Tesla has instructed Cybertruck manufacturing staff to not report back to work for the following three days, in one other signal of demand points for the automobile that when touted thousands and thousands of preorders.
The information was reported by Enterprise Insider, who obtained an e-mail telling Cybertruck manufacturing employees at Tesla’s manufacturing unit in Austin, Texas that they “don’t have to 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 going on, however Enterprise Insider stated 4 employees instructed it that their schedules have been inconsistent for the final month.
Provided that it’s a essential time for Tesla deliveries, significantly of its flagship mannequin, the timing is suspect.
At the moment, Tesla is one in all few EV producers that has bought fewer vehicles to this point this yr than it did in 2023. Regardless of what you’ll have heard, EV gross sales are up considerably in 2024 – however Tesla was down within the first half of this yr.
The corporate had a good third quarter largely as a result of rising China gross sales, however continues to be down in comparison with final yr.
Because of this, Tesla has began pulling out quite a lot of stops this quarter with the intention to shut out the yr with power. 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 for the reason that 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 automobile.
After it was first unveiled in 2019, the Cybertruck managed to tally over 250k pre-orders in lower than per week, later reaching a peak of probably 2 million reservations in accordance with crowdsourced knowledge.
However when the truck hit the street, issues didn’t go precisely as deliberate. The automobile got here out late and over finances, additionally lacking a number of the specs that had been initially promised. The primary obtainable “Basis Sequence” fashions began at $100k – a far cry from the promised entry-level $40k. It’s now obtainable 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 however, demand appears a lot decrease than the sky-high expectations for the automobile. That ~2 million automobile backlog appears to have been depleted round October of this yr, when Tesla began permitting orders with no reservation. On the time, Tesla had bought someplace round 30,000 complete Cybertrucks.
This could possibly be the reason for the plant shutdown. Corporations will usually pause manufacturing strains for a couple of days or even weeks if manufacturing goes quicker than deliveries, in order to not have quite a lot of stock weighing down a stability sheet.
It’s potential that there are different causes – a line improve or some type of adjustments associated to the latest Cybertruck inverter recall – however for the previous, the tip of the quarter can be a greater time, and for the latter, one would suppose the adjustments would have been made nearer to when the issue was discovered (and would doubtless not shut down the entire line for 3 days).
And if there had been different causes, that’s often the type of factor an organization sends its PR group 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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