Lots of Ghost Cars

Right off the bat this isn’t my reporting, this is mostly @IspyTsla who’s streaming video right now, please give them a follow over there, is me just writing down his work and a bunch of other Twitter threads coming together in one spot. I’ll keep an eye out for any published stories, and if anyone spots anything send me a line and I’ll make sure it gets linked in.

TL;DR there’s a bunch of missing Teslas and some internet sleuths found them.

It’s possible that every single Tesla is used as a showroom model, press car or loaner before being sold as used.

Tesla is currently claiming that the nearly 12 thousand cars produced in Q2 are in transit right now.

However, their delivery numbers don’t match this at all. In @TeslaCharts thread above they go over a bunch of people checking out Tesla service centers with maybe a dozen cars each and not the hundreds they’d need to match sales numbers.

Meanwhile stories like this are wracking up, people who’ve paid in full still waiting for their car.

This is all going though at the same time as the tax credit for rechargeable vehicles expires increasing costs dramatically.

Cut to yesterday and internet sluths find this:

So @IspyTsla gets out there with camera and finds, well, a bunch of Teslas just uh, sitting there. We don’t know if these are cars that function, cars waiting to ship or what have you. But Tesla has sold a lot of cars, Tesla has a bunch of cars (not enough to reach demand) and Tesla hasn’t delivered a lot of cars.

Just hanging out, sitting there.

There’s a variety of reasons for this behavior, but they’re all really just wild speculation at this point. Occam’s razor seems to tell me that they probably just don’t have the distribution infrastructure to handle the amount of orders they need to send out.

However Tesla has had a history of shipping out incomplete cars, and not finishing a car but getting them out of the factory into a holding lot is a way they could hit target numbers on a technicality.

They could also just be overstock, with how long it’s taken to get the Model 3 out the door refund rates have outstripped deposits, which is a big problem when a full 3rd of your companies cash holdings are customer deposits.

Tesla of course isn’t talking and the lot in Lathrop is under very heavy NDA.

What does it mean? Iunno, but there’s a bunch of missing cars, and they’re sitting in a lot. There’s the next shareholder letter coming out August 1st, so perhaps something will come to light then.

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