A few weeks ago, almost immediately after the quarterly Tesla conference call, emails went out to Tesla Model 3 reservation holders telling us that delivery timelines had changed. In particular, estimated delivery times for the shorter range $35,000 Model 3 were being pushed back — for everyone. Well, Tesla didn’t explicitly say they were being pushed back for everyone, but that’s what we gathered based on simple and straightforward logic.
I was about to close out the month and get off the computer (at 2:20 am, admittedly), but then something obvious hit me — why not crowdsource the coming Tesla Model 3 delivery estimate for the month of February?
I generally base Tesla delivery estimates for my monthly US electric car sales reports on many factors, but I’ve somehow not previously thought to tap the vast CleanTechnica reader knowledge & speculation base for support.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Arthur C. Clarke. A while before the anticipated unveiling of the Tesla Semi, Elon Musk tweeted, “It can transform into a robot, fight aliens and make one hell of a latte.”
The latest Consumer Reports rankings are out and only one US manufacturer made the Top 10 — Tesla. Chrysler just missed out, coming at 11 and beating Ford and GM among American companies.
I’ve been reading EV Obsession and CleanTechnica for a while now, using it to help examine electric car costs and pricing to determine how these upcoming vehicles will impact us on a cost basis, and I have read article after article about the Tesla Semi. The articles followed a pattern that it seems like happens with every Tesla product: Tesla announces a product reveal, there are articles hypothesizing about what Tesla will do, then there are articles saying it isn’t possible, then there are articles saying that other companies will do it better before it comes out and no one will care.
What did hundreds of thousands of people read on CleanTechnica in the past week? My monologue on Republican policy problems didn’t crack the top 20, but the following stories certainly lit people up:
There has been a lot of talk about what the fate of Tesla will be when the big legacy automakers start producing EVs in earnest. With their century of experience and established production lines, they will roll over Tesla. They will show how real carmakers take a new model through production.
In December, I was inspired enough by Tesla’s Semi specs and the flow of orders coming in for the trucks that I decided to crunch some numbers to try to estimate various revenue and gross margin possibilities for Tesla from its semi truck offerings. I wanted to start fairly conservative but within the realm of possibility. I ran some estimates for a very modest number of orders first, and then I got more aggressive.
It’s time to update our research on what electric car drivers experience, want, and require in their electric vehicles (EVs). We also want to roll in the views of potential electric car drivers this time.
Until April 1st, 2016, the only thing I knew about Tesla Motors came from a news story reporting on an esoteric car company out of California that had appropriated the last name of famous inventor Nikola Tesla, and was marketing an awesome electric car with a price tag of $100,000. The car was clearly desirable, yet since my budget didn’t stretch to anywhere near the vehicle’s purchase price, I basically forgot about the car and the company.
