Photo: Tesla
It takes a few clicks on the Tesla website and $1,000 to get in line for the Model 3, but not everything went expecting to Elon Musk’s plans. From a high of 518,000 reservations, the order books currently number approximately 455,000 deposits as per the electric vehicle manufacturer’s latest quarterly earning call.
The 63,000 people who have canceled their Tesla Model 3 orders in the past year, as reported by Business Insider, represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket” for head honcho Elon Musk. The chief executive officer highlights that Tesla has been averaging 1,800 new reservations per day since Friday, the day that marked the handover of the first 30 production-spec Model 3 vehicles.
Musk makes a point that cancellations aren’t necessarily a bad thing, commenting: "It's like if you're a restaurant and you're serving hamburgers and there's like an hour-and-a-half wait for hamburgers - do you really want to encourage more people to order more hamburgers?” Bearing in mind goodies such as Dual Motor and the Performance option won’t go official until 2018, it serves Tesla’s objective to sort things out by the middle of next year.
A quick look on the Model 3 section of the Tesla website reveals that $1,000 deposits put down today translate to a rough delivery estimate of “12 to 18 months.” In other words, one’s car would be ready in August 2018 at the earliest or February 2019 in the worst case scenario. That’s a lot of waiting, especially for first-time EV customers, but Tesla has an artifice in the offing.
Based on the production timeline for the Model 3, today’s snail-like weekly volume will be one-upped to 5,000 vehicles per week by the end of the year. In 2018, Tesla expects to ramp up production for its three-model lineup to a mind-boggling 500,000 vehicles. We’ll have to wait and keep those fingers crossed Musk isn’t getting ahead of himself, more so if you consider that electric vehicle manufacturing is a capital-intensive business.
Musk makes a point that cancellations aren’t necessarily a bad thing, commenting: "It's like if you're a restaurant and you're serving hamburgers and there's like an hour-and-a-half wait for hamburgers - do you really want to encourage more people to order more hamburgers?” Bearing in mind goodies such as Dual Motor and the Performance option won’t go official until 2018, it serves Tesla’s objective to sort things out by the middle of next year.
A quick look on the Model 3 section of the Tesla website reveals that $1,000 deposits put down today translate to a rough delivery estimate of “12 to 18 months.” In other words, one’s car would be ready in August 2018 at the earliest or February 2019 in the worst case scenario. That’s a lot of waiting, especially for first-time EV customers, but Tesla has an artifice in the offing.
Based on the production timeline for the Model 3, today’s snail-like weekly volume will be one-upped to 5,000 vehicles per week by the end of the year. In 2018, Tesla expects to ramp up production for its three-model lineup to a mind-boggling 500,000 vehicles. We’ll have to wait and keep those fingers crossed Musk isn’t getting ahead of himself, more so if you consider that electric vehicle manufacturing is a capital-intensive business.
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