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Guestimating Tesla "invitation to configure" heuristic

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  • Tesla Employees / family - Living in California
  • Current Tesla owners - Living in California, Line waiters
  • First time buyers - Living in California, Line waiters (probably same priority as [5] )
  • Tesla Employees / family - outside California
  • Current Tesla owners - outside California, Line waiters
  • First time buyers - outside California, Line waiters
  • First time buyers, Reveal day online reservation (but non-line waiter)
  • First time buyers, post reveal online reservation

Looks like my initial heurestic was off the mark! bump all owners to the top

  1. Tesla Employees / family - Living in California
  2. Tesla Employees / family - outside California
  3. Current Tesla owners - Living in California, Line waiters
  4. Current Tesla owners - outside California, Line waiters
  5. Current Tesla owners - anywhere, reserved anytime!!
  6. First time buyers - Living in California, Line waiters (probably same priority as [5] )
  7. First time buyers - outside California, Line waiters
  8. First time buyers, Reveal day online reservation (but non-line waiter)
  9. First time buyers, post reveal online reservation
Wonder if this is correct now?
 
Your forgot: 10. Right hand drive markets.

Some or all people from all categories 1-9 will get cars before those in category 10. Even line-waiting Tesla owners in Australia will wait about 3 years before they take delivery of their Model 3. Kinda puts the whinging from others about "the wait" into perspective, doesn't it?
 
Looks like my initial heurestic was off the mark! bump all owners to the top

  1. Tesla Employees / family - Living in California
  2. Tesla Employees / family - outside California
  3. Current Tesla owners - Living in California, Line waiters
  4. Current Tesla owners - outside California, Line waiters
  5. Current Tesla owners - anywhere, reserved anytime!!
  6. First time buyers - Living in California, Line waiters (probably same priority as [5] )
  7. First time buyers - outside California, Line waiters
  8. First time buyers, Reveal day online reservation (but non-line waiter)
  9. First time buyers, post reveal online reservation
Wonder if this is correct now?

My only suggestion would be to change "line waiters" to "first day reservations in-store" or even just "first day reservations" or just "based on time of reservation".

Tesla has no idea who was actually waiting on line that day. They weren't prepared for it (for the most part), and to tag people who were actually waiting on line, or 'when the line ended' is a terribly murkey task to do for every store across the country or globe that was taking M3 reservations that day. Of course I don't know this for sure, but I would bet dollars to donuts there wasn't any corporate directive to the stores to keep track of "when the line ends" and report that back to HQ.

What if there was an early line, then a lull, then another line formed later in the day? Are those people still "line waiters"? What if someone just wandered up as the line was ending, or shortly thereafter? Are they a "line waiter"? Nobody had a sign on their back "LAST LINE WAITER".

Sure, Tesla could sit down and analyze the rate of reservations for each store and take a wild ass guess at when the "line ended", but that's super subjective, and bound to have false positives and false negatives. Also, a colossal waste of time just to figure out the invite order and exclude people who didn't happen to wait in line, even if it was only for a one minute gap at end of the "line".

And on top of that, all the stores, and at the M3 Reveal event, all reservations were taken using the same Tesla.com website. So even people who reserved online that first day used the exact same interface as everyone else. Of course, Tesla can track those reservations by IP address (since they use a corporate VPN across all their locations), so it's in theory possible to separate out the people who reserved in-store versus at home. But did they? Would they? Possibly, but this still doesn't separate out actual "line waiters" from everyone else that reserved that day who didn't wait in line.

This is all the same reason why there's not going to be a "special gift" for the "line waiters" besides the lithograph they sent to all first day (or two) reservations.
 
My only suggestion would be to change "line waiters" to "first day reservations in-store" or even just "first day reservations" or just "based on time of reservation".

Tesla has no idea who was actually waiting on line that day. They weren't prepared for it (for the most part), and to tag people who were actually waiting on line, or 'when the line ended' is a terribly murkey task to do for every store across the country or globe that was taking M3 reservations that day. Of course I don't know this for sure, but I would bet dollars to donuts there wasn't any corporate directive to the stores to keep track of "when the line ends" and report that back to HQ.

What if there was an early line, then a lull, then another line formed later in the day? Are those people still "line waiters"? What if someone just wandered up as the line was ending, or shortly thereafter? Are they a "line waiter"? Nobody had a sign on their back "LAST LINE WAITER".

Sure, Tesla could sit down and analyze the rate of reservations for each store and take a wild ass guess at when the "line ended", but that's super subjective, and bound to have false positives and false negatives. Also, a colossal waste of time just to figure out the invite order and exclude people who didn't happen to wait in line, even if it was only for a one minute gap at end of the "line".

And on top of that, all the stores, and at the M3 Reveal event, all reservations were taken using the same Tesla.com website. So even people who reserved online that first day used the exact same interface as everyone else. Of course, Tesla can track those reservations by IP address (since they use a corporate VPN across all their locations), so it's in theory possible to separate out the people who reserved in-store versus at home. But did they? Would they? Possibly, but this still doesn't separate out actual "line waiters" from everyone else that reserved that day who didn't wait in line.

This is all the same reason why there's not going to be a "special gift" for the "line waiters" besides the lithograph they sent to all first day (or two) reservations.

Tesla definitely knows who waited in line and who didn't. Its not even a question.
 
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I agree! But they don't know people who waited in line versus people who slept-in that morning and reserved later in the day.
Sure they do. Absolutely they do.

Store orders have to look differently than online orders. I have a physical receipt from the store. All they have to do is look at the receipts they gave out that day in the amount of $1k.

Would you suggest that Tesla lost all of their receipts?
 
I agree! But they don't know people who waited in line versus people who slept-in that morning and reserved later in the day.

Sure they do. Absolutely they do.

Store orders have to look differently than online orders. I have a physical receipt from the store. All they have to do is look at the receipts they gave out that day in the amount of $1k.

Would you suggest that Tesla lost all of their receipts?

He didn't say online...he specified 'later in the day'. No way to know who waited for 6 hours and was the back of the line, vs who walked in and waited 15 minutes.

People have theorized about all kinds of crazy algorithms for the time between reservations and what not - I would bet my model 3 that Tesla hasn't and isn't going to go through those lengths to differentiate reservations
 
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Tesla definitely knows who waited in line and who didn't. Its not even a question.
Sure they do. Absolutely they do.

If they absolutely do know and "it's not even a question", please tell me how they would differentical an actual "line waiter" from someone who just walked into a store after the last "line waiter" had reserving their car? Or the next person one minute later? Or the person after that two minutes later? As far as the data is concerned, those last three people are indistinguishable from the last actual line waiter would could have been waiting in line for hours.
 
I think in Tesla's mind anyone who came into the store BEFORE the reveal and put down $1k on a car that they haven't seen might get 'something special'. The print that was sent out was sent to people who reserved a few days after the reveal so it isn't the same thing. I don't think we'll get something special after all BUT if they did do it I think anyone who put down the 1k in store before the reveal would get the gift just for the reason they put down hard cash on something that hadn't even been seen yet.
 
Everyone has a Reservation ID where Tesla can easily track when you ordered. When the original plan was announced everyone including Elon only expected 100,000 or so reservations. At that quantity it made sense to keep the first deliveries close to Fremont.

With 5x that quantity it would be smarter to spread those deliveries out based on time zone and Reservation ID. For example 5,000 people from each time zone with the lowest ID get to configure. This would evenly spread out deliveries to each store and reward the people that were 1st.
 
If they absolutely do know and "it's not even a question", please tell me how they would differentical an actual "line waiter" from someone who just walked into a store after the last "line waiter" had reserving their car? Or the next person one minute later? Or the person after that two minutes later? As far as the data is concerned, those last three people are indistinguishable from the last actual line waiter would could have been waiting in line for hours.
Who cares?

If the line is short at a store....then its just short and anyone can walk in after the line goes down.

Look....if you get up and leave your house you are separate from those who didn't.


It obviously doesn't matter. Soo....... whats next?