Tesla tuner Unplugged offers to take over Cybertruck production
Unplugged Performance, the biggest name in Tesla aftermarket tuning, wants to keep the Cybertruck alive. The company publicly offered on Tuesday to take the Cybertruck line off Tesla’s hands, funded by a consortium of investors.
It comes just four days after Elon Musk said Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas around mid-2027, with the truck selling at roughly 12% of the 250,000 units a year Tesla planned for.
The offer
UP posted the pitch on X as “an open offer to Tesla.” The company says it fully supports putting Cybercab first and would run Cybertruck production “at no cost to Tesla’s floor space, headcount, or focus.”
In exchange, Tesla would collect a license fee plus FSD and Robotaxi network revenue on every vehicle built. UP even offered to let Cybercab get first call on battery cells. “We’ll wait our turn,” the company wrote.
UP founder Ben Schaffer made it clear that he supports Tesla’s all-in move to autonomy, but he wants to keep the Cybertruck program alive.
And it isn’t stopping at the pickup. UP says it would build the Cybertruck, a three-row “CyberSUV,” and an unmanned “CyberCargo” hauler. Two vehicles Tesla has sometimes referenced, but they were never unveiled.
The post passed 240,000 views within hours, and the replies are mostly Cybertruck owners and Tesla shareholders begging Musk to say yes. Neither Musk nor Tesla had publicly responded at the time of writing.
UP has a lot riding on this. It sells an entire Cybertruck product line, the UP Invincible lift and armor kits, and it has scored several contracts to turn Cybertrucks into police vehicles for law enforcement agencies. CEO Ben Schaffer once described the company’s purpose as doing “the things that Tesla maybe wants to do, but doesn’t have the bandwidth to do.” This is that idea taken to its extreme.
Musk’s reason vs. the real one
Musk framed the Cybertruck’s end as a space problem. He said Tesla needs to “make room for increased Cybercab production.”
If the Cybertruck program was successful, Tesla wouldn’t be killing it. Tesla also produces Model Ys at Giga Texas, and it is not shutting that down to make room for Cybercab.
As we reported when Tesla announced the wind-down, that explanation doesn’t hold up. Giga Texas has more than 10 million square feet of floor space, the Cybertruck line runs at about a quarter of its 125,000-unit installed capacity, and Texas had only a few hundred Cybercabs registered as of late October.
The real problem is buyers. Tesla delivered 8,295 “Other Models” in Q3, and we estimated 7,000 to 8,000 of those were Cybertrucks, a pace of about 30,000 trucks a year. That was a good quarter by Cybertruck standards.
Even that number flatters it. S&P Global Mobility data showed SpaceX bought 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025, about 18% of US registrations that quarter. Tesla also tried a cheaper RWD trim, killed it, launched a $60,000 AWD version, then raised prices by $5,000 in August. None of it fixed demand.
Electrek’s Take
I’ll give UP credit for this: the offer calls Musk’s bluff. If the Cybertruck is really dying because Cybercab needs the 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’s also a slight possibility that makes this possible.
First off, the backlash is real. If you look on social media and forums, yes, most of the discussion is about how Cybertruck is a failure, and Elon is lying about why Tesla is killing it, but there’s 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 steer-by-wire makes it a very addictive vehicle to drive, and even though the price is high, the value proposition for the specs is not bad compared to the very limited options for 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 some tweaks here and there.
I could see a group of wealthy Cybertruck fans pooling money under Unplugged to make this happen, but getting Tesla to agree could be hard. It’s not unheard of for an automaker to sell a vehicle program to a dealer, like the Lotus Seven and Studebaker Avanti, but it would be a first at this scale.
You could make sense of it by looking at UP to Tesla as AMG to Mercedes. It’s not too big a stretch, considering UP isn’t just your average Tesla tuner. It even worked with the automaker on its own version of the Model S Plaid.
If UP were to become for Tesla what AMG has become for Mercedes, it could make some sense for the company to run a separate vehicle program that started under Tesla, but even as I write this, I realize that there’s very little chance this will happen.
But I wish them the best of luck, and I would be happy to see the Cybertruck live on.
