Tesla has informed Cybertruck manufacturing staff to not report back to work for the following three days, in one other signal of demand points for the car that when touted tens of millions of preorders.
The information was reported by Enterprise Insider, who obtained an electronic mail telling Cybertruck manufacturing employees at Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas that they “don’t must report back to work” on “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week (Dec. 3-5).” Staff will nonetheless be paid for his or her scheduled shifts.
Tesla didn’t give a remark as to why this shutdown is going on, however Enterprise Insider stated 4 employees informed it that their schedules have been inconsistent for the final month.
Provided that it’s a essential time for Tesla deliveries, significantly of its flagship mannequin, the timing is suspect.
At present, Tesla is one among few EV producers that has offered fewer automobiles to date this yr than it did in 2023. Regardless of what you could have heard, EV gross sales are up considerably in 2024 – however Tesla was down within the first half of this yr.
The corporate had a good third quarter largely because of rising China gross sales, however continues to be down in comparison with final yr.
In consequence, Tesla has began pulling out quite a lot of stops this quarter with a view to shut out the yr with energy. It has provided bigger incentives for Tesla referral codes, lowered Mannequin Y lease pricing, and added extra flexibility to its leasing program.
And, most notably for at the moment’s topic, simply at the moment it lowered Cybertruck lease pricing – and this occurred lower than a month for the reason that firm began leasing Cybertrucks in any respect.
It’s one other signal that Tesla isn’t seeing fairly as a lot demand as as soon as anticipated for the polarizing car.
After it was first unveiled in 2019, the Cybertruck managed to tally over 250k pre-orders in lower than every week, later reaching a peak of doubtlessly 2 million reservations in response to crowdsourced information.
However when the truck hit the street, issues didn’t go precisely as deliberate. The car got here out late and over funds, additionally lacking a number of the specs that had been initially promised. The primary out there “Basis Sequence” fashions began at $100k – a far cry from the promised entry-level $40k. It’s now out there at a base value of $79k – however a promised future $61k base RWD mannequin was not too long ago eliminated that from Tesla’s web site.
Regardless of all that, it’s nonetheless the best-selling electrical pickup within the US and the third best-selling EV with a very excessive common transaction value, bringing in a superb chunk of change for the corporate.
However however, demand appears a lot decrease than the sky-high expectations for the car. That ~2 million car backlog appears to have been depleted round October of this yr, when Tesla began permitting orders and not using a reservation. On the time, Tesla had offered someplace round 30,000 whole Cybertrucks.
This could possibly be the reason for the plant shutdown. Corporations will usually pause manufacturing strains for just a few days or even weeks if manufacturing goes sooner than deliveries, in order to not have quite a lot of stock weighing down a steadiness sheet.
It’s doable that there are different causes – a line improve or some type of modifications associated to the current Cybertruck inverter recall – however for the previous, the top of the quarter could be a greater time, and for the latter, one would assume the modifications would have been made nearer to when the issue was discovered (and would possible not shut down the entire line for 3 days).
And if there had been different causes, that’s normally the type of factor an organization sends its PR workforce out to debate, in order to not spook traders with fears of waning demand. Since Tesla hasn’t made an announcement suggesting such, Occam’s razor means that manufacturing could also be outpacing demand, and the pause is to assist steadiness the 2.
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