Unraveling a Tesla Mystery: Lots of Parked Cars

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/tesla-cars-questions.html

by atombender • 8 years ago

21 12 8 years ago

nytimes.com

ecpottinger• 8 years ago

How about sales. The online forums are full of people who have just receive their cars.

What about all the deliveries done on the weekend?

I think someone is leaving out some facts.

malshe• 8 years ago

The point of the article is that, despite all the talk of great demand for M3, there is a large (potentially unsold) inventory. The article documents an interesting observation and then provides probable explanations sourced from many people.

Latteland2• 8 years ago

Sales figures came out, they did well, more than doubling production and sales from last quarter.

Technetium_Hat• 8 years ago

M3

Please do not refer to the Tesla model 3 this way, call it the TM3 or just Model 3 instead. The M3 is a BMW.

EADGBE2• 8 years ago

"Groups of new vehicles are being detected in unexplained locations across the country. Evidence being posted online has raised questions about production, logistics, quality and even demand."

This is only news because it's Tesla.

Ford F150's are made near my hometown (Not even the only city making them). So are many versions of the Transit vans. But we're talking like 24/7 droves of trucks and vans logistically being organized and shipped out within a 10 mile area.

Sometimes it requires a staging area.

Sometimes that staging area is a parking lot in a theme park. Sometimes that staging area is an abandoned field near train tracks. Sometimes that staging area is an overflow lot for a major casino. Either way you look at it, it's weird (Like 400 white identical trucks in the middle of nowhere). Right now, they like to line the trucks up bumper-to-bumper in a weaving-in-and-out fashion with no real rhyme or reason (I think they're bored). I drove by the other day around dusk and a few Ford employees had most of the flashers on in the trucks and were randomly honking the horns.

Most of these vans and trucks have various marks on them and removed beds (Or cabin-only vans). Some already have wraps and stickers for the corporations they're waiting to be delivered to.

This is all very normal car manufacturing. Sorry.

Latteland2• 8 years ago

Yeah - I'm in the Seattle area, I read where they were storing their cars before selling them, it was a giant parking lot. I drove over there and saw a couple of 100 cars that were in different stages of being prepared, some ready to go, others with protective wraps.

Every 5 minutes a tesla would pull up and 3 or 4 people would get out, walk down an aisle until they found the car they were looking for and drive off to deliver it.

tomatotomato37• 8 years ago

I would say the absence of car stockpiles would be more worrying then their presence, because it shows the manufactor is unable to build up buffers for logisitcal difficulties and factory retooling. In other words this is decent news for Tesla because they have the productive capacity to build these stockpiles in the first place

EADGBE2• 8 years ago

other words this is decent news for Tesla

No news is good news, then. Kinda the point I was making. No one's talking about Ford in the papers and their weird inventory methods. :)

justtopost• 8 years ago

I would venture to guess they are problem cars. It is more expensive in many cases to diag a new car than just to roll another off the line and reuse the known good parts when convenient. This is not ususual for any carmaker. While I harbor major moral issues with Tsla for their buisness practices, this seems like nit picking by shorts.

goelakash• 8 years ago

Musk should've probably asked Bezos for Amazon's logistic expertise.

woodandsteel• 8 years ago

It's no mystery as to why Tesla is having delivery problems. It has been working on producing cars at a far more rapid rate than before. This is a very complicated problem with many parts, and Tesla is not able to focus on them all at once.

So it has wisely decided to set priorities, and worked on production before it got to deliveries, and as a consequence undelivered cars have piled up. Now production is going pretty well, and so Musk and his crew are turing their attention to the delivery problem.

You know, the more Tesla succeeds in producing the Model 3, it seems the more negative the mainstream media gets in its coverage.

Unraveling a Tesla Mystery: Lots of Parked Cars

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