Unpaid Parking
Tesla’s massive pileup
Tesla's extra, unsold inventory is just sitting in parking lots
Rani Molla

Tesla's unsold inventory is creating stockpiles you can see from space Where have all the Teslas gone? Stored in parking lots, every one.
Last quarter Tesla produced 433,371 Teslas. It delivered just 386,810, meaning there were about 47,000 extra Teslas around, more than double what it was a year ago and its biggest imbalance to date.
This surplus is happening as the electric car company deals with a number of headwinds, including slowing electric vehicle sales growth, growing competition, and chaotic leadership.
“The primary driver of this was an increase in inventory from a mismatch between builds,” Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said of the company’s -$2.5 billion in free cash flow (spending on AI compute was also to blame). “We expect the inventory built to reverse in the second quarter and free cash flow to return to positive again.”
Until then, we wondered: Where have all the unsold Teslas gone?
I used satellite imagery and object detection analytics from the earth observation marketplace SkyFi, to take a look at some images of Tesla’s Gigafactory outside Austin, Texas. Comparing a Thursday from last October to a Thursday in March, you can see that the parking lots outlined in green in the images below became much more full.

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Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. Top: October 2023. Bottom: March 2024.
A production lead at the gigafactory who was recently laid off along with more than 10% of Tesla’s workforce told Sherwood those parking lots hold finished Teslas before they’re shipped off.
Tesla does store inventory in the other parking lots but those are primarily for employees and contractors. We were unable to discern if extra Teslas are being parked in those, too. Tesla did not respond to questions about the images or requests for comment on this story.
SkyFi also shared satellite imagery of Chesterfield Mall, a soon-to-be-demolished mall west of St. Louis, where Jalopnik previously reported Tesla has been storing excess inventory.