Is it a 2013 or 2014 Model S?

My understanding is that improvements are made pretty much continuously on the line. There have been scores of changes, large and small, throughout the past year.

I was asking this a little while ago...

I think if you take delivery in 2013 it's a 2013 car - even if it's on December 31st.

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/23283-What-defines-a-2012-2013-or-2014-car

I you can actually take delivery of the car in January and still have it be a 2013. What determines the year is when the factory finishes production. This came from both ownership and service center manager. There is a letter in the vin sort of like the P that shows you have a P85 well there's a letter in the vin that tells what year it was produced at the factory. You can call ownership and they'll tell you what that letter is.

jamieb said:

Does anyone see any hints as to an internal Tesla revision naming scheme? I am assuming that there are certain hardware configurations that affect what version of software is downloaded and what capabilities the car has (e.g., certain levels of supercharging).

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Yea a Tesla regional manager once told me that this is a huge headache for them when doing software rollouts. Specifically, when they make software releases, every time they release software they have several different versions they need to roll out because certain cars have different embedded computer chips requiring different programming. This is different then adding 'configuration flags' for 'tech package' vs 'non-tech-package' or '21in' vs '19in', but rather actual different embedded chips themselves. Aka sigs have a few embedded chips that were from prototype models. So when an engineer is writing code related to that module they need to write different code for the different embedded chips to make sure it works on all the different pieces of hardware to make sure "everyones car works". And this varies car by car (VIN by VIN) as the build continuously improves or different parts are used throughout the year, basically requiring many different builds for different VINs on every release. That's why when they roll something out it might break things for some cars but not others. I know this was a major problem early on last year for them, but I'm hoping that they streamlined the approach quickly and have that process nailed down a little better than it sounded like at the time.

With regards to 'is yours 2013 or 2014', since Tesla does not have "Model Years", AFAIK they process they use is simply the date that the car rolls through the production line. So when Jan 1st rolls around, cars entering the production line are now stamped with 2014 (even though the car is identical to the one that rolled off the line the previous day).

Alysashley79 said:

I you can actually take delivery of the car in January and still have it be a 2013. What determines the year is when the factory finishes production. This came from both ownership and service center manager. There is a letter in the vin sort of like the P that shows you have a P85 well there's a letter in the vin that tells what year it was produced at the factory. You can call ownership and they'll tell you what that letter is.

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the 10th digits is the year A=2010,B=2011,C=2012,D=2013,E=2014,ETC

I hope they make upgrade packages for cars that are 2 years old to get the newer features.

yobigd20 said:

Yea a Tesla regional manager once told me that this is a huge headache for them when doing software rollouts. Specifically, when they make software releases, every time they release software they have several different versions they need to roll out because certain cars have different embedded computer chips requiring different programming. This is different then adding 'configuration flags' for 'tech package' vs 'non-tech-package' or '21in' vs '19in', but rather actual different embedded chips themselves. Aka sigs have a few embedded chips that were from prototype models. So when an engineer is writing code related to that module they need to write different code for the different embedded chips to make sure it works on all the different pieces of hardware to make sure "everyones car works". And this varies car by car (VIN by VIN) as the build continuously improves or different parts are used throughout the year, basically requiring many different builds for different VINs on every release. That's why when they roll something out it might break things for some cars but not others. I know this was a major problem early on last year for them, but I'm hoping that they streamlined the approach quickly and have that process nailed down a little better than it sounded like at the time.

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Thanks for posting this; this really clarifies for me why their software rollouts tend to be buggy and the bugs frequently only touch some people, but not others.

Per Tesla, 2014 will start on vehicles completing production On or after January 1 2014.

I get my car in 2014 and that will be registered as a 2014 over here. Don't matter when its produced in the factory. But guess the regulations are different for different countries. Actually good that I get the car early 2014 rather than late 2013 as its registered as a 2014 model.