Tesla starts selling demos and test-drive vehicles as end of record quarter approaches

Tesla has authorized locations in North America to start selling display and test-drive vehicles as it aims to close out a record quarter despite the noise.

Over the last few weeks, we have reported on a lot of incentives Tesla has put in place to sell cars this quarter.

Tesla started offering a $3,750 discount to buyers for everyone taking delivery of a vehicle in the US in December.

Later, the automaker also started to offer 10,000 free supercharging miles to people taking delivery this month.

Earlier this week, Tesla increased the amount of the discount to $7,500 – equivalent to the federal full tax credit for electric vehicles that will be put in place for vehicles getting delivered next month in the US.

However, we didn’t report on how well these incentives have been working.

Now we learn that Tesla’s inventories are getting low in the US as the incentive program was successful.

Tesla barely has any Model 3 vehicles available in the Bay Area. It has some Model Ys. The automaker literally has a single Model 3 listed for the Los Angeles area and less than two dozen Model Y vehicles.

Tesla still has a few dozen Model 3 vehicles around New York City and a handful of Model Y vehicles. Florida also still has some inventory.

But most markets are starting to run low on inventory following the rare discount program put in place by Tesla. There are more cars coming off the lines in Fremont and Texas for the US market, but many of them are already spoken for.

Electrek has learned that Tesla started to authorize the sale of display and test-ride vehicles in several markets in the US yesterday, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Tesla is expected to beat its previous US delivery record by a significant margin in the US and globally.

The last record was achieved last quarter with over 343,000 vehicles.

In Q4 2022, Tesla is expected to deliver over 400,000 vehicles thanks to increased production capacity and a decent number of vehicles in transit at the end of the last quarter.

Electrek’s Take

I believe Tesla is likely going to be around Elon’s magic number in Q4: 420K deliveries.

It would put Tesla at over 1.3 million deliveries in 2022 or about 39% growth versus the previous year. That’s not exactly the 50% rate Tesla has been aiming for, but it is still undeniably impressive in the current auto market compared to other brands.

The problem for Tesla is that a significant number of those 420,000 vehicles have been heavily discounted this quarter. Tesla has industry-leading gross margins that enable it to absorb those discounts profitably, but it is still going to affect its bottom line in a bad way.

Now in the US, the government is going to cover these discounts, in the US at least, starting next quarter.

It will be interesting to see how Tesla fares in the rest of the world in 2023 with a lot more production capacity.