Blog Tesla is Building Car Carriers to Keep Up With Model 3 Deliveries

Tesla is in a sprint to deliver as many cars as possible ahead of the end of the third quarter. Chief Executive Elon Musk has called it “delivery logistics hell.”

In fact, Tesla is delivering so many cars that it’s having trouble finding car carriers. So, the company has started manufacturing their own trailers. Musk shared that tidbit in a tweet today.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1044294753041313792

Tesla has struggled with production bottlenecks since the Model 3 sedan was introduced, but is now reportedly churning out around 4,000 of those cars every week. The ramp in production is now creating a bottleneck in delivery.

TMC members and Tesla watchers have observed large lots packed with Model 3s, as well as trucks pulling full loads of Model 3s en route to new owners. Tesla is aiming to produce around 50,000 Model 3s in the third quarter.

Musk did not provide more details about the car carriers built by Tesla, but it’s interesting to see the company work out a solution when it’s up against a tough challenge. Musk has also tried to remove some pressure from Tesla’s delivery team by inviting existing Tesla owners to help “educate” new owners taking delivery.

Has anyone spotted a Tesla-built car carrier?

 

[Knightshade]

Here is another:
Trucking ‘in trouble’ if it doesn’t solve the payroll problem for drivers

Did you even bother to read your own source?

The guy commenting makes clear there's plenty of drivers as long as a company is willing to pay them properly.

I suppose this does give Tesla a second excuse for their logistics failures though!

it's not that they didn't know they'd need car trailers- they were just too cheap to pay going rate for them!

 

[Knightshade]

The store opened April 2015 Tesla opening Matthews store next week
NC shut down sales May 2016 North Carolina walks back on direct sales and denies Tesla’s latest dealership license
That was a year of being open (apparently without a license).

Yes- and without a license you can't legally sell cars.

they never had a license.

The Raleigh store (opened 2013) did (and still does).

Interestingly; Tesla is apparently delivering cars from that location.

They deliver from the service center IIRC.

Which is completely legal. You can deliver cars from a non-dealership, you just can't SELL them there.

 

[jelloslug]

That's a 3 year old story.

The quote from the two different trucking reps are from this week.

Here is a little hint: the driver shortage has not gotten better lately.

 

[copyhacker]

Interestingly, it appears that significant chunk of folks are going to go home and tell their friends that while they were at the delivery center there were HUNDREDS of people there getting their cars delivered... numbers like they've never seen before at a dealership. And what's more, other adoring owners were willing to hang out and show them all the ropes of their new ride!

You may be assuming that the small percentage of folks with issues are representative of the 10's of thousands of cars being delivered in the last few months. That's often a bad assumption just because the 1 person with a bad experience is more likely to complain somewhere...

This.

I think we can all agree that the delivery process in many ways is a hot mess right now. Yes? Good.

Consider the following hypothetical customers: Alice and Bob.

Alice gets fed up with delivery hell, ragequits, and tells all her friends and neighbors. Maybe she even engages in ranty arguments on TMC in which she accuses Tesla of lying and other customers of making stuff up.

Bob also is annoyed by delivery hell, but hangs in there, receives his Model 3 (maybe even the one that Alice gave up), and is happy with it. He soon forgets the annoyances, or even considers them a weird sort of rite of passage on the way to being a for-real Tesla owner. He gives test drives to all his friends and neighbors (maybe even the ones that Alice told her horror story to).

Who's going to change more minds? Alice has a (legitimate) gripe. But Bob has a rainbow-farting spaceship.

In the long run, delivery hell only matters if you think it's never ever going to improve AND it's going to get so bad that most people end up canceling without receiving a car.

 

[jelloslug]

Did you even bother to read your own source?

The guy commenting makes clear there's plenty of drivers as long as a company is willing to pay them properly.

I suppose this does give Tesla a second excuse for their logistics failures though!

it's not that they didn't know they'd need car trailers- they were just too cheap to pay going rate for them!

That article talks about how to solve the driver crisis by paying them more, not that there are drivers turning down jobs.

 

[mongo]

In the long run, delivery hell only matters if you think it's never ever going to improve AND it's going to get so bad that most people end up canceling without receiving a car.

Forever....

 

[mongo]

Yes- and without a license you can't legally sell cars.

they never had a license.

The Raleigh store (opened 2013) did (and still does).



They deliver from the service center IIRC.

Which is completely legal. You can deliver cars from a non-dealership, you just can't SELL them there.

In reality, the act of buying a Tesla has zero to do with having a dealer license (until you need to register the car)...

It is so incredibly lame that I can go to the local gallery, walk in, and press order on my phone while telling everyone in the store how to order, how much cars are and such. But the Tesla employees can't talk price, or ordering, or let me use their computers to hit the order button...
If the gallery were more local, I would visit and tell everyone what employees can't... Take that Michigan! Oh yeah, I want all the Tesla sales taxes taken off my income tax bill too. /rant off

 

[Knightshade]

That article talks about how to solve the driver crisis by paying them more, not that there are drivers turning down jobs.

Actual quote from the article-

it’s not a driver shortage, it’s a payroll shortage.

He goes on to point out that a company paying enough never has any "shortage" of drivers.

He even mentions car companies have no shortage of drivers if they pay enough.

 

[mongo]

Actual quote from the article-



He goes on to point out that a company paying enough never has any "shortage" of drivers.

He even mentions car companies have no shortage of drivers if they pay enough.

Any company in an industry can gain employees by paying more than other companies in the industry. That doesn't increase the number of workers in the industry, or the industry capacity. If all companies raise their wages, that can attract more overall employees. CDL licenses don't grow on trees (nor do dealership licenses )

 

[Knightshade]

Any company in an industry can gain employees by paying more than other companies in the industry. That doesn't increase the number of workers in the industry, or the industry capacity. If all companies raise their wages, that can attract more overall employees. CDL licenses don't grow on trees (nor do dealership licenses )

Sure.

But all the info we have from the people with high level knowledge of the industry say there's no actual shortage of car carriers or drivers for those carriers.

So I'm not sure we ought dismiss those facts because someone found one truck driver who says drivers need to be paid more.

 

[mongo]

Speaking of North Carolina...
Ali Tofts on Twitter

 

[Knightshade]

Yeah they told me I'd get a home delivery weeks ago. I haven't gotten one.

I now have an in person one scheduled for tomorrow in Raleigh.

Mind you, nobody in Raleigh is answering the delivery phone #, and their mailbox is full so I can't leave a message- and my IDA hasn't replied to anything in a week.

So I've no idea if I'm ACTUALLY getting the car or not.

 

[mongo]

Yeah they told me I'd get a home delivery weeks ago. I haven't gotten one.

I now have an in person one scheduled for tomorrow in Raleigh.

Mind you, nobody in Raleigh is answering the delivery phone #, and their mailbox is full so I can't leave a message- and my IDA hasn't replied to anything in a week.

So I've no idea if I'm ACTUALLY getting the car or not.

Ugg, I'd be frustrated too.

 

[Knightshade]

Ugg, I'd be frustrated too.

Funny follow up...a couple hours ago unable to get any contact with anyone else, I reached out to a low level guy I met at the Raleigh location like 8 months ago when I did a 24 hour test drive of a model S- he's whoever the "real" sales guy has handle minor stuff, but I happened to have his email address... (the actual sales guy never replied when I emailed him).

THAT guy got back to me just now....

To tell me the car IS in Raleigh, but they are doing deliveries at another location which is 25 miles away from where I was expecting to be going.... (it's apparently another temporary/borrowed lot to try and work around the fact the Raleigh store has no parking to hold delivery cars)


That's fine, they're actually both roughly similar distance from where I live.... but it would've been nice if someone from Tesla had actually let me know, otherwise I'd have shown up at the wrong place with another drive ahead of me to the right one.

That said, once I DID get in touch with that guy, he was great- not only did he tell me the address and confirm my car was there- he texted me a picture of it.

Asked him what he liked to drink so I can buy him a bottle of it- he's been vastly more helpful and responsive than anybody whose actual job it is to help me has been in this process.

Now just have to cross my fingers for no major issues with it at delivery

 

[Uncle Paul]

This has nothing to do with paying drivers. Tesla is talking about making the trailers. They still need to pay someone to drive them.

I beilive that this is just a stop gap measure. Withing 5 years or so, I predict the cars will have the technology to deliver themselves.

If they hook up the trailers up to their own Semis they will have significant competitive cost advantages over the competition.

They could also probably use a Tesla Semi to deliver a bunch of cars to the East Coast and just leave that cab there to deliver to a customer.