I get what you’re saying and as someone who has worked in making both automobiles and now 15 years of consumer products, I totally understand how a few pieces of a product can totally mess up your production schedule. That said, in this case they are making 1 single model of car. The difference car to car is literally close to 2% of the component list. If they didn’t have AWD motors, controllers, or wire harnesses, the production line would be at a stand still. It’s not, they are still building at good volumes, they just have 4 months worth of orders to fill and frustrated customers to make happy. I wasn’t frustrated till I started hearing that people who called, for no reason but to waste time of the IDA’s, were getting matched to cars, that sounds like working with a sales guy at a dealer. It encourages excessive call volume and damages the credibility of the reservation system. I worry for the company almost more than the car right now due to what I see as rogue entities within the company misbehaving. After all, if Tesla fails and gets bought by another company the whole vision will likely get seriously watered down and who knows where early adopters will land.
The thing is that it seems like RWD was made in numbers expecting a big surge of orders for that, and then they opened up AWD and here we all are waiting for that instead. This left them with less than anticipated AWD parts, so they have produced and filled a significant portion of the RWD orders (and I was told by the "local" Tesla delivery room (an hour and a half way) that they were seeing multiple people without reservations ordering RWD and getting it within a few weeks.
On the call, they said that they were having about half of the orders of AWD cars. Based on the VINs we have seen registered, with only about 25% being RWD since the announcement, we can make some vague assumptions about how much longer the AWD line is. Considering how few AWD deliveries were happening, I do think this was a surprise to them, and then have been ramping up AWD part procurement because of that.
It might also be worth pointing out that *perhaps* they purposely pushed the majority of AWD until Q3 to not have to purchase the parts, saving that money. Then, they can build and sell cars containing those parts in Q3, in which case we should see a significant increase of those sales sooner than later.
Furthermore, one of the people really diving into the numbers guessed that the sheets were something like about 9-10% of pre-orders, with the data changing now to 1.5-2.5%. Assuming that's the case, looking at the AWD numbers to be delivered, the line shouldn't be *that* long. Considering that the trend line of how many people are waiting versus how many have ordered is starting to come together now, probably by about 5% a week, that should bode well for deliveries.
Yeah, I want my car before I have to drive my trade-in down to Tesla by doing the Fred Flintstone thing through the floor, but I do feel like they are doing what they can.
Personally I think the badge is a gimmicky way of saying "I spent more money to get a faster car"... I was kind of happy with Tesla's initial decision to ditch the badging on the 3 completely.
On a previous vehicle we owned (Hyundai Tucson), my wife got rear-ended and we needed to replace the hatch. For whatever reason, the auto-shop never replaced the words and instead just gave us a bag with it in and told me to come back and they would put them on. I never did. It looked so much cleaner without the wording on it.
I would rather mine come with the Dual Motor badge I can stick in the frunk.
So if one were to order today, a RWD model in the right configuration might arrive faster than a similarly specced AWD? Asking for a friend.
I think it could, although the backlog seems to have abated recently.