Tesla Vehicles excluded (almost)
Cars
Published on January 1, 2019 |
by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
1. January 2019 by Maarten Vinkhuyzen
Sometimes there is a reason to report on rumors. This is one of those times. There are many rumors that swear the interweb about Tesla and its inventory. And I'll guess what they mean.
Inventory is manufactured products, but not yet sold – remember it. The most widely used tool to guess the Tesla production has been Bloomberg tracker. But while stories from the Tesla factories in Sparks, Nevada and Fremont, California, are about raising production levels to 6,000 / week and higher for Model 3 + 1000 / week each of the S & Model X models, the tracker shows an inviting downward slope – if you like to ski.
The rumor is that Tesla has produced a consistent 6000+ units / week of model 3 this past month of the year. Combined with the normal model S & X production of 1000 / week each, there are 8,000 new Teslas each week. The mathematical whiz children say that it translates into another record production quarter. In Q3 2018, production was just over 80,000. With the weeks starting at 6,000 / week and ending with over 8,000 / week in the quarter, a production of 90,000 Model S.3.X is a fair, optimistic guess.
Talk about logistics hell is also a thing of the past, and the plan was to get all production to dealers before the turn of the year. Early in the month, the American East Coast was favored. In the last few days, production was on the west coast. You can't sell cars that are on trailers that cross the fly over land. Tesla's goal was to have the absolute minimum number of cars as possible in transit at the end of the year. I expect the number of cars on the way to Europe and China should also be the lowest possible.
Another story I met was about Tesla stores / dealers / galleries without anything that could move by itself, with only those swatches left to help people order a new car. Test drives or loan wagon? No. They can help a last-minute buyer to lower their tax liability. Everything gone.
The latest rumors that were discovered today were a Tesla listing of over 3,000 model 3s in the United States. Wall Street fueled TSLA (!!!), according to some poorly informed shorts. While it was a share price reaction, it was well within normal volatility for TSLA, and the stock recovered at almost the exact same closing price as the day before. But was even $ 1 drop in stock price the right answer?
Normally, during the quarter about 2-3 weeks worth of production "in transit". There would be 15,000 to 20,000 Tesla vehicles with today's production level.
Normal inventory = showroom cars (mainly sold) + test driven cars (mainly sold) + borrowers (mainly sold) + canceled orders mainly sold). Yes, the financial analysts trying to decipher Tesla's balance should ask some hard questions about the shrinking inventory line.
We normal people do not care about the stock line in the balance. We focus on what will be inventory at midnight when the last showroom on the west coast closes its doors. How many of the final 3000 will be sold today? How many of the stores that advertised that they stayed open until midnight closed early because they were sold out?
My efforts are fewer than 1,000 new Tesla cars are now in stock in the United States. And most places ended up sold.
]
About the author
Maarten Vinkhuyzen Grumpy old man. The best thing I did with my life was to raise two children. Just finished primary school, but when you do not go to school, you have a lot of time to read. I switched from accounting to software development and ended my career as a system integrator and architect. My 2007 boss got two electric Lotus Elise cars to show decision makers the future energy and transport direction.
