Elon Musk said in a post on X on Nov. 9 that Tesla will have to return deposits to a lot of Cybertruck customers, because orders for the truck exceed what the company can build before it shuts the production line. He said Tesla will try to make as many trucks as possible in the roughly eight months left. The statement came three days after he first announced that the line is ending.
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Read literally, the post tells a reservation holder that a place in the queue no longer guarantees a truck. Musk did not say how many orders are open, how large the deposits are or when refunds would begin, and Tesla does not report sales by model, so the size of the backlog is unknown outside the company.
Three posts in four days
The sequence began on Nov. 6, when Musk said Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of 2027. Local television coverage of that post quoted his stated reason: to make room for increased production of the Cybercab, the company’s two-seat robotaxi. The Texas plant is the only place the Cybertruck is built.
The next day, Musk said the order backlog was far larger than Tesla could build before the line is taken apart, and that an extra shift would be added to try to finish every order in time. Drive Tesla Canada’s report carried both statements, and Tesla North noted he narrowed the timing of the dismantling to about June or July of 2027. Autoblog’s account of the extra shift said Musk gave no figure for the backlog.
The deposit statement followed on Nov. 9. According to Motor1’s report, Musk wrote that Tesla would have to return deposits for a lot of people. The report also relayed his explanation for keeping the line running until mid-2027 instead of ending it sooner: the opportunity cost of the truck’s complexity is outweighed by the value of Cybercab production, so the Cybertruck gets its remaining months and then makes way.
What an extra shift can and cannot clear
Adding a shift raises output, but Musk gave no number for how many more trucks it adds or when it starts. With only a handful of months before the line closes, there is a hard ceiling on how many trucks the plant can finish, and he has not guaranteed that every order will be built. His own wording, that Tesla will try to get all orders done in time, leaves room for the opposite outcome, and the deposit remark states it directly.
Production has never run at the pace Tesla once promised. Musk said in 2022 that the company would build about 250,000 Cybertrucks in 2025. Autoblog reported that Tesla sold 20,237 in the U.S. last year, and Cox Automotive data cited in the same report put third-quarter 2026 sales at 4,323, enough to make it the best-selling electric pickup in the country that quarter. Cumulative sales are just under 71,000, under 30 percent of the annual volume Musk once projected for a single year of full production. The truck was unveiled in November 2019 and customer deliveries began in November 2023, so the production run will have lasted about three and a half years.
Tesla North advised customers with open orders to check their Tesla account for delivery estimates, because Musk has not promised that every order will be built before the line change. He also did not say when the extra shift starts, how much output it adds, or whether the truck will be built anywhere once the Texas line goes.
Price, demand and the Cybercab swap
Cybertruck deliveries began in late 2023 at prices far above the $40,000 starting figure Tesla once talked about. Autoblog lists the Premium all-wheel-drive version at $92,490 and the Cyberbeast at $102,490, with the dual-motor all-wheel-drive model no longer offered. A second Motor1 report cites Kelley Blue Book estimates of 11,586 U.S. sales in the first nine months of 2026, down 28 percent from a year earlier.
Those figures complicate the claim that demand outruns supply. Orders can exceed what a shrinking schedule allows even when sales are soft, because a line that ends in mid-2027 caps what any buyer can still get. Tesla has not published an order count, so the claim rests on Musk’s word alone.
The company is shifting floor space and resources toward the Cybercab, and Motor1 described the Cybertruck as the third Tesla model to be cancelled this year, after the Model S and Model X. For people holding a reservation, the open question is the one Musk left unanswered: which deposits Tesla will return, and when. Tesla has also not said whether refunds will go to the newest reservations first or be sorted by some other order, nor whether customers who already hold a configured order are affected differently from those who only placed a deposit. Those details will determine how many buyers end up without a truck.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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