Do other automakers do that? Seems like you risk alienating a big chunk of your local market (wait goes from 1 week to 9 weeks based on the week in the quarter cycle you are in), to see a temp bump in earning reports?
They want to sell internationally so that the market is there and distribution is ready globally as their production capacity increases.
They also need to make enough money to be cash flow positive while they continue down the manufacturing learning curve.
Those are two good reasons why you can’t just keep all your supply in the US even if the demand could cover your production.
GF3 is online in Q4 and Tesla will no longer ship any US units into China as of a couple weeks ago. All that Fremont production that had been shipping to China will revert to EU/US going forward.
Tesla is trying to time production so that cars produced in one quarter are mostly sold in that quarter. So in the first month, oversea production gets prioritized. Musk has announced that they try to reduce the resulting effects, but so far they are still very dominant.
There's a tax credit in the Netherlands that phases out at the end of the year. Prioritizing delivery to the Netherlands will be greatly appreciated by those who can take advantage.
Tesla isn't hiding the fact, that production for oversea customers is done in the first month of a quarter, so the cars can be delivered in that quarter. Easy to imagine what the reporting would be, if they had large amounts of "unsold" cars in transit at the and of a quarter.
15,000 units in delivery in Q1 was part of the reason why Q1 was so bad for them.
They’ve said they would like to smooth out the delivery timing, and eliminate the dedicated delivery phase but I don’t see how that happens until you have more geographically distributed production (EU GF4 in 2021).
Do other automakers do that? Seems like you risk alienating a big chunk of your local market (wait goes from 1 week to 9 weeks based on the week in the quarter cycle you are in), to see a temp bump in earning reports?