You're still looking at six to nine months before the standard battery models are available, although that isn't surprising. Tesla raced to make 5,000 Model 3s per week just to turn any kind of profit on its more accessible car, and it may be a while after that before the vaunted $35,000 trim is profitable enough to be worth manufacturing.

This doesn't necessarily mean that demand is slowing down for Tesla. It still has to address hundreds of thousands of reservations, so there's no shortage of existing customers. Rather, it appears that the automaker finally has enough manufacturing bandwidth to spare that it can increasingly focus on courting new Model 3 buyers -- the ones it'll need the most once the backlog is gone.