In Production???

[5YJSA]

Not sure if you are aware of this thread. Model S Delivery Update
I call it the "the current vintage of misery likes company" thread. LOL Thankfully, I've graduated.

But seriously, there is an xls tracker on the very first post where you can log your progress or at least see trends before you. And just about every imaginable issue, gripe or event is represented throughout the thread. Hang in there, you'll find the process imperfect but within 60 days a custom made machine will be in your driveway regardless of what emails, MyTesla or anyone else says. The manufacturing process has a life of its own.

As NikeWings points out above, people should peruse the thread he links to.

Here is my updated news, as promised:

June 15 - placed order
June 22 - order confirmed
July 4 (I think) - in production
July 6 (today) - fully built and in transit

 

[Austral]

Mine just entered Production around 11AM this morning.

How did you get such a specific time? I want to use your method!

 

[Chopr147]

IDK why you had a problem changing options in the first week. I actually changed 3 things during that 1 week ordering window. After ordering online 6/24 I then added Nex gen. seats, 6/25, changed the color and added pano roof 6/27. All before July 1st which was when I received the production email. Any changes after that would have cost me $500

 

[5YJSA]

My Model S left the factory on July 6. Today, 6 days later, my DS tells me it is in Richmond, California at a rail yard, still waiting to be sent east. It has moved only about 64 km in 6 days. :-(

 

[wilheldp]

My Model S left the factory on July 6. Today, 6 days later, my DS tells me it is in Richmond, California at a rail yard, still waiting to be sent east. It has moved only about 64 km in 6 days. :-(

That sucks...especially since mine is probably sitting on that same train. No wonder it takes so long between production and delivery. Apparently refreshing the My Tesla page repeatedly does not speed up the process. If it did, I would have gotten my car a few weeks ago.

 

[wilheldp]

My Model S left the factory on July 6. Today, 6 days later, my DS tells me it is in Richmond, California at a rail yard, still waiting to be sent east. It has moved only about 64 km in 6 days. :-(

I did a little digging. Turns out, Richmond, CA is home to the BNSF Oakland International Gateway. Tesla probably fills up rail cars at the Fremont factory, then drags them up to BNSF for shipment to other hubs across the country. I just checked the schedules for the Richmond to Chicago route, and the cut-off days are Tuesday and Friday at 5 pm. Hopefully, our cars departed California yesterday and are currently en route to Chicago. The goal for that route is listed at 133 hours (~5.5 days) on BNSF's website, so if the cars departed yesterday, they should arrive in Chicago on Sunday evening and be off-loaded on Monday. Add in a day or two for trucking from Chicago to Cincinnati and Toronto, and our cars should be at the SvC's no later than Thursday of next week. That would certainly put them on pace to meet the early date of July 27 of our delivery window.

 

[Austral]

Optimistic. My ride is on that train most likely then. I noticed a bottle neck inside my dealer's back garage yesterday, i.e., lots of undelivered cars wrapped in plastic. Wonder if that plays into the DS giving me late delivery times. I read somewhere that Tesla experienced a 30 percent increase in sales last month, perhaps more than they could absorb--I don't know. Lots of speculation on my part. I need to chill out. Or, or, maybe I nailed it.

 

[Chopr147]

I think the re-fresh and 60kwh battery has spiked sales and it now appears Tesla is having a bit of a hard time filling orders. It's a good problem to have though. My DS told me it is illegal for them to give a delivery date until it's in the shop. Maybe it's a NY thing but sounds weird.

 

[5YJSA]

I did a little digging. Turns out, Richmond, CA is home to the BNSF Oakland International Gateway. Tesla probably fills up rail cars at the Fremont factory, then drags them up to BNSF for shipment to other hubs across the country. I just checked the schedules for the Richmond to Chicago route, and the cut-off days are Tuesday and Friday at 5 pm. Hopefully, our cars departed California yesterday and are currently en route to Chicago. The goal for that route is listed at 133 hours (~5.5 days) on BNSF's website, so if the cars departed yesterday, they should arrive in Chicago on Sunday evening and be off-loaded on Monday. Add in a day or two for trucking from Chicago to Cincinnati and Toronto, and our cars should be at the SvC's no later than Thursday of next week. That would certainly put them on pace to meet the early date of July 27 of our delivery window.

OMG: "a little digging"?

You're a saint! I vaguely thought about searching railways to see if I could sleuth out what line they might be on, but I'm way too lazy and never thought I could get so much information so...

Thanks!

I have nagged my DS again to see if he knows where my car is now. I will report back when I hear.

If it has moved, we can assume your info is solid. If not, I'll see if he has different info on Friday.

 

[5YJSA]

Optimistic. My ride is on that train most likely then. I noticed a bottle neck inside my dealer's back garage yesterday, i.e., lots of undelivered cars wrapped in plastic. Wonder if that plays into the DS giving me late delivery times. I read somewhere that Tesla experienced a 30 percent increase in sales last month, perhaps more than they could absorb--I don't know. Lots of speculation on my part. I need to chill out. Or, or, maybe I nailed it.

It's public knowledge that Tesla missed its delivery target last quarter (ended June). They claimed one of the problems they had was 2x more than normal "cars sold but still in transit", which was 5,150 cars last quarter, compared to about 2,500 usually "in transit" at the end of other quarters.

So Delivery Specialists are dealing with roughly double their normal workload to get those cars into people's hands.

My DS told me that, coincidentally, they always have a larger workload around the end of each quarter (not, he said, because Tesla intentionally floods the pipe with cars near the end of the quarter for any nefarious reason, but just because of other internal logistical reasons that happen to coincide with the ends of quarters). So each end of quarter is already normally super busy for them.

This end of quarter, they have double their normal "super busy" work.

We know from Tesla's web site, that a typical delivery appointment should take about 30 minutes. So a DS can, theoretically, if he does nothing else all day, pump 16 cars / day out to customers.

Obviously DSs do more than appointments, because mine has to answer my million emails, and has spent literally over 60 minutes on the phone with me in the past weeks. I'm just one customer. And they cannot possibly move from delivery appointment to delivery appointment with perfect efficiency.

Also, when I was at my local Tesla store about 3 weeks ago, they told me they had just received the first Model X vehicles ever for the Toronto area. Those required all kinds of extra time to train staff to inspect them and to deliver them. So that would add to the DS's workloads too.

So the # of deliveries / day that they do is likely much less than 16.

I would guess that if there are at least 8 vehicles in the lot before yours gets there, you have to wait at least a day before your DS can possibly look at yours. It could be more.

So I believe it is reasonable to assume delivery times are going to get padded by a few days throughout July, compared to what they might be in August.

 

[wilheldp]

OMG: "a little digging"?

You're a saint! I vaguely thought about searching railways to see if I could sleuth out what line they might be on, but I'm way too lazy and never thought I could get so much information so...

Thanks!

I have nagged my DS again to see if he knows where my car is now. I will report back when I hear.

If it has moved, we can assume your info is solid. If not, I'll see if he has different info on Friday.

That seriously took me less than an hour of digging. I try to use my Web-Fu for good on occasion.

Did you hear back from your DS? I'm really interested to know if my prediction was correct.

 

[5YJSA]

No my DS couldn't get a response yesterday. He is trying again today.

 

[5YJSA]

That seriously took me less than an hour of digging. I try to use my Web-Fu for good on occasion.

Did you hear back from your DS? I'm really interested to know if my prediction was correct.

My DS says he can't get a ping on my car's location anymore, maybe because some other car is sitting right over top of it on the train, so my poor car can't get a GPS signal. Or maybe it's just randomly been under a bridge, like a common troll, when he tried.

If your car is blocking my car's GPS signal, then damn you!

If my car has decided to live under a bridge and never come live with me, then damn me!

Maybe your DS can get a fix on your car's whereabouts?

 

[Nish]

My DS says he can't get a ping on my car's location anymore, maybe because some other car is sitting right over top of it on the train, so my poor car can't get a GPS signal. Or maybe it's just randomly been under a bridge, like a common troll, when he tried.

If your car is blocking my car's GPS signal, then damn you!

If my car has decided to live under a bridge and never come live with me, then damn me!

Maybe your DS can get a fix on your car's whereabouts?

My car is around Flagstaff, AZ right now.

 

[wilheldp]

My car is around Flagstaff, AZ right now.

That jives with the BNSF route between Richmond and Chicago. I think we may be on to something. I'll ask my DS tomorrow and see if we can get another data point.

 

[5YJSA]

That jives with the BNSF route between Richmond and Chicago. I think we may be on to something. I'll ask my DS tomorrow and see if we can get another data point.

Cool.

When I was poking around BNSF's site, though, in multiple places it seems to say (as you reported) that their Richmond -> Chicago route is 5 days.

But I found one page that says 10 days. I can't find it again though, because their site is a nightmare.

Anyway, even at 10 days, from the 12th to the 22nd (in Chicago) + 3 days from Chicago to Toronto = July 25, which is the earliest day Tesla is telling me so...

I'm also getting pretty confident you are on the "right track". Whether the car will get here earlier than the 25th or not, though, I'm less sure.

 

[wilheldp]

I was wrong in my first post about this. The facility in Richmond is not the Oakland International Gateway. Unsurprisingly, that facility is in Oakland, and it deals almost solely with intermodal containers unloaded from cargo ships in the Port of Oakland. The facility in Richmond is the Richmond Vehicle Facility which consists of a large parking lot with loading ramps onto rail car carriers. The vehicle facility connects to a commercial rail yard to the north, but it doesn't connect directly to Oakland to the south.

I did find the 240 hour (10 day) estimate between Richmond and Chicago on one of the schedules. I am hoping that isn't the route that our cars are taking, and I don't think it is. I think the 10 day route would include one or more stops along the way. Since Tesla is just sending cars by train to regional hubs, I doubt they would want the cars being transported by trains that would make multiple stops. I'm sure it is cheaper that way, but Tesla already has a problem with cars being in transit at the end of a quarter affecting their monthly/quarterly/yearly delivery numbers.

I would like to try to figure out how long it should take to get from Richmond to Flagstaff, but I can't find BNSF transit times for that route and I don't really know when Nish's car passed through there. If my theory is correct, the cars left Richmond sometime between 5 PM Tuesday and 8 AM Wednesday.

You're right, though. BNSF's website is a hot mess. It seems like they have the infrastructure to make it easy to look up this information, but they aren't using that infrastructure very well. The only interactive map I can find only uses the intermodal hubs.

 

[Nish]

I was wrong in my first post about this. The facility in Richmond is not the Oakland International Gateway. Unsurprisingly, that facility is in Oakland, and it deals almost solely with intermodal containers unloaded from cargo ships in the Port of Oakland. The facility in Richmond is the Richmond Vehicle Facility which consists of a large parking lot with loading ramps onto rail car carriers. The vehicle facility connects to a commercial rail yard to the north, but it doesn't connect directly to Oakland to the south.

I did find the 240 hour (10 day) estimate between Richmond and Chicago on one of the schedules. I am hoping that isn't the route that our cars are taking, and I don't think it is. I think the 10 day route would include one or more stops along the way. Since Tesla is just sending cars by train to regional hubs, I doubt they would want the cars being transported by trains that would make multiple stops. I'm sure it is cheaper that way, but Tesla already has a problem with cars being in transit at the end of a quarter affecting their monthly/quarterly/yearly delivery numbers.

I would like to try to figure out how long it should take to get from Richmond to Flagstaff, but I can't find BNSF transit times for that route and I don't really know when Nish's car passed through there. If my theory is correct, the cars left Richmond sometime between 5 PM Tuesday and 8 AM Wednesday.

You're right, though. BNSF's website is a hot mess. It seems like they have the infrastructure to make it easy to look up this information, but they aren't using that infrastructure very well. The only interactive map I can find only uses the intermodal hubs.

My information was current as of my posting. I got GPS coordinates from my DS

 

[Nish]

On another note, I think we are obsessed
Lol

 

[wilheldp]

My information was current as of my posting. I got GPS coordinates from my DS

I didn't mean to imply that your information wasn't correct or current. There is a BNSF location in Ash Fork, AZ, which is near Flagstaff, where cargo can take a detour down to Phoenix. Not knowing when the train left Richmond and not knowing whether it was stopped in Ash Fork when you received your update is keeping me from correlating that data point to my theory. If we get another data point tomorrow, it should help with that. If the cars have moved from Flagstaff to somewhere in Colorado, Oklahoma, or Kansas, we can be reasonably sure that they are taking the faster route. If they are still in AZ, we may be hosed.