You can forget seeing the Tesla Cybertruck in Australia - but don't worry, Elon Musk just promised us something "worse"

The Tesla Cybertruck is not coming to Australia, at least not as we know it, with the brand's boss Elon Musk finally confirming what we all expected during an earnings briefing with investors.

Despite launching the Cybertruck program in Australia with some fanfare, and opening the order books for Aussies to plonk down deposits (before suddenly closing them again in 2022), the boss of Tesla has at last confirmed that the vehicle as we know it will likely be an America-only model.

And the not-so-sweet icing on the cake is that Tesla hasn't ruled out eventually exporting a Cybertruck successor, or alternative, eventually, but concedes the model would be "worse" than the one we know today.

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The problem, Musk says, are countries with design rules, like Australia's own ADRs, which act as a set of rules product manufacturers must comply with to offer vehicles in this market.

Other manufacturers lament the unique homologation requirements of Australia, too, saying they delay a new model's arrival, and add cost and complexity to a vehicle's launch.

"We did design the car to North American requirements, because if you start going with the superset of international requirements, it forces a lot of constraints on the Cybertruck that would make the product frankly worse,” he told investors this week.

Tesla Cybertruck.

"I think we’ll need to make a special version that is, for example, China-compliant or Europe-compliant, but that doesn’t really make sense to add that complexity until we’ve achieved higher volume production on Cybertruck.”

The auto boss didn't rule out the eventual export of the "worse" version of the Cybertruck saying “we might be able to certify it for other markets some time next year", but that would be unlikely to include Australia, given the complexity of our requirements.

Increasing complexity is the popularity of the Cybertruck in the USA, where there is a growing order bank and wait times that currently exceed six months, and Musk's challenges with lowering the vehicle's overall production cost.

Tesla Cybertruck.

“There is still a lot of work to do on (getting the) cost down for Cybertruck,” Musk said.

“It’s 100 times harder to go from prototype to production. Then, to improve the price, the cost of goods by 20 per cent, is harder than reaching production in the first place. It’s mega pain, it’s not the funnest job in the world.

“We’ll have plenty of demand for Cybertruck. Wherever it goes anywhere in the world it gets a massive crowd. It’s not a demand thing.

"We’ve got to reach volume production, go through the cost grind. It would be difficult for me to overstate the difficulty of the cost grind, it’s really intense, then we’ve got to re-certify the car which will include some design changes for it to be compliant in other markets.”