The Tesla Cybertruck is still in need of some changes before it makes its way to Australia, but the country’s director is still unsure whether the vehicle will ever make its way down under.

In March, we reported on Tesla’s intention to bring the Cybertruck to Australia and potentially New Zealand. Country Manager Thom Drew said Tesla had intentions to bring the truck to the market, especially as there is a lack of a “real workhorse, full EV that has the range and capability that Cybertruck does.”

Tesla plans to bring Cybertruck to new market for a big advantage

Now, there has been more criticism about the concerns for the vehicle to be approved for operation in Australia. Various people have said that the Cybertruck would not comply with Australian Design Rules, according to EVCentral. But Drew believes that those critics are simply spouting their opinions.

At the Melbourne Motor Show, Drew said:

“A lot of those concerns are unfounded around its compliance. There is a lot about it that works within the Australian compliance system. Are there changes required? That is absolutely part of the discussion with headquarters at the moment.”

It sounds as if Tesla might not have to change the truck but potentially redesign an all-new pickup design. The new truck will have to be right-hand drive, and steer-by-wire has been mentioned in some discussions as a potential issue for passing the ADRs.

Additionally, the shape and angles of the Cybertruck have been criticized in several markets as potentially dangerous to pedestrians. However, if you take the angular design and steer-by-wire away, it’s not really a Cybertruck any longer; it might end up being Tesla’s first traditional pickup design.

Currently, Drew remains skeptical that the Cybertruck will ever break into the Australian market. He said that a lot of these changes would require significant adjustments to the Cybertruck manufacturing program, as right-hand-drive units would have to be produced on the production lines in Gigafactory Texas. This could throw a wrench into the production timeline.

He added:

“I think the consideration we have to make a decision on, as a business, is Australia really the only right-hand drive market where it’s suitable? That is obviously part of the consideration for the program. I am not confident it’s coming, but we are discussing it. Locally, we want to see it [Cybertruck] here but it’s certainly not a done deal just yet.”

It seems somewhat unlikely as of right now that the Cybertruck will make its way into a new market.

Two former supply chain managers at Tesla have started their own AI inventory firm, which aims to make demand and inventory planning more efficient.

Neal Suidan, Tesla’s former Senior Manager of Global Demand Planning, and Michael Rossiter, former Director of Sales Operations and Senior Manager of Business Planning, announced the launch of Atomic on Tuesday, an AI platform geared toward supply planning. The launch was made alongside the announcement of a $3 million seed funding round from former DVx Ventures, the capital fund run by former Tesla President Jon McNeill, as well as the firm Madrona.

“Planners are the unsung heroes of consumer brands, holding together supply chains through spreadsheets and sheer force of will,” Suidan wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “But they deserve better tools. We built Atomic to be the inventory planning system we always wished we had.”

“Michael and Neil experienced this pain firsthand as leaders at Tesla in the supply chain, and I saw that work first hand — because they worked for me,” McNeill said in an interview with Tech Crunch.

The former Tesla president also explains how delicate the balance between supply and demand is, while a primary part of Atomic’s approach to the software platform is giving business operators the tools to manage these factors more quickly and easily.

“If you have too much capital tied up in inventory, you could really harm the business,” McNeill adds. “And if you have too little, where you don’t have the right things in stock when the customer is ready to purchase, then you’re costing yourself big time.”

Atomic says its AI planning software has previously helped early customers cut inventory costs by between 20 and 50 percent, allowing users to easily simulate scenarios based on real-time data and scenarios.

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Suidan worked with Tesla for nearly six years, while Rossiter was with the company for about two years. Both of the managers also worked closely with McNeill at the time.

The former Tesla president also highlighted the difficulty in ramping Model 3 production as part of the project’s inspiration, a period that Elon Musk has said brought the company weeks away from bankruptcy and had him sleeping on the Fremont factory floor.

McNeill also recalled the Model 3 production ramp in a post on LinkedIn:

Back in 2018, we had a big problem at Tesla.

We needed to scale Model 3 production from 20k to 100k cars per quarter. But the existing supply chain systems simply couldn’t handle this growth. With only a month of cash left, we had to keep the cars moving.

We were far too dependent on spreadsheets for planning. They couldn’t keep up with the business and it was having a serious negative impact.

Neal Suidan and Michael Rossiter, both leading global demand planning, created something remarkable out of necessity: a unit-level planning system that could simulate and track individual cars through the entire supply chain and match them to demand. This reduced Tesla’s inventory from 75 days to just 15, unlocking billions of dollars in working capital at a time when every dollar mattered.

Fast forward 7 years and it occurred to us that thousands of companies can use this. They are now bringing that framework to customers with Atomic.

Several former Tesla employees and executives have gone on to start their own firms, most recently including former SVP Drew Baglino, who announced the grid hardware venture Heron Power last week. Another notable one includes JB Straubel, a Tesla co-founder, who went on to start the battery recycling company Redwood Materials.

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Tesla’s Gigafactory in China is officially shipping its first large batch of the new Model Y to Australia, as an outbound cargo vessel has docked at a nearby port and been loaded with almost 3,500 of the company’s vehicles.

The marine vessel Great Pioneering was docked and loaded up at the Shanghai Nangang Terminal this week, set to ship 3,499 Tesla vehicles to Australia, according to a report from Gear Musk on Tuesday. Out of those, 3,015 units are the new Model Y, and the shipment will mark the first such international deployment of the Giga Shanghai-built SUVs.

The Tesla units will be shipped to Port Kembla, Australia, before being distributed to some of the first customers in the country to order the updated Model Y.

Credit: GearMusk

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As is common at the beginning of each quarter, Tesla’s China Gigafactory was primarily focused on exports for the couple of weeks of Q2, before shifting output capacity toward the country’s domestic market. This is why we’re starting to see the first such international shipment of the new Model Y go out to Australia, since the refreshed version of the vehicle wasn’t yet available in the early weeks of Q1.

Tesla launched the new Model Y in China on January 9, before it went on sale in the U.S. and other markets just a few weeks later. The refreshed vehicle features upgraded interior and exterior features from the original Model Y, as well as the bold front and rear lightbars that were not included in the initial design.

During the month of March, Tesla sold 74,127 vehicles domestically in China, along with exporting around 4,701 units from the Shanghai Gigafactory. Out of those shipped domestically, 49,029 of the units were the new Model Y, while 29,799 were the Model 3.

This week, Tesla was also forced to discontinue the Model S and Model X in China due to the ongoing tariff war lodged by the Trump administration. As such, the company’s website has switched over from the typical “order” button to those that only say “learn” for both of the models.

Global EV sales climbed 29% in March, powered by China & Europe