Configurator has said "Late March Delivery" for the last 6 weeks - meaning?

[calisnow]

For roughly the last 6 weeks, each time I've checked the Model S configurater it says "late March delivery" - and it still does today.

Does this mean:

• The configurater is not accurate?
• The factory is expanding in capacity each week - so time to delivery is shrinking?
• Tesla is playing marketing games to goose Q1 sales as much as possible?
• Sales are declining and thus the time to delivery is shrinking?

All of the above? None of the above?

 

[Haxster]

I could be wrong, and this is just my guess:

Your Q1 speculation is probably closest to the reason.

Non-US orders can take a long time to get delivered to the customer. So they build them earlier in the quarter in anticipation of them being delivered before the quarter ends.

Right-half US orders also take longer to get from the Fremont factory. So they build them a few weeks earlier than left-half US orders.

Typically, Tesla's goal is to get as many cars delivered by the end of each quarter.

Back in December, I think the "end of March" estimate was to assure customers that they would get unlimited supercharging by taking delivery of their cars before the original April 1 delivery deadline.

It's also possible that there were anticipated tooling/production delays for the 100 KWh batteries and the HW2.1 changes (just kidding).