Sneakerbuddy
Member
I get your point that its not necessarily a lot of money. But the number of people configured no VIN; and VIN no Car would still be interesting:
1) It would have general indication of Teslas expectations for manufacturing and delivery. Should be a stable but slightly growing number. But, what if it wasnt? If the number went way up or way down, it might correlate with something interesting.
2) If production is going up, you are right the number of people in those status should be generally growing but not outrageously. What is the growth rate compared to expected production rate? If Tesla announces 5K per week but not a lot of people in the queue, that would be weird.
3) They are in a well documented financial crunch with net working capital below negative $2.3B. Every dollar counts until they make Model 3 goals for volume and profit. If these numbers balloon, it might indicate they are taping this source of funding. $25 million will soon be a material portion of unrestricted US cash.
I just think the chart would be interesting and would love to see how it has behaved over the last few months and going forward.
The recent deep delivery push back emails make this even more imperative. Is Tesla deliberately stacking up purchase deposits?