[rconti]

It seems fair to compare an automaker to another automaker. Declining sales among your competitors is a strong indicator of a difficult environment to sell into.

Unless you're saying the cited sales are sedans only, in which case I get your point.

[bischofs]

Not really fair, I can walk into a dealer and buy any car from one of those other brands. The Tesla numbers are 1-2 years of built up demand being built/delivered in one quarter. These numbers will definitely not continue.

[rconti]

You're not replying to the substance of my reply. I was saying that analyzing Tesla's sales in comparison to other automakers' declining sales is perfectly fair.

You're right to point out that Tesla has years of pent up sales, but it is still true that, whatever their sales are, they are more impressive in a market where other automakers are declining than they would be in a market of overall double-digit auto sales growth.

[codeulike]

Reservations stand at about 400,000 I believe.

[ummonk]

At 83,500 vehicles in a quarter, that does come out to 1-2 years.

[hwillis]

That's a totally different statement though. Model 3s are also only 53,000 of that, although that's still just under 2 years. But really, the number of deposits doesn't have much of anything to do with the actual demand. The number of cancellations and new deposits also makes it really hard to estimate what it actually is.

The bottom line though is that any reasonable observer will expect the Model 3 to keep a sustained demand at its price point. People really do like them despite what critics say.

[compcoffee]

>Reservations stand at about 400,000 I believe.

Based on? There's been no official release. If they stood at 400k, Musk would be shouting it from the rooftops.

Many reservations were expecting a $35k car (with a substantial rebate). Even Musk himself said the demand for $50k+ sedans is ~100k annually.

[hwillis]

They report the amount of deposits quarterly, ya goober:

> Customer deposits decreased slightly compared to Q1 to $942 million. This does not reflect the incremental deposits we received once we opened the Model 3 configurator for orders in early Q3 2018. Deposits impact the P&L only once the vehicle gets delivered to a customer.[1]

$.94 billion in deposits, where deposits are $1000 for a model 3, $20,000 for a Semi, and $250,000 for a roadster. It's also up by $90 million from two quarters before. No matter how you slice it they have a crazy number of deposits. Musk also does bring it up fairly often, certainly every earnings call that I remember.

[1]: http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/7235e525-db16-470c-8dce-9ec...

[T-A]

https://electrek.co/2018/06/04/tesla-model-3-reservations-re...

[devwastaken]

>Not really fair, I can walk into a dealer and buy any car from one of those other brands.

That's like saying Amazon won't continue because I can walk to Walmart. If the numbers won't continue give specific facts relating to the market of teslas vehicles. Unless the vehicles become failures themselves, a better alternative is made, or tesla suddenly bottoms up, 400,000 new vehicles isn't too bad.