Unsold Tesla Cars Piling Up In America, Australia, & Germany – CleanTechnica

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Remember when if you wanted a new Tesla, you ordered it online and waited 3 to 6 months for your battery-powered beauty to arrive? Those days are gone. News reports are cropping up that claim Tesla has so many unsold cars, they are filling parking lots at defunct malls and outside the Tesla Gigafactory in Texas. Of course, no one can confirm any of this since the company refuses to talk publicly about anything, preferring instead to simply reply to any requests with an emoji of a smiling pile of dung. Very classy, Elon.

The reports of unsold cars started late last month when Channel 7 News in Australia aired video of unsold Tesla automobiles piling up at the port of Melbourne. It said Tesla has lowered the price of some cars by as much as AUS $20,000, but still there were fewer buyers than anticipated. According to Chanmel 7 News, customers are being put off by the lack of a comprehensive charging network and plummeting resale values.

Rani Molla of Sherwood News reports that Tesla produced 433,371 automobiles in the first quarter of this year, but delivered just 386,810, meaning there were about 47,000 extra Teslas around, more than double what it was a year ago and the biggest imbalance in the company’s history. This surplus is happening as the company deals with a number of headwinds, including slowing electric vehicle sales growth, growing competition, and chaotic leadership, Molla says. “The primary driver of this was an increase in inventory from a mismatch between builds,” Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said of the company’s minus $2.5 billion in free cash flow. We expect the inventory built to reverse in the second quarter and free cash flow to return to positive again.” The second quarter ends in a few weeks and we will know soon afterwards if the inventory mismatch has corrected itself.

Molla used satellite imagery and object detection analytics from the earth observation marketplace SkyFi to take a look at some images of Tesla’s Gigafactory outside Austin, Texas. Comparing a Thursday from last October to a Thursday in March, it shows the parking lots outside the factory are much more full now than they were then. SkyFi also shared satellite imagery of Chesterfield Mall, a soon to be demolished mall west of St. Louis, where Jalopnik previously reported Tesla has been storing excess inventory. The firm counted 465 Teslas parked there in May, where before there had been none.

Sherwood was unable to get comparable satellite imagery of Tesla’s Fremont factory, but a series of drone videos by a YouTuber show what look to be increasingly cramped lots across the property. Here’s a flyover from last week. People have reported unsold Tesla cars taking up space at a mall near the factory as well as in parking lots and airports around the world. “Of course, some of these Teslas could be en route to happy owners,” Molla says, “but the mass of them piling up is getting harder to ignore.”

€6000 Bonus In  Germany

Germany’s Handelsblatt reports that unsold Teslas are also piling up in that country. To move them, Tesla has just announced a €6000 environmental bonus, provided the new owner takes delivery by the end of June. It says Tesla sales in Germany are off by around 40% in the first five months of 2024. With the bonus, the RWD Model Y now starts at €38,990 in Germany. The Model Y Long Range with rear-wheel drive starts at just under €43,000, while the dual motor Long Range model costs €49,000. The Model Y Performance is now less than €54,000 after the so-called environmental bonus is applied.

Readers may note the bonus is very close to the electric car incentive previously available from the German government that was rescinded at the end of 2023, two years earlier than expected. Used vehicles are also excluded from the environmental bonus offer and it cannot be combined with any other promotional offers such as subsidized financing rates, Handlesblatt says. It adds that that there are currently thousands of unsold Teslas parked at a former military airfield near Berlin.

The Takeaway

What can we learn from all this? It seems certain that Tesla is producing more cars than there is demand for, something many thought was impossible a few years ago. The company’s CEO and chief cheerleader confidently proclaimed it would be selling 10 million cars a year by 2030 or so and the trend would be steadily upward from there. There were new factories coming in Europe, Mexico, and India. Now all that happy talk has ended in a glut of unsold cars.

It is pretty clear that the mood among consumers about electric cars has shifted dramatically in the past 6 months or so. Whether that is the result of intense pushback by oil companies is hard to say, but something has clearly changed. States like Virginia are telling California to take its clean transportation initiative and shove it. The US government is going crazy over the threat of low cost electric cars from  China and now the EU is about to follow with increased tariffs of its own. Manufacturers in China are beating each other’s brains in with ruinous price cutting in an attempted to simply survive. It can be argued that even Tesla, with all its technological prowess, could not have foreseen the sudden shift in the marketplace.

What is certain, however, is that all those images and videos of unsold Teslas sitting in parking lots around the world is not doing the EV revolution any good. The transition to zero emissions transportation needs to happen quickly if there is to be any hope or lowering emissions from cars and trucks enough to keep the Earth from becoming a boiling cauldron, and yet it seems to have gone into neutral at best and into reverse at worst. Manufacturers are now telling anyone who will listen that what the people really want today are hybrids — technology that was spearheaded by Toyota 40 years ago.

That’s a problem for Tesla. Unlike Ford and General Motors and Fiat, it cannot just start shoving some internal combustion engines into its cars to soothe the fears of nervous drivers. In essence, Tesla is a one trick pony when the rest of the auto industry is a 3-ring circus. Tesla could be in real trouble here. We will learn at the next conference call just how bad it is, but there is a real question whether a new focus on autonomy will be enough to pull Tesla’s chestnuts out of the fire.