Over 50,000 Unsold Teslas: Is Elon Musk’s Political Ambitions a Factor?

I think this is probably just a manufacturing issue. Maybe Tesla miscalculated demand and ended up producing more cars than they could immediately sell — which, let’s be honest, happens all the time. You’ve probably seen those huge lots full of brand-new cars just sitting there, waiting for someone to buy them. It’s not that weird.

I first saw this news on Jalopnik, where they reported that around 50,000 Teslas are sitting unsold. Using satellite images from SkyFi (a satellite imagery marketplace), they figured out where all these Teslas are being stored. Images of Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory from a random Thursday in October 2023 and another in March 2024 show the factory lots going from partially full to completely packed.

And it’s not just Texas — Tesla is apparently stashing cars all over the country. Satellite images of the Chesterfield Mall in St. Louis, for example, show a parking lot filled with nearly 500 Teslas. So, yeah, it looks like Tesla is stockpiling cars somewhere before eventually selling them.

In reality, people slowly don’t feel that EVs are interesting or the future and they go back to ICs or hybrids. I mean, sales in 2024 have proven that EVs are slowing down and people are no longer favoring them. It may not happen everywhere but in general, EV is slowing down for many reasons so Tesla, which (maybe) released a lot of cars to anticipate demand, finally had to move those cars and their prediction was wrong. It happens everywhere, even though in Tesla’s case it became big because of Musk.

Maybe most people are reluctant to buy Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Musk’s supporters, who are now, well, quite strange, and his political direction is questionable. Sometimes I wonder about him, where he (as a company owner and, indirectly, influencer) should be able to maintain his behavior, yet he didn’t do that; basically, he remains himself (in a bad sense), and people slowly don’t like him. It's a bad thing for business, actually.

And finally, it took its toll on Tesla; people don’t want to buy it and because Musk’s political moves are getting more and more antique, people don’t want to use Tesla. I’m not surprised if in the future Tesla users will be considered Musk supporters by most people; stereotyping is easy.

I don’t mean to bring politics into it, but unfortunately, that’s kind of where things have been going lately. Tesla actually makes solid cars—they’re not bad at all—but some people have really hurt the brand’s image. That kind of bad press has ended up affecting how well some of the models sell.

Maybe they’ll bounce back if things smooth out and the controversy fades, but it’s not exactly a simple fix. The stigma might still stick around for a while and keep spreading.

Even so, I think it happens because the paradigm of society has started to change; gone are the days when we thought EV was the future and slowly we know that EV is an imperfect car. All those “perfections” that are said to come from supporters and media that support it—basically, it’s the same as other technologies; at first they will give a big welcome but over time we know the shortcomings and will be eliminated if it doesn’t match our expectations—it’s not really surprising.

It’s just that the last few years seem to be bad for tech companies, from EV to AI; maybe we’re fed up with all the high-tech stuff that we don’t really need; now we’re slowly returning to the traditional path.