About 400 Tesla electric cars were found parked in a closed mall lot near Saint Louis, Missouri. But this might be just a small part of a bigger issue with thousands more Teslas waiting to be delivered, as internet detectives have discovered.
In addition to the initial batch at the former Chesterfield Mall, several hundred Tesla EVs, including some Cybertrucks, are parked at the Quaker Bridge Mall in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Similarly, an abandoned apartment complex parking lot in Richmond, Virginia, is being used to store several hundred more Teslas, as reported on Reddit.
In Germany, the scale of this inventory situation is even more pronounced. Hundreds of car transporters travel daily from Tesla’s Gigafactory Berlin to a former East German military airfield in Neuhardenberg, about 37 miles away, to drop off newly built cars.
This site can accommodate up to 5,000 vehicles, and satellite images on Google Maps show the extent of the inventory buildup. A local resident observed up to “40 car transporters per hour” passing through, amounting to “300 to 400 trips a day,” according to the Berliner Zeitung.
These parking lots are often used by nearby Tesla service centers to store vehicles that can’t fit on their own lots. For example, a local news report from FOX 2 St. Louis revealed that a Tesla service center near the Chesterfield Mall could only hold about 135 cars, including customer vehicles, necessitating the use of the mall’s lot for overflow storage.
In the last quarter, Tesla had 46,561 unsold vehicles in inventory, representing about 10.7% of its total production. This is a significant increase from the 2% excess inventory Tesla had for the entirety of 2023, highlighting the need for additional storage spaces.
This inventory issue isn’t exclusive to Tesla. In February, the available inventory of EVs in the U.S., excluding Tesla and Rivian, was measured at 136 days’ supply, according to Cox Automotive. This is significantly higher than the industry average of 78 days’ supply, indicating broader challenges in the EV market.
