Tesla starts Model 3 customer deliveries on the East Coast

Just a few weeks after opening the Model 3 configurator to regular reservation holders on the East Coast and Midwest, Tesla now started deliveries to customers without employee priority.

For the first few months of Model 3 production, Tesla limited deliveries to employees, family members of employees, and other company insiders, like early investors and board members.

It started opening the online configurator to regular Model 3 reservation holders in California in November and started deliveries in December.

During the first week of 2018, Tesla expanded invites to several more states like New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

Electrek’s Seth Weintraub got an invite recently and was given a timeframe of four weeks for deliveries, but it looks like some are getting their Model 3 vehicles on a quicker timeframe.

We are getting reports this week of several deliveries on the East Coast and especially in the North East. Several Model 3 vehicles being prepped for delivery were also spotted at Tesla stores following the first Model 3 display cars hitting showrooms last weekend.

Outside of employee priority, it appears that Model 3 deliveries are still limited to first-day reservation holders who are also current Tesla owners.

Electrek’s Take

The Model 3 ramp appears to be progressing a lot more smoothly over the last month. Both invitations to configure and deliveries seem to be ramping up now that Tesla is reportedly producing around 1,000 cars per week. It plans to ramp up to 2,500 cars by the end of the quarter.

In my opinion, the next big milestone will be opening Model 3 configurations and orders to reservation holders who are currently not Tesla owners.

We expect that it will coincide with the start of standard battery packs and interior production. It’s unclear when that will actually happen, but it will have to be relatively soon in order for demand to match Tesla’s production rate.

Demand for Model 3 is quite strong, but it is especially strong closer to its base price. I think that if Tesla is producing several thousand cars per week, it will have to offer less expensive options to sell those cars to its current backlog of reservation holders.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.