Unplugged Performance, the biggest name in Tesla aftermarket tuning, wants to keep the Cybertruck alive. The company publicly proposed Tuesday to retire Tesla’s Cybertruck line, funded by a consortium of investors.
This comes just four days after Elon Musk announced that Tesla would end Cybertruck production at Giga Texas around mid-2027, with the truck selling at about 12% of Tesla’s planned 250,000 units per year.
The offer
UP published the pitch on X as “an open offer to Tesla.” The company says it fully supports prioritizing Cybercab and would lead Cybertruck production “at no cost to Tesla’s floor space, headcount, or focus.”
In exchange, Tesla would receive licensing fees as well as FSD and Robotaxi network revenues on each vehicle built. UP even offered to let Cybercab get first call on battery cells. “We will wait our turn,” the company wrote.
UP founder Ben Schaffer has made it clear that he supports Tesla’s overall transition to autonomy, but wants to keep the Cybertruck program alive.
And it doesn’t stop at the pickup. UP says it would build the Cybertruck, a three-row “CyberSUV” and an unmanned “CyberCargo” transporter. Two vehicles that Tesla has sometimes referred to, but they have never been revealed.
The post surpassed 240,000 views in a matter of hours, and the responses are mostly Cybertruck owners and Tesla shareholders begging Musk to say yes. Neither Musk nor Tesla had responded publicly as of this writing.
UP has a lot to play on this. It sells a full line of Cybertruck products, the UP Invincible Lift and Armor Kits, and has won several contracts to transform Cybertrucks into police vehicles for law enforcement. CEO Ben Schaffer once described the company’s goal as doing “the things that Tesla maybe wants to do, but doesn’t have the bandwidth to do.” It’s this idea taken to its extreme.
Musk’s reason versus the real one
Musk presented the end of the Cybertruck as a space problem. He said Tesla needed to “make room to increase Cybercab production.”
If the Cybertruck program succeeded, Tesla wouldn’t kill it. Tesla also produces Model Ys at Giga Texas, and it won’t close them to make room for Cybercab.
As we reported when Tesla announced the liquidation, this explanation doesn’t hold up. Giga Texas has more than 10 million square feet of floor space, the Cybertruck line is operating at about a quarter of its installed capacity of 125,000 units, and Texas had only a few hundred Cybercabs registered as of late October.
The real problem is the buyers. Tesla delivered 8,295 “other models” in the third quarter, and we estimate that 7,000 to 8,000 of them were Cybertrucks, a rate of about 30,000 trucks per year. It was a good quarter by Cybertruck standards.
Even this figure flatters him. Data from S&P Global Mobility shows that SpaceX purchased 1,279 Cybertrucks in the fourth quarter of 2025, or about 18% of U.S. registrations that quarter. Tesla also tried a cheaper RWD version, killed it, released a $60,000 AWD version, then raised prices by $5,000 in August. None of this fixed the demand.
Electrek’s point of view
I give UP credit for this: the offer is a bluff from Musk. If the Cybertruck is truly dying because Cybercab needs room, here’s someone volunteering to take the line off Tesla’s plate. Problem solved.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that.
There are many ways this could fail or never happen in the first place, but there is also a slight possibility that makes this possible.
First of all, the reaction is real. If you look on social media and forums, yes, most of the discussion is about Cybertruck being a failure, and Elon lying about why Tesla is killing it, but there is also a serious group of people, especially Cybertruck owners, who are genuinely upset that Tesla is killing the program because they love their trucks.
Most people have never driven a Cybertruck, but the electric steering system makes it a very addictive vehicle to drive, and while the price is high, the value proposition for the specs isn’t bad compared to the very limited options of electric pickup trucks.
In other words, I wouldn’t necessarily bet against this effort, especially if they add an SUV variant and show the program some love with a few tweaks here and there.
I could see a group of wealthy Cybertruck fans pooling money under Unplugged to make this happen, but convincing Tesla to agree might be difficult. It’s not uncommon for an automaker to sell a vehicle program to a dealership, such as the Lotus Seven and Studebaker Avanti, but this would be a first on this scale.
You might understand this by looking at UP to Tesla like AMG to Mercedes. It’s not too complicated, considering that UP isn’t just your average Tesla tuner. He even worked with the automaker on its own version of the Model S Plaid.
If UP became for Tesla what AMG became for Mercedes, it might make sense for the company to run a separate vehicle program that started under Tesla, but even as I write this I realize that there is very little chance of that happening.
But I wish them luck and would be happy to see the Cybertruck live on.
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