Now that our orders are placed, it’s time to wait. If you haven’t done research and ordered a Tesla, you might be surprised. We ordered on 11/24/2020, placed our orders on hold until 1/2/2021 to put off a substantial Personal Property Tax Increase due to us owning older cars, 2011 Cruze and a 2007 Lucerne.
Tesla does its best to sell every car produced in a quarter, at this time Tesla produces Model 3’s for overseas markets the first part of every quarter. This is done to account for transit via many RORO’s, or roll-on/roll-off ships and get these overseas deliveries done within the same quarter. When overseas orders are complete, they start producing cars for the US and Canadian Markets. This pushes most US deliveries into the last 4-6 weeks each quarter, typically deliveries start to the East and work West across the regions. For the Missouri markets, Tesla’s are shipped by Train to Chicago, then transported by Trucks to the various Service Centers for delivery. If you are on the West Coast, it’s very likely your delivery will be in the last couple days of the quarter.
Back to our orders, your account page can get confusing, many times delivery estimates change often, for no rhyme or reason to you and I, only Tesla knows why. You will probably see many variances as seen in samples below.
The wait is in a couple steps, now we are waiting for a VIN, Vehicle Identification Number, to be assigned for both our cars. This can be assigned just days or hours from delivery, but for many this is done 1-3 weeks before delivery. We received a VIN for our Blue Tesla on 2/12/21, and a delivery estimate of late February. Our VIN for our Black Tesla was received on 2/24/21 with a delivery estimate in the 2nd week of March. So you can see this varies dramatically, even for similar cars, with only exterior color differences ordered on the same day.
The estimated delivery dates continued to change a couple days back and forth. This wasn’t helped by Mother Nature, there was an extensive push of cold and Winter weather deep into the southern US. This impacted many regions and slowed/stopped many transport types.
We received a text on 2/15 for our Blue Tesla that included a link to schedule pickup, we picked 3/1/21, they provided options for 3 different days and 4-6 pickup windows each day. Ironically a text was received for our Black Tesla on 3/1/21 to schedule pickup, which was scheduled for 3/12/21.
You will receive text/email communication along the way with updates or in our case delays. The Blue Tesla was caught up in a backlog at the Chicago Railyard and pickup was pushed back to 3/3/21. As you can see the wait is very fluid, it is tough planning pickup with work/family routines. Our Black Tesla was pushed back several times as the Tesla Service Center was waiting for delivery of a front passenger door glass, pickup was finally settled on of 3/18/21. There is a lot to the story of our Black Tesla, down and dirty, as of when this was published, we are again waiting on a VIN after rejecting 2 Black cars, more on that in a later publication.
Next up: Pickup Day!
Thanks for reading:
Tesla Referral Link: https://ts.la/thomas14616
I also enjoy a 3rd party service to track the performance of our Tesla Model 3, it is called TeslaFi
If you use my referral code or link you will receive a 30 day trial instead of 14 days.
TeslaFi Referral: tstolze
TesalFi Referral Link: https://www.teslafi.com/signup.php?referred=tstolze