Tesla Model 3 Deliveries To Non-Employees Begin!!
There’s a public Google Sheet people have been using for tracking Tesla Model 3 invites, configurations, and deliveries. It was apparently set up by someone on the Tesla Motors Club forum. I’ve written a couple of stories that referenced it since the crowdsourced data essentially shows the phases of configuration invites that Tesla has sent out (and which have lined up with configuration invitations for people I legitimately know — in the flesh). I just opened the Google Sheet a couple of hours ago by accident and happened to notice that a few people on the sheet had put their info into the “Delivered” tab.
The first delivery in the tab was to an employee (if these crowdsourcers can be trusted). The delivery date was December 15.
More interesting was that there was a delivery scheduled for today, and the human behind that row doesn’t indicate that she/he is an employee. To me, that says that Tesla Model 3 deliveries to non-employees have begun! As I was searching for a specific series of tweets Tesla enthusiast Bonnie Norman recently sent out, I noticed that she indicated this person is not an employee of Tesla or SpaceX.
Unfortunately, of the 117 Tesla Model 3 reservations accounted for in there, only 3 are in the “Delivered” tab. Many of them have an expected delivery date sometime in December 2017.
The hope is that these other deliveries have begun or will begin soon now that one non-employee has reported receiving his/her car?
While there are 45 people in the sheet who anticipate a December 2017 delivery, there are another 37 who have their delivery date set as January 2018. Of course, it’s totally unclear what the total numbers are for deliveries, for certain delivery dates, etc. This is just a sample of 117. But it does seem that the alien dreadnought is coming to life.
Still, I find it super exciting if the first second customer who isn’t an employee of Tesla/SpaceX (or a noted investor) just got their Tesla Model 3 today. The floodgates won’t open for a while, since Tesla is surely going to slowly roll out cars for a bit longer to learn about and address potential problems on a small scale before striding into mass production, but it does look like things may be on the schedule Tesla estimated a month and a half ago, which would be “a production rate of 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week by late Q1 2018.”
Does this news make you smile? Still biting your nails? Want to pull your hair out?
It brings me back to the excitement of that first night the Model 3 was shown to the public, when I spent 2 hours on the Tesla Model 3 test track with Kyle Field filming and photographing the new beauty.
Related:
15,000 Tesla Model 3 Configuration Invites? (Customer Report)
Tesla Model 3 Production Ramp — “We Here Yet?” Patience, Young Jedi.
Note: If you want a $1,000/€1,000 discount on a new Tesla Model S or Model X, feel free to use our discount code: http://ts.la/tomasz7234.
[Update: This article has been updated to correct some statements regarding dates. I initially read “Dec 17” and “Jan 18” in the Google Sheet as specific dates, but it turns out they just stand for December 2017 and January 2018, so I quickly updated the article appropriately.]
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