Will Rivian electric pick-up and Tesla Cybertruck come to Australia?

The Rivian electric pick-up from the US is poised to come to Australia as a mining vehicle by the end of this decade – and auto industry insiders say that could lead to right-hand-drive examples available to the public.

Earlier this year Rivian announced a partnership with Australian-based MEVCO (Mining Vehicle Electric Company) to fill the void left by the stillborn project to privately convert Toyota HiLux utes to electric power.

While Rivian is yet to deploy any of its RT1 electric pick-ups to an Australian mine, it is expected to still be some years away while the manufacturer ramps up production of a right-hand-drive model.

Once a right-hand-drive version is completed, Rivian would likely be seeking to recoup its additional engineering costs by selling vehicles to private buyers as well as the mining sector – with an arrival date some time before 2030.

Meantime, the Tesla Cybertruck is not likely to go on sale anytime soon in Australia even though Tesla recently sent out a demonstrator model for a tour of local showrooms.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have poured cold water on a right-hand-drive version of the Tesla Cybertruck arriving imminently, because of the complexities of making significant changes to the design to meet Australian regulations.

Elon Musk said during the latest shareholder meeting earlier this month:

“We might be able to certify (the Cybertruck) for other markets sometime next year, but for sure this year it’s just North America.

“We did design the car to (meet) North American requirements, because if you start going with the superset of all international requirements, it forces a lot of constraints … that would make the product, frankly, worse.

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

As for the Ford F-150 Lighting electric pick-up, a handful of examples have been privately imported and converted to right-hand-drive in Australia – without the backing of Ford.

Ford Australia has left the door open to add the Lightning to the local factory-backed F-150 conversion program, but for now the Blue Oval brand is trying to ramp up production of the twin-turbo V6 version amid a series of setbacks with a number of Australian compliance issues, which are in the process of being addressed.