Tesla speeds up delivery times for new Model 3 orders
When Tesla opened up Model 3 orders to everyone, it was easy to be jaded when delivery would take at least three months. Wouldn’t the situation only get worse? Apparently, just the opposite is true: Tesla has dramatically shortened delivery times for new orders. If you order either the Long Range RWD or Performance dual-motor models, you’re looking at wait times between one to three months. That’s much, much better than the three to five months of before. Even Long Range dual motor buyers now face ‘just’ two to four months of thumb-twiddling.
You’re still looking at six to nine months before the standard battery models are available, although that isn’t surprising. Tesla raced to make 5,000 Model 3s per week just to turn any kind of profit on its more accessible car, and it may be a while after that before the vaunted $35,000 trim is profitable enough to be worth manufacturing.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that demand is slowing down for Tesla. It still has to address hundreds of thousands of reservations, so there’s no shortage of existing customers. Rather, it appears that the automaker finally has enough manufacturing bandwidth to spare that it can increasingly focus on courting new Model 3 buyers — the ones it’ll need the most once the backlog is gone.
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