Tesla Ends the Cybertruck: The $30,000 Cybercab Bet Has Until December 31

On Friday, Elon Musk announced on X that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of 2027, to make room for increased Cybercab production. Three years after the first deliveries, the stainless-steel pickup Musk once said would sell 250,000 a year is being retired so its factory floor can build a car with no steering wheel and no pedals.

The sales record explains the decision, and it is not close. Tesla delivered an estimated 20,237 Cybertrucks in the United States in 2025, down 48 percent from 38,965 in 2024, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates reported by Reuters. The model has had 11 recalls since deliveries began in late 2023. Tesla's "Other Models" group, which includes the Cybertruck, delivered 8,295 vehicles in the third quarter, down from 12,364 in the second. The truck was sold officially only in the United States, Canada, South Korea and a few Gulf states; European pedestrian-impact rules made approval there effectively impossible. The Cybertruck is the second vehicle line Tesla has ended this year: its second-quarter update confirmed the Model S and Model X lines at Fremont had already been decommissioned, their space going to Optimus humanoid robot lines.

What replaces it is the Cybercab, the two-seat robotaxi unveiled in October 2024, with butterfly doors and no steering wheel or pedals. The first production car rolled off the line at Gigafactory Texas in February 2026, volume production began in April, and paid public rides started in Austin in September. Tesla has installed annual manufacturing capacity above 125,000 Cybercabs, and Musk has said the company will soon build more Cybercabs than all its other vehicles combined, using its unboxed manufacturing process to eventually build one every ten seconds. But the company's own chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, has identified regulatory approvals as the key challenge to expanding deployments — production has already outpaced Tesla's ability to put the cars on the road.

That is what makes the next eight weeks the real test. Tesla said in October that it was targeting retail deliveries before year-end, and Musk has long promised the Cybercab will sell for under $30,000. On Polymarket, the contract asking whether Tesla will sell a Cybercab to a retail customer for $30,000 or less by December 31 was trading at about 20 to 24 percent on November 7, after briefly surging to 36 percent on the wind-down news. The gap between Musk's target and the market's doubt is the whole story: a car with no steering wheel needs federal approval Tesla does not yet have, and the version with a removable steering wheel that would satisfy regulators is only now in production.

I read the wind-down as a serious signal rather than a bluff — a company does not kill a product line to make room for a demonstration. But a factory reallocation is not a delivery, and Tesla's history is full of year-end targets that slipped into the following spring. The Cybertruck's epitaph is already written in its sales figures; whether the Cybercab is a real product or the next promise depends on a single retail sale, at a stated price, before the year runs out. My call: a 35 percent chance Tesla makes that sale by December 31.