Found this on a story on
Electrek as an explaination for the end of quarter sales push.
"Tesla incentivizes deliveries by the end of the quarter to limit the amount of inventory on hand. Since Tesla is one of the few direct-to-consumer automakers and doesn’t sell its cars to dealerships, it owns them all the way until the customer takes delivery.
This means that if Tesla has a vehicle on hand at the end of a quarter, it spent tens of thousands of dollars to build it, but it doesn’t recognize any revenue for it even if it is already sold to a customer. Therefore, it can look really bad on its income statement at the end of the quarter."