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Tesla has announced that it is launching Cybertruck in South Korea, only the fourth market where the electric pickup truck becomes available and the first outside North America.
While Tesla took reservations worldwide when unveiling the Cybertruck in 2019, the automaker never confirmed plans to launch the vehicle outside North America.
The Cybertruck is currently only available in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
By any metric, it has been a total commercial flop.
Tesla had accumulated over 1 million reservations for the vehicle and planned for a production capacity of 250,000 units per year, with CEO Elon Musk saying that it could be increased to 500,000 units.
After Tesla unveiled the production version for a much higher price than announced initially and a significantly shorter range, demand fell off a cliff, and now Tesla now has issues selling the truck at a rate of 25,000 units per year.
This quarter is expected to be better due to the end of the tax credit in the US pulling demand forward, but it could prove extremely difficult to move the Cybertruck in North America starting in October.
Tesla is now turning to South Korea to try to sell some Cybertrucks.
The American automaker has told South Korea reservation holders to confirm their orders over the next week, as it will start converting reservations into orders – something it hasn’t done since expanding into Canada and Mexico last year.
The announcement was made via X:
South Korea might sound like a strange, relatively small, distant market for the first expansion of the Cybertruck outside North America, but Tesla is extremely popular in South Korea.
In July, it sold a record number of more than 7,000 vehicles in a single month.
Tesla also has an extremely strong shareholder base in the country.
However, in South Korea, the Cybertruck is going to start at 145 million South Korean won, which is approximately $104,000 USD – making the Cybertruck about $24,000 more expensive than in the US.
It should not be easy to sell in significant volumes despite Tesla’s popularity in the market.
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