The 1st ship to Europe in Q4 is on the way!
Welcome to the ship tracking thread where the aim is to follow your new Model 3 as it makes it’s way to you.
RCC ANTWERP departed Pier 80 yesterday evening and is now making 17 kts southwards along the Californian coast enroute to the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal.
Why does this thread exist? Unlike other car manufacturers Tesla will not initiate communications with you after you have placed your order until just before delivery when they want to be paid. You will have possibly been told an expected delivery date which may, or may not, prove to be accurate. Due to this vacuum of knowledge a mini industry of Tesla tracking has emerged. There are websites and social media sites that dabble in this however I am Mr Miserable and I have quickly established a reputation for providing in this thread accurate and timely information on Model 3 shipping to the EU and particularly the UK.
First of all, some background. You may know some or all of this already.
Your car has been manufactured in Fremont, California and it has been transported by road to the port of San Francisco and specifically to Pier 80. It will have sat there for up to a week or so before being loaded on to a ship designed especially to transport cars and other wheeled vehicles. There are hundreds of these big ugly monsters at sea at anytime and they operate globally. Tesla have chartered the entire ship for this single voyage to transport the cars to Europe. The ship’s destination will be Zeebrugge in Belgium. To get there it will travel down the Pacific coast to the Panama Canal (about 8 days), transit the canal (1 day) and then cross the Caribbean into the Atlantic and finally up the English Channel to Zeebrugge (11 days). A total sea journey of roughly 8000 miles in about 3 weeks at an average speed of 16kts.
Generally all the LHD Model 3s are unloaded in Zeebrugge and distributed from there by road, rail and sea (on a different ship) to the rest of Europe and Scandinavia. RHD Model 3s often remain onboard and the ship then sails to Southampton where it unloads at pier 104 or 105 in the Western docks about 3 days after arriving in Zeebrugge. Cars are then moved by road to Tesla delivery centres or by sub-contractors for delivery direct to your door. Some lease vehicles are delivered first to a central disused airfield location and are then subsequently delivered to your door by the leasing company.
You can follow the ship on a number of ship tracking websites:
www.marinetraffic.com
www.vesselfinder.com
to name but 2, there are many others.
These websites receive location data of the ships generally from shore-based radio receivers. Once the ship is more than about 150 miles off the coast it will be out of the range of the shore based receivers and the only way of continuing to track the ship is by satellite. You can take out a satellite subscription to continue tracking the ship however you may find it prohibitively expensive (~£1200pa) or you could take out a daily subscription costing just over £20 for each ship for the 3 week trip, or you can just let me do it for you because that is what I do. Each “Tesla” ship is tracked and I will post a daily report on its progress or otherwise. All free of charge. Along the way, I will post other items which may or may not be of interest about the weather, the route, the ship and other related trivia. If you find it all fascinating, please come back and follow another ship or two!
Today’s subject is the Tesla shipping season. Tesla like many other companies are very conscious of their quarterly financial figures. They aim to sell every car they make in any quarter in the same quarter. So a car manufactured in January, February or March must be sold by the end of March, and so on. To be deemed as sold the car must not only be paid for in full but actually delivered to the customer. It makes sense then that cars destined for Europe are manufactured at the beginning of the quarter and in the last month of the quarter no cars are exported to Europe. This means that ships will depart in the 1st two months of any quarter and none in the 3rd. This is why there is a feast or famine cycle of Model 3 availability. (Model S and X are slightly different and will be subject of another post tomorrow) This cycle also explains the mad rush at the end of every quarter to deliver all the cars. We normally receive around 7 to 8 shipments each quarter in Europe with up to 5 ships enroute at any one time. For Model 3 there is no way of knowing exactly which ship your car is on bar being told by a friendly Tesla person. You can however have a pretty good guess based on when you expect delivery and when you get your VIN allocated. VINs seem to be allocated within a day or 2 of the ship departing from Pier 80. I won’t describe here how to find your VIN because there are many threads on this subject already on this forum and I recommend you have a read of them. Another thing about Tesla and specifically Model 3 is that your car is not built to order - Tesla build whatever they want and then match those built against orders. It can mean that some folk could have a long wait for their particular specification. It means that you may have ordered the same day as someone else however you may not get delivery on the same day if your specification is different. Some get lucky, they order on Monday and take delivery on Friday whereas others wait, and wait, and then wait some more. This waiting can be incredibly frustrating and inconvenient, but trust me, it’s worth the wait!
Finally now the shipping season to Europe is at last under way, I do request that posts to this thread from now on be confined to shipping related matters, not VINs!!