Tesla has informed Cybertruck manufacturing staff to not report back to work for the subsequent three days, in one other signal of demand points for the automobile that when touted hundreds of thousands of preorders.
The information was reported by Enterprise Insider, who obtained an electronic mail telling Cybertruck manufacturing staff 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).” Employees will nonetheless be paid for his or her scheduled shifts.
Tesla didn’t give a remark as to why this shutdown is occurring, however Enterprise Insider stated 4 staff informed it that their schedules have been inconsistent for the final month.
On condition that it’s a vital time for Tesla deliveries, notably of its flagship mannequin, the timing is suspect.
Presently, Tesla is certainly one of few EV producers that has offered fewer vehicles up to now 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 attributable to rising China gross sales, however continues to be down in comparison with final yr.
Consequently, Tesla has began pulling out quite a lot of stops this quarter with a purpose to shut out the yr with power. It has supplied bigger incentives for Tesla referral codes, lowered Mannequin Y lease pricing, and added extra flexibility to its leasing program.
And, most notably for as we speak’s topic, simply as we speak it lowered Cybertruck lease pricing – and this occurred lower than a month because the 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 automobile.
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 probably 2 million reservations in line with crowdsourced information.
However when the truck hit the highway, issues didn’t go precisely as deliberate. The automobile got here out late and over funds, additionally lacking among the specs that have been initially promised. The primary out there “Basis Collection” fashions began at $100k – a far cry from the promised entry-level $40k. It’s now out there at a base worth 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 worth, bringing in chunk of change for the corporate.
However however, demand appears a lot decrease than the sky-high expectations for the automobile. That ~2 million automobile backlog appears to have been depleted round October of this yr, when Tesla began permitting orders with out a reservation. On the time, Tesla had offered someplace round 30,000 whole Cybertrucks.
This might be the reason for the plant shutdown. Corporations will usually pause manufacturing traces for a number of days or perhaps weeks if manufacturing goes quicker 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 kind of modifications associated to the latest Cybertruck inverter recall – however for the previous, the top of the quarter can be a greater time, and for the latter, one would suppose 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 have been different causes, that’s often the kind of factor an organization sends its PR workforce out to debate, in order to not spook buyers with fears of waning demand. Since Tesla hasn’t made a press release 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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