Tesla has sold ‘thousands’ of Model 3s in Australia, making it the best selling EV in the country

If you were in any doubt about the success of the Model 3 in Australia, fear not, we have confirmation that the car is selling incredibly well.

Thanks to an email reply I received today, I can confirm that Tesla has received “thousands of orders” and the delivery team are trying desperately to get those orders to customers. Some would say, they’re in delivery hell.

“..as one small team, are all working tirelessly to accommodate for the thousands of orders we have currently.”

While it’s hard to determine a specific number from the reference to ‘thousands’, it does show that Tesla has a smash hit with the Model 3. Despite its price tag, it is amazingly popular and will easily become the most successful EV in Australia’s history.

By way of comparison, Victoria has the highest electric car ownership count with 1324 vehicles bought between 2011-2017, closely followed by NSW with 1,238 vehicles in the same time period.

For Tesla to sell “thousands” of a single nameplate, the Model 3, that’s kind of incredible. At the 2nd generation Nissan Leaf launch, Nissan was excited by the prospect of dozens of pre-orders and that’s a car at almost half the price tag. The first generation was the previous best selling EV in Australia, with 635 total sales over its lifetime.

As someone who has a Model 3 on order, who hit buy when the delivery date said August, I was beginning to run out of patience with the lack of information about when I’d actually get my car.

Launching a new product in a new country is surely never easy and when that product is something as large and complicated as a car, I’m sure it’s incredibly hard. Tesla is not new at this process, they’ve sold the Model S and X in Australia for years, so should be familiar with the import process.

When it comes to customer communication, there’s a lot of excitement turning to frustration on the forums and that is largely born out of a lack of updates from Tesla.

It is kind of amazing that the Tesla mobile apps don’t send push notifications at each stage of the production and delivery process. Being such a technology-focused company, it’s pretty surprising this hasn’t made it up the priority list.

Instead, the relatively small team in charge of deliveries in Australia’s capital cities are clearly struggling to manage the time required to respond to an avalanche of emails and phone calls from customers seeking an update. All of this could be automated like it is for parcel tracking.