Tesla lineup slide from its 2024 shareholder meeting, with the discontinued Model S, Model X, and Cybertruck crossed out (Electrek edit)
Elon Musk now says Tesla can’t build the Cybertruck and the Cybercab at the same time because there are only so many “smart, dedicated people” to go around. Half the executives he showed off in 2023 as proof of Tesla’s “bench strength” have since left the company.
It’s the most honest explanation yet for how Tesla went from five consumer vehicle programs at the start of 2026 to a single platform, Model 3 and Model Y, by the middle of 2027.
Three explanations in four days
On Friday, Musk said Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas around the middle of next year “to make room for increased Cybercab production.” As we pointed out at the time, Giga Texas isn’t short on space. The Cybertruck line runs at a fraction of its installed capacity because the truck sells a fraction of what Tesla planned.
A day later, replying to a user on X, Musk gave a different reason:
“The biggest thing most people fail to understand is that there are a very limited number of smart, dedicated people! They can only do so many things.”
He added that if Tesla has to “maintain a complex production line, supply chain and allocate engineering for Cybertruck, we can’t use those people” for scaling Cybercab.
By this morning, the explanation had shifted again, to the “opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck.” But the Saturday version is the one that matters. Musk is telling us the bottleneck at Tesla isn’t factory space or money. It’s people.
From five programs to one platform
The Cybertruck is the second casualty this year. In January, Musk announced the end of the Model S and Model X on Tesla’s Q4 earnings call and summed up the reason in one word: “Autonomy.” The Fremont line is being converted to build Optimus robots, and by April, only inventory was left.
The flagships had been on life support for years. Their last real update was the 2021 interior refresh. The June 2025 “refresh” brought a new paint color, a front bumper camera, a bit more range, and a $5,000 price increase. That’s not how you treat a vehicle program you care about.
Tesla painted a very different picture just two years ago. At its 2024 shareholder meeting, it showed this slide of its lineup: the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X, Cybertruck, and Semi, plus three vehicles under covers that Musk said were “going to be pretty special.”
Tesla lineup slide from its 2024 annual shareholder meeting (Tesla)
Of the five consumer vehicles on that slide, three are now dead or on their way out.
So here’s what will be left in the second half of 2027: Model 3 and Model Y, two vehicles built on the same platform, plus the Model Y L and cheaper “Standard” variants of both. The Semi is a commercial truck. The Roadster’s production is still a giant question mark. And the Cybercab is a robotaxi with no steering wheel, not a car you can buy – even though Tesla is going to let fleet buyers get them to add on its own Robotaxi network. We previously explained how this is a terrible idea.
For comparison, Hyundai Motor Group sells more than half a dozen EV models in the US across its Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis brands, on top of its gas and hybrid lineup. GM and Toyota run dozens of nameplates at once. Tesla can’t keep more than two programs alive at the same time.
The “significant bench strength” that walked out the door
At Tesla’s Investor Day at Giga Texas on March 1, 2023, Musk mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Instead, Tesla paraded more than a dozen executives on stage to present its plans, a rare move for a company long criticized for being a one-man show.
“We’ve obviously got significant bench strength here,” Musk said at the time.
Of the 14 executives named as presenters that day, seven are gone:
Martin Viecha, who ran investor relations through that event, left in April 2024 as well.
Seven are still at Tesla, according to their LinkedIn profiles: Tom Zhu, Lars Moravy, Franz von Holzhausen, Ashok Elluswamy, Karn Budhiraj, Laurie Shelby, and Brandon Ehrhart. And the ones who left weren’t peripheral. They ran batteries, powertrain, software, chips, energy, charging, and the money.
The people who actually build the cars are leaving too
The bigger problem for Tesla’s ability to run vehicle programs is the program-level talent, the people who take a car from prototype to volume production.
In November 2025, Tesla lost the head of its Cybertruck program, Siddhant Awasthi, and the Model Y program manager, Emmanuel Lamacchia, within a day of each other. Lamacchia had led Tesla’s best-selling vehicle for four years.
Then the Cybercab, the program Musk is now pulling people toward, started losing its own leaders:
Add 17-year finance VP Sendil Palani and Thomas Dmytryk, the director who built Tesla’s over-the-air update system and Robotaxi infrastructure, both in March, and you get the picture.
So when Musk says he needs Cybertruck’s people for Cybercab, part of the reason is that Cybercab keeps losing its own.
Tesla has bet on autonomy too early before
Musk will frame all of this as focus. Autonomy is going to be so big, the argument goes, that Tesla has to go all in.
But we’ve heard that before. Tesla made the yoke steering wheel standard on the Model S and Model X in 2021 because the cars would soon drive themselves, then brought back a round wheel as an option. It removed the turn signal stalk from the Model 3 in 2023, then brought the stalk back in 2025 and started selling a $350 retrofit to owners. Each time, the autonomy that justified the change wasn’t there yet.
And Tesla isn’t the leader in unsupervised driving. It has the best driver-assist system on the market, but Waymo still logs roughly seven times more driverless miles per week, and NHTSA estimates Tesla’s entire Robotaxi fleet at about 1,000 vehicles. Zoox is scaling too, and Baidu’s Apollo Go runs a far bigger driverless fleet in China.
Electrek’s Take
This is something that I’ve been highlighting for a decade. Even after it became a big company with a large headcount, Tesla has never been good at running several vehicle programs in a healthy way. The Model S and Model X were starved for updates long before the talent exodus started. Tesla has always thrown everything at its newest program and let the older ones coast.
What changed is that the slack is gone. In 2023, Tesla could still neglect the flagships and keep them on the market, because it had deep benches in engineering, manufacturing, and software to absorb mistakes. Today, half the executives Musk called his bench are gone, and the people running the Cybercab ramp keep walking out. Musk is now openly telling us there aren’t enough people left to build a pickup truck and a robotaxi at the same time.
Musk calls it focus. It looks a lot more like a constraint Tesla can’t hire its way out of.
Will the Cybercab be revolutionary and make it all worth it? We have our doubts. Tesla leads in driver assistance with FSD, but it has failed to evolve the product into unsupervised self-driving at scale, which it promised to buyers for a decade. It’s clearly not the leader in unsupervised self-driving, and the competition is crowded. Tesla’s lasting impact on the robotaxi market is genuinely hard to predict.
What’s not hard to see is the trend. Tesla has shown a complete inability to sustain multiple vehicle programs at once, and it’s getting harder for the automaker, not easier. If Tesla can’t hold on to the people who build its cars, how long before the Model 3 and Model Y get the same treatment as the Model S?
Both vehicle programs will undoubtedly go down in history as some of the most critical EVs of all time, but that doesn’t guarantee lasting success in a rapidly changing auto landscape.
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