Remember the Cybertruck? The steel wedge whose window demo cracked two windows on stage back in 2019? It’s on its way out. Last week, Elon Musk said Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production in Texas so it can build more of something else: the Tesla Cybercab robotaxi, a small car with no driver at all.
On the surface, it’s a factory shuffle. But it also tells you a lot about where Tesla thinks the money is. Spoiler: it’s not in pickup trucks. So let’s unpack what happened, and whether the bet makes sense.
So what actually happened?
Musk posted the news on X on November 6. Tesla will be “winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year,” he wrote. The reason? To “make room for increased Cybercab production.”
He didn’t add much else in that post. In a reply to another user, though, he called the Cybertruck the “best vehicle Tesla has ever made” and said the move marks the “end of an era.” It’s unclear whether the truck will move to another plant or simply stop. According to Fox Business, the Austin factory is the only known Tesla plant set up to build it.
The truck’s lead engineer, Wes Morrill, also chimed in. “Cybertruck was an incredible technology development platform and lives on through Cybercab,” he wrote. He also confirmed that Tesla will keep spare parts and service going for current owners.
So if you already own one, you’re not stranded. You just won’t see many new ones rolling off the line after mid-2027.
Why the Tesla Cybercab robotaxi gets the floor space
First, a quick refresher. The Cybercab is a two-seat robotaxi, which means it drives itself and carries paying passengers. It entered production earlier this year. Tesla started paid rides with a small Cybercab fleet in Austin in September, and it plans to launch Cybercab service in Dallas next month.
The numbers are still small, but they’re growing. Texas DMV figures cited by Fox Business show about 570 of Tesla’s 1,200-plus robotaxis in the state are Cybercabs. The rest are mainly Model Y cars. Musk also says demand is running ahead of production.
Then there’s the way Tesla builds it. The Cybercab uses what Tesla calls an “unboxed” manufacturing process. Roughly, that means building big sections of the car in parallel and joining them near the end, rather than moving one body down a single long line. According to Not a Tesla App, the eventual goal is one Cybercab every 10 seconds.
The Cybercab also borrows tech from the truck, like steer-by-wire, where the steering works through electronics instead of a mechanical link. So Morrill’s line about the truck living on isn’t just a nice sentiment.
Okay, but was the Cybertruck just a flop?
Honestly? Commercially, it’s hard to call it anything else. When production started in 2023, Musk predicted 250,000 sales a year. Instead, Kelley Blue Book says Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in the U.S. in 2025. That’s down 48% from 38,965 the year before.
Price didn’t help, either. Musk once promised a $40,000 starting price. Yet after a $5,000 increase in August, the cheapest version now starts at $74,990. Meanwhile, the truck has racked up 11 recalls since its debut, according to Fox Business.
That’s why Electrek isn’t buying the “make room” story. It points out that Giga Texas has more than 10 million square feet of factory floor, by Tesla’s own count. In its view, the real problem is demand, with sales stuck at roughly a tenth of the original plan.
We think both things can be true. The truck didn’t sell, and Tesla would rather spend its energy on robotaxis. Calling it “making room” is just the nicer way to say it.
The catch nobody should skip
Here’s the part that matters most. Tesla is moving factory space from a product people can buy today to one that’s still proving itself. Electrek’s phrase for it is blunt: Musk is “betting the house on autonomy.”
There are real open questions, too. In September, the U.S. road safety regulator NHTSA opened an audit into whether Tesla properly self-certified the Cybercab under federal safety standards. That’s a big deal for a car with no human driver as backup. Also, first customer deliveries of the Cybercab are only targeted for the end of 2026, so it’s early days.
None of this means the plan will fail. But if regulators push back, or riders don’t show up, Tesla will have swapped a real product for a slower ramp. That’s the risk you take when you go all in on one idea.
The pattern goes beyond one truck. Tesla already turned its Model S and X lines in Fremont over to building Optimus robots, as we covered in our piece on Tesla Optimus production. In other words, a carmaker is slowly turning into a robot maker.
What the Tesla Cybercab robotaxi bet means for you
If you live in Austin, you might ride in one soon. Everywhere else, the effect is more indirect, but it’s real. Big carmakers are shifting money and factory space toward self-driving cars and robots, and they’re doing it fast.
Tesla isn’t the only player, of course. Waymo is planning a much bigger fleet, as we explained in Waymo’s push toward 20,000 robotaxis. Then there’s Toyota, which is building cars for Waymo straight off its own line, which we looked at in our Toyota bZ4X robotaxi story.
For engineers and founders in Armenia and other emerging markets, the takeaway is simple. The skills in demand are moving from building cars to building the software, sensors and safety systems that let machines drive themselves. That’s a field where smaller teams can still compete.
So here’s the open question. Will the Tesla Cybercab robotaxi turn out to be the hit the Cybertruck never was? Or is Tesla trading a product with real, if small, sales for a promise? Our honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and the next twelve months in Texas will tell us a lot.