“It would make the product worse”: Tesla Cybertruck ruled out for Australia as Elon Musk delivers hammer blow to local fans

In the smallest surprise since the sun coming up this morning, Elon Musk has ruled out exporting the weird and wild Tesla Cybertruck to Australia, or any other market outside of North America, over fears that global and local design standards will make it worse.

Currently the Tesla Cybertruck can be sold within the North American region because the design standards are not as high as those enforced in both Europe and Australia.

“We did design the car to North American requirements, because if you start going with the superset of international requirements, it forces a lot of constraints on the Cybertruck that would make the product frankly worse,” he told investors this week.

“I think we’ll need to make a special version that is, for example, China-compliant or Europe-compliant, but that doesn’t really make sense to add that complexity until we’ve achieved higher volume production on Cybertruck.”

The outspoken Tesla CEO didn’t shut the door completely on export. Musk added that Tesla “might be able to certify” the Cybertruck for international markets “some time next year” but stopped short of announcing which markets he was talking about, with the suggestion the battery-powered ute might be homologated for emerging markets outside of Europe and Australasia.

Originally, some automotive analysts suggested that to sell the Cybertruck in Europe and Australia it would require a dramatic redesign in order to pass pedestrian impact tests. The extra costs to convert from left to right-hand drive would be another challenge for engineers.

The latest comments from Musk seem poorly timed as the Tesla Cybertruck is currently touring Australia and New Zealand as part of an official ‘Down Under’ roadshow designed to gauge local interest in exporting it to our market.

Back in May 2022 Tesla halted Australian Tesla Cybertruck orders without any warning or updates given to prospective owners. A similar decision was made in other markets outside of North America.