“Coming soon” cars in new inventory?

[EVRider-FL]

I recently placed an order for a new Model Y to take advantage of the FSD transfer promotion. I don’t have a VIN yet, but I’ve been checking new inventory on New & Used Electric Cars | Tesla daily to see if there are any matches there.

Today I noticed a couple of close matches in inventory, one of which was allocated to my local service center. When I asked them about it, they told me that car hasn’t been built yet, and is listed as “coming soon.” Why is Tesla listing pre-production cars as new inventory?

Note that the new inventory on the website gives me different results from the new inventory shown in the mobile app (on the order page).

 

[Unclepaul]

Tesla knows what they have coming down the line, and which delivery center they have allocated it to.

They will be deciding how to ship all the current 3/y configurations till they close down to begin refreshed design (Highland)

 

[E90alex]

They are building more cars now than they have orders for. So some of them are built with common/popular configurations and destined for inventory.

Tesla doesn’t really do “custom orders” either as some other automakers do where the car is built specifically for you. With such limited options/configurations they just make batches of the same car and match them up to orders. When an order comes in they will try to match one in inventory local to you or you’ll get put in line to get one from a future production batch.

 

[MYexperience]

I think the "coming soon" helps them to have more available cars in inventory you can choose from and they able to sell the car before it is being built (best case scenario for Tesla, and more choice for the customer). I had the same experience with website inventory vs app inventory. In my case (I live in SF Bay Area) the website shows me all cars within 200 miles (of about 6 delivery centers), while the app showed only the inventory of the delivery location that was allocated to the order I had already placed. Also, see my post about my experience buying from inventory (sorry, don't know how to link to the post, new to the forum)

 

[EVRider-FL]

I learned that some of the "coming soon" inventory cars can be assigned, but only if they have a VIN and ETA at the service center/gallery, otherwise they can't be assigned. I actually got one of these (MYP) at a huge discount (not a demo car), taking delivery this week.