What is the basis of your current obsession with the number of cars that Tesla has in inventory? Do you know what the "right" number should be? How does it compare with the inventory carried by other manufacturers and their dealer network compared to the volume that they sell quarterly? Even specialty manufacturers like McLaren (<4000/year) who primarily build to order have inventory cars at the dealers to capture the buyer who is unwilling to wait.
I'm not concerned that Tesla is stacking up inventory cars because they don't have enough demand to match the capability of the factory to produce. Multiple reasons why:
1) CFO Jason Wheeler is focused on cash and has been since he got to Tesla. He's not going to allow extra cash to be tied up in excess inventory.
2) Tesla chose to not build any US custom orders from December for Q4 delivery, planning to deliver them in Q1 instead. They have plenty of demand.
3) Lead times for custom orders in Q4 and now Q1 are back to historic highs. No reason to build inventory cars that aren't going to be sold when customers are having to wait 3 months for delivery. They have plenty of demand.
What I think happened, partly due to the AP1 to AP2 switchover and partly based on success with inventory sales in Q3 is that Tesla ran several sales "experiments" in Q4. One was to build inventory cars early in the quarter and have them available for customers to purchase late in the quarter when the lead times for custom orders stretched out. The other was to build high margin P100D's for inventory and attempt to capture the 4th quarter bonus crowd rewarding themselves with a $150K holiday present. We don't know yet how these programs worked out, but there are a couple of hints from reading the tea leaves:
- Sales of delivery-only miles inventory cars was very successful in Q4, in all geographies, with a multi-fold increase over prior quarters, including Q3
- Sales of discounted AP1 inventory cars was successful in the US (only 10 left in ev-cpo) but not so much in Europe, with around 300 still available in ev-cpo
I assume that Tesla has reviewed the results of these Q4 programs and factored them into its Q1 production plan. We can now crowd source info from the VIN watching, ev-cpo analyzing and delivery spreadsheet divining members here (including you and me) over the next 90 days and speculate on what that plan might be. I believe that whatever plan Tesla comes up with it will result in a sequential increase in deliveries from Q4 to Q1.