Tesla has advised Cybertruck manufacturing staff to not report back to work for the following three days, in one other signal of demand points for the car that when touted tens of millions of preorders.
The information was reported by Enterprise Insider, who obtained an e-mail telling Cybertruck manufacturing employees at Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas that they “don’t must report back to work” on “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week (Dec. 3-5).” Employees will nonetheless be paid for his or her scheduled shifts.
Tesla didn’t give a remark as to why this shutdown is occurring, however Enterprise Insider mentioned 4 employees advised it that their schedules have been inconsistent for the final month.
On condition that it’s a crucial time for Tesla deliveries, significantly of its flagship mannequin, the timing is suspect.
At the moment, Tesla is considered one of few EV producers that has bought fewer automobiles thus far this 12 months than it did in 2023. Regardless of what you will have heard, EV gross sales are up considerably in 2024 – however Tesla was down within the first half of this 12 months.
The corporate had a good third quarter largely attributable to rising China gross sales, however continues to be down in comparison with final 12 months.
Consequently, Tesla has began pulling out a variety of stops this quarter to be able to shut out the 12 months with energy. It has supplied bigger incentives for Tesla referral codes, lowered Mannequin Y lease pricing, and added extra flexibility to its leasing program.
And, most notably for as we speak’s topic, simply as we speak it lowered Cybertruck lease pricing – and this occurred lower than a month because the firm began leasing Cybertrucks in any respect.
It’s one other signal that Tesla isn’t seeing fairly as a lot demand as as soon as anticipated for the polarizing car.
After it was first unveiled in 2019, the Cybertruck managed to tally over 250k pre-orders in lower than every week, later reaching a peak of doubtlessly 2 million reservations based on crowdsourced information.
However when the truck hit the street, issues didn’t go precisely as deliberate. The car got here out late and over price range, additionally lacking a few of the specs that had been initially promised. The primary out there “Basis Collection” fashions began at $100k – a far cry from the promised entry-level $40k. It’s now out there at a base worth of $79k – however a promised future $61k base RWD mannequin was not too long ago eliminated that from Tesla’s web site.
Regardless of all that, it’s nonetheless the best-selling electrical pickup within the US and the third best-selling EV with a very excessive common transaction worth, bringing in a superb chunk of change for the corporate.
However nonetheless, demand appears a lot decrease than the sky-high expectations for the car. That ~2 million car backlog appears to have been depleted round October of this 12 months, when Tesla began permitting orders and not using a reservation. On the time, Tesla had bought someplace round 30,000 complete Cybertrucks.
This might be the reason for the plant shutdown. Corporations will usually pause manufacturing traces for a number of days or perhaps weeks if manufacturing goes sooner than deliveries, in order to not have a variety of stock weighing down a stability sheet.
It’s potential that there are different causes – a line improve or some kind of adjustments associated to the current Cybertruck inverter recall – however for the previous, the tip of the quarter could be a greater time, and for the latter, one would assume the adjustments would have been made nearer to when the issue was discovered (and would probably not shut down the entire line for 3 days).
And if there had been different causes, that’s normally the kind of factor an organization sends its PR workforce out to debate, in order to not spook buyers with fears of waning demand. Since Tesla hasn’t made a press release suggesting such, Occam’s razor means that manufacturing could also be outpacing demand, and the pause is to assist stability the 2.
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