Tesla is Building Car Carriers to Keep Up With Model 3 Deliveries

There are more than 16 million new vehicles sold in the US per year. How do all the other manufacturers deliver their cars?
This story makes no sense.

Daniel in SD said:

There are more than 16 million new vehicles sold in the US per year. How do all the other manufacturers deliver their cars?
This story makes no sense.

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Makes perfect sense. This is the time of year when all the 2019 trucks, SUV's, and cars from the major manufacturers are being shipped to dealers, so I'm sure that the major car carriers have been under contract for several months. To ship as many as Tesla is shipping right now would be an added burden to those carriers.

If Tesla can not only build their own carriers but also have them towed by Tesla Semis would be awesome marketing as a bonus!

Daniel in SD said:

There are more than 16 million new vehicles sold in the US per year. How do all the other manufacturers deliver their cars?
This story makes no sense.

Click to expand...

Along with what @wipster said about peak season, a little spitballing..

The car carrier fleet was sized around the total existing vehicle fleet size. Suddenly, Tesla is throwing an extra 50,000 cars a quarter into the mix. Even if that much spare capacity (~60 carriers a day times average number of transit days) was sitting around idle, it may not be in the correct geographic location to be useful.

Say all car deliveries average 1 day away. That is an additional 120 carriers needed. Who would have a fleet of 120 idle carriers around Fremont? Tesla is small in proportion to the total, but for a carrier, have that much excess would not be wise.

Presumably Tesla is taking some sales away from other car companies and a few hundred thousand cars a year is only 2% of total US vehicle sales. When the factory was owned by Toyota/GM it produced 400k+ vehicles a year. It just doesn't add up.

Daniel in SD said:

Presumably Tesla is taking some sales away from other car companies and a few hundred thousand cars a year is only 2% of total US vehicle sales. When the factory was owned by Toyota/GM it produced 400k+ vehicles a year. It just doesn't add up.

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It makes sense if the other auto makers didn't believe that Tesla would steal many/any of their customers and they are still making cars at the old rate. After all the just make them and ship them to dealers, they aren't filling orders from end purchasers. I could see dealers being stuck with a lot of inventory...

When the factory was owned by Toyota/GM it produced 400k+ vehicles a year. It just doesn't add up.

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But did they stop making those 400k cars, or did they move the production to other places? I think Toyota/GM also used the train tracks that were at the Fremont plant, so they would have required fewer car carrier trucks.

Daniel in SD said:

Presumably Tesla is taking some sales away from other car companies and a few hundred thousand cars a year is only 2% of total US vehicle sales. When the factory was owned by Toyota/GM it produced 400k+ vehicles a year. It just doesn't add up.

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My friend, it hasn't been owned by Toyota/GM in a loooong time and the amount of "outgoing" cars by Tesla in the interim has been a piddling amount - until now. As @mongo so eloquently puts it above, why would anyone keep a spare fleet of 120 carriers in Fremont? Granted, perhaps Tesla could have done a better job in getting them lined up beforehand, but this is probably the worst time of the year to be contracting for additional carriers.

Every new successful new company has growing pains, but you learn from your challenges. Rest assured, I don't believe they will be having these problems six months from now, at least in the US. Now ocean shipping? I hope they'll have that, and the transport when they arrive, worked out by the start of the new year.

Daniel in SD said:

There are more than 16 million new vehicles sold in the US per year. How do all the other manufacturers deliver their cars? This story makes no sense.

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Why does it not make sense just because other makers can deliver their cars? We live in a capitalist, competitive market system --- not a cooperative one where one company can just use another's contacts, contracts and resources. My understanding is the trucking of vehicles is strapped by logistics and demand....

Consider the organizational demands of Ford Motor Co. in North America. Ford has 13 full production plants that produce 2.5 million vehicles. These cars, trucks and SUVs must be delivered to 4,000 dealers. These are not random deliveries, like a load of paper towels dropped off at a supermarket: Dealers order specific vehicles from each production plant, and the correct vehicles must be properly routed through multiple channels for a timely and damage-free delivery [source: Lowe].

Daniel in SD said:

Presumably Tesla is taking some sales away from other car companies and a few hundred thousand cars a year is only 2% of total US vehicle sales. When the factory was owned by Toyota/GM it produced 400k+ vehicles a year. It just doesn't add up.

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It adds up to me. Unless you think you can start a business and your competitor says "use our trucking contracts and contacts" --- which never happens. If anything they tell their contacts if you work for them you lose us. Business, and competition, is cut throat. It doesn't matter what my competitor can move -- it matters what I can move.

Unless you've personally contacted trucking companies, and have found movers for Tesla, which we know you did not, it sure adds up to me.

wipster said:

My friend, it hasn't been owned by Toyota/GM in a loooong time and the amount of "outgoing" cars by Tesla in the interim has been a piddling amount - until now. As @mongo so eloquently puts it above, why would anyone keep a spare fleet of 120 carriers in Fremont? Granted, perhaps Tesla could have done a better job in getting them lined up beforehand, but this is probably the worst time of the year to be contracting for additional carriers.

Every new successful new company has growing pains, but you learn from your challenges. Rest assured, I don't believe they will be having these problems six months from now, at least in the US. Now ocean shipping? I hope they'll have that, and the transport when they arrive, worked out by the start of the new year.

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If only technology existed to move car carriers from other parts of the country to the factory.
Not only auto manufacturers use car carriers. I see used and wrecked cars on them most of the time. Hard to believe that there is that little slack in the system.

Daniel in SD said:

Hard to believe that there is that little slack in the system.

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No for me. Any trucking company who has enough trucks sitting empty and available for Tesla would be out of business carrying that much debt or assets with no production to show for it.

Daniel in SD said:

Not only auto manufacturers use car carriers. I see used and wrecked cars on them most of the time.

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So these guys are suppose to stop hauling wrecks/used and now work for Tesla? They have their own contacts and contracts to maintain, and bank loans to pay.

If there was slack in the system, I'm certain Tesla would be using it -- and has used it to this point. But to say it doesn't add up because there's not excess slack from wreckers/used truckers who can now haul Teslas is what doesn't add up to me.

I expect that within a few months they'll turn out to be [Jeremy Clarkson] the best car-carriers... in the world [/Jeremy Clarkson]

Daniel in SD said:

If only technology existed to move car carriers from other parts of the country to the factory.

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Assuming a surplus of carrier hardware, what of the required drivers? They are not easy to relocate, if they even exist...

Truck Driver Shortage Is Pressuring Businesses

There are about three million truckers in the U.S. today, but the shortage is particularly acute among the 500,000 or so who make longer trips, according to the American Trucking Associations. The industry group estimates that about 50,000 such drivers are needed.

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I've had cars transported across the country twice and my impression was that car transport services were run by small companies or independent contractors much the same way that freight transport is run. It would be nice if the people writing these articles would contact people actually in the trucking industry to provide some first hand knowledge. Both times I had cars transported it cost less than my Tesla's destination charge. Now, maybe things have changed from 6 months ago (when I last had a car transported) and there is now a severe shortage of car carriers. It would be nice if the article quantified that.

Daniel in SD said:

I've had cars transported across the country twice and my impression was that car transport services were run by small companies or independent contractors much the same way that freight transport is run. It would be nice if the people writing these articles would contact people actually in the trucking industry to provide some first hand knowledge. Both times I had cars transported it cost less than my Tesla's destination charge. Now, maybe things have changed from 6 months ago (when I last had a car transported) and there is now a severe shortage of car carriers. It would be nice if the article quantified that.

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Transporting one car with, I'm guessing, flexible timing, is way different from 500 plus cars per day sustained.

@outdoors reminded me that Tesla is the only volume car manufacturer in the entire state of California. So existing car carriers were there to support imports from shipping fleet and move around cars that came in on the rail lines to Richmond and such. A fairly consistent arrival pattern would yeild a fairly optimised support size. Train + ship + S/X (which partly overlap as return trips to train and ship). Then tack on 500 more a day that are only train and East bound.

Would be interesting to know if the trains are saturated also.

Only 4,000/wk? Where did that number come from? There's several hundred this week here, about 1,000 in Vancouver on this forum due to rebate ending, about the same in Virginia (or Vermont?) so I was told. That's over half the 4,000 from just 3 locations.

I guestimate 6,215 M3s this week. I can't tell you how fast the line was moving on the factory tour last week. No seriously, I can't tell you. But I bet it could go even faster.

Daniel in SD said:

If only technology existed to move car carriers from other parts of the country to the factory.
Not only auto manufacturers use car carriers. I see used and wrecked cars on them most of the time. Hard to believe that there is that little slack in the system.

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I've been reading reports of no slack in the car carrier system for months, so I believe it.

mongo said:

Would be interesting to know if the trains are saturated also.

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They're not. More cars used to be transported by train than are now; there are a lot of autoracks around. Unfortunately, Tesla thoughtlessly ripped up their on-site train loading facilities (because Musk has a serious blind spot about trains), so they're limited in ability to load trains by their ability to truck cars to the Richmond CA railyard.

That said, overall train movement capacity is limited by several national chokepoints, particularly in Chicago.

Aren't carriers and trailers covered with massive regulation like other road vehicles so that it takes a long time and cost millions to get them approved?

Now it sounds like Tesla just build these on a whim. There must be a lot more to the story, no? Have they been planning this for a long time?

mongo said:

Transporting one car with, I'm guessing, flexible timing, is way different from 500 plus cars per day sustained.

@outdoors reminded me that Tesla is the only volume car manufacturer in the entire state of California. So existing car carriers were there to support imports from shipping fleet and move around cars that came in on the rail lines to Richmond and such. A fairly consistent arrival pattern would yeild a fairly optimised support size. Train + ship + S/X (which partly overlap as return trips to train and ship). Then tack on 500 more a day that are only train and East bound.

Would be interesting to know if the trains are saturated also.

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My point was that transporting one car is much more expensive than transporting an entire car carrier full (per car). The argument that car carriers need to be in California to transport cars to other places doesn't make sense to me either. Couldn't one drive a car carrier from wherever it's located to California and then back? If the car carrier was based in California it would have to drive back to California. It's the same number of trips.

Man, if only someone at Tesla had known in advance they'd eventually need to transport a lot of cars or something...

Instead, it seems they had no way of realizing this would ever happen, just as they apparently had no way to ever know they'd need to have delivery centers staffed and physically large enough to accommodate delivery of this volume of car, or an IT back end capable of tracking and keeping up with this volume or orders...

I mean, it's clear nobody at Tesla had any way of knowing how many cars Tesla planned to make or sell right?

if only they'd had a few years with hundreds of thousands of preorders and multiple quarters in a row with publicly stated production and delivery goals as a warning or something....but nope, no way to have known!