.

Reuters contributed to this report.