Tesla restarts Model S and X deliveries in Europe after 2-year wait

Tesla has started to deliver the refreshed Model S and Model X to customers in Europe – resulting in roughly two years without deliveries of its two flagship models in the region.

The automaker shut down Model S and Model X production in January 2021 to update its two flagship vehicles.

Europe has been starved of those models since then – coming up on almost two years now.

Tesla kept taking new orders, but production was delayed with the new refreshed Model S starting to be delivered in June 2021 and the updated Model X in October 2021 in North America.

With the production ramp being slow, Tesla took the rare decision to stop taking orders outside of North America starting in December 2021.

That turned out to be the right decision because Tesla was not able to start deliveries in Europe until now. We reported that Tesla opened orders back up in August, and now customers in Europe are reporting taking delivery of their vehicles that they ordered more than two years ago in some cases.

Those who placed their orders when Tesla reopened them in August don’t expect deliveries until next year. Deliveries are starting with the Model S and Model X Plaid – the top-performance version of Tesla’s two flagship models.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla famously has a different approach to model updates. It often updates its vehicles with new hardware whenever ready and doesn’t wait for model year updates at the end of the year like most other automakers.

Every few years, it does bundle some of those updates together for a model “refresh,” like it did with the Model S and Model X in this case, but we have to point out here just how inefficient that model update was if it resulted in no deliveries in Europe and China, two huge markets for Tesla, for almost two years.

CEO Elon Musk even admitted that for the Model X update, Tesla shouldn’t have shut down production of the Model X at the same time as Model S since it resulted in about nine months without deliveries even in the US.

Now two years without deliveries in Europe for both models, that’s not great. I think Tesla should rethink how it does model refreshes after this experience.