Unplugged Performance, the biggest name in Tesla aftermarket tuning, wants to keep the Cybertruck alive. The company publicly offered Tuesday to take the Cybertruck line away from Tesla, funded by a consortium of investors.
It comes just four days after Elon Musk said Tesla would shut down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas in mid-2027, and that the truck would sell at about 12% of the 250,000 units a year Tesla planned.
the offer
UP published the speech about 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 space, workforce or focus.”
In exchange, Tesla would charge a licensing fee plus revenue from the FSD and Robotaxi network for each vehicle built. UP even offered to let Cybercab be the first to order battery cells. “We will wait our turn,” the company wrote.
UP founder Ben Schaffer made it clear that he supports Tesla’s full move toward autonomy, but wants to keep the Cybertruck program alive.
And it doesn’t stop at collecting. UP says it would build the Cybertruck, a three-row “CyberSUV” and a “CyberCargo” unmanned transporter. Tesla has occasionally referenced two vehicles, but they were never 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 at the time of writing.
UP has a lot riding on this. It sells a full line of Cybertruck products, UP Invincible armor and lift kits, and has secured several contracts to convert Cybertrucks into police vehicles for law enforcement. CEO Ben Schaffer once described the company’s purpose as doing “the things that Tesla might want to do, but doesn’t have the bandwidth to do.” This is that idea taken to the extreme.
Musk’s reason versus the real one
Musk framed the end of the Cybertruck as a space problem. He said Tesla needs to “make room for more Cybercab production.”
If the Cybertruck program were successful, Tesla would not end it. Tesla also produces the Model Y in Giga Texas, and will not close it to make room for Cybercab.
As we reported when Tesla announced the liquidation, that explanation doesn’t hold up. Giga Texas has more than 10 million square feet of space, the Cybertruck line operates at about a quarter of its installed capacity of 125,000 units, and Texas had only a few hundred Cybercabs registered at the end of October.
The real problem is the buyers. Tesla delivered 8,295 “Other Models” in the third quarter, and we estimate that between 7,000 and 8,000 of them were Cybertrucks, a pace of about 30,000 trucks a year. It was a good quarter by Cybertruck standards.
Even that number flatters him. Data from S&P Global Mobility showed that SpaceX purchased 1,279 Cybertrucks in the fourth quarter of 2025, about 18% of US registrations that quarter. Tesla also tested a cheaper RWD version, killed it, released a $60,000 AWD version, and then raised prices by $5,000 in August. None of that settled the demand.
Electrek’s opinion
I’ll give UP credit for this: the offer is a bluff by Musk. If the Cybertruck really is dying because the Cybercab needs space, 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, but there is also a small chance that makes it possible.
First of all, the reaction is real. If you look at 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 is also a serious group of people, especially Cybertruck owners, who are really upset that Tesla is killing the program because they love their trucks.
Most people have never driven a Cybertruck, but the steering-by-wire makes it a very addictive vehicle to drive, and while the price is high, the spec value proposition isn’t bad compared to the very limited electric truck options.
In other words, I wouldn’t necessarily bet against this effort, especially if they add an SUV variant and show some love to the program with a few tweaks here and there.
I could see a bunch of wealthy Cybertruck fans raising money at Unplugged to make this happen, but getting Tesla to agree could be difficult. It’s not unusual for an automaker to sell a program of vehicles to a dealer, such as the Lotus Seven and Studebaker Avanti, but it would be a first on this scale.
You could understand it by looking at UP to Tesla like AMG to Mercedes. That’s not an exaggeration, considering UP isn’t just your average Tesla tuner. He even worked with the automaker on his own version of the Model S Plaid.
If UP were to become for Tesla what AMG has become for Mercedes, it might make some sense for the company to run a separate vehicle program that started with Tesla, but even as I write this, I realize there is very little chance of this happening.
But I wish you the best of luck and would love to see the Cybertruck live.
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