Tesla Is Winding Down The Cybertruck — Musk Is Betting The Factory On Robotaxis
Elon Musk just put an expiration date on the most polarizing truck ever built.
In a post on X, Musk announced that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas in Austin around the middle of 2027, clearing the line for the Cybercab, the company’s autonomous robotaxi. “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,” Musk wrote. He gave the truck its flowers on the way out, calling it “an incredible technology platform” that “lives on through Cybercab.”
Translation: the factory floor is worth more building driverless cars than stainless-steel wedges. The Cybercab is a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel and no pedals, and Tesla has been running paid Cybercab rides in Austin since September. Musk is not easing into that bet — he is handing it the Cybertruck’s own assembly line.
The sales math explains why. Kelley Blue Book counted 16,097 Cybertrucks sold in the first nine months of 2025, down 38% from 25,974 in the same stretch of 2024 — a long way from the roughly 250,000 trucks a year Musk once predicted. This was a vehicle that became a genuine status symbol: rappers and athletes turned it into the driveway flex of the moment, the truck people bought to be seen in. The visibility was enormous. The order books never matched it.
The arc was wild from the start. Unveiled in 2019 with a promised starting price of $39,900, the Cybertruck finally reached its first customers in December 2023 at prices far above that promise, then spent its early life collecting a string of recalls. It was part truck, part meme, part cultural moment — and now the moment has a wind-down date. On Friday morning, the truck’s official X account posted a “driving into the sunset” video, which tells you exactly how Tesla is framing the goodbye.
What Musk did not say is whether the Cybertruck moves to another plant or ends entirely — and Austin is the only Tesla factory known to be equipped for the truck’s specialized parts, which makes a quiet relocation hard to picture. Lead engineer Wes Morrill has indicated that the trucks already on the road will keep parts and service support, so owners are not being left stranded. But the truck itself, as a going concern, looks finished. The future of that production line has no steering wheel at all.
Source: Elon Musk’s post on X; reporting via Reuters. Sales figures: Kelley Blue Book via Cox Automotive. Photo: MotorTrend.
