Parking lots full of Tesla Model 3 vehicles have been spotted around California in the past few days and Tesla naysayers and shorts are framing the discoveries as the automaker stockpiling vehicles due to a lack of demand.

Tesla owns or leases several facilities near its Fremont factory in the Bay Area as part of its expansion plans to eventually support the production of 500,000 vehicles per year at the factory.

One of those facilities is in Lathrop.

In the parking lot of the building, a large number of Model 3 vehicles (estimated at around 2,000) have been spotted this week.

After “rumors” of the lot full of Model 3’s came up, Tesla shorts had to check it out for themselves and even started doing livestreams about it:

Twitter user @Paul91701736, known to be a TSLA Short or hater based on his account, even took a plane and posted a series of aerial photographs of the facility:

Another lot was spotted in Burbank for an estimated 4,000 vehicles and the usual Tesla shorts and naysayers had a field day about the discovery yesterday:

Open to plausible alternative scenarios, but $tsla looks absolutely fucked. — Value Dissenter (@ValueDissenter) July 20, 2018

So I can't figure out a positive reason all those cars would sit in Lanthrop. Apparently when Tesla uses rail it ships from a giant yard in Roseville which is 123 miles from the factory, but Lanthrop is around 70 miles so there's no reason to unload cars there then reload them. — Mark B. Spiegel (@markbspiegel) July 20, 2018

$TSLA is hiding Model 3s in an industrial which is apparently somewhere in CA. Why not deliver them? Demand issues? https://t.co/H9lCePgOSG — Salt_Nole (@Salt_Nole) July 19, 2018

The tweets were followed by an article from Zero Hedge, an online financial publication known for its series of hit pieces on Tesla.

The article alleged that Tesla is storing the vehicles at those locations because it cannot deliver them even though cars have been spotted going in and out of the lots.

Some shorts even alleged that Tesla is attempting to defraud investors by making cars that customers haven’t ordered in an attempt to achieve its promised production rate.

Electrek’s Take

We have often posted articles about Tesla shorts grasping at straws, but I think this one may top it off. They have outdone themselves.

Why on earth would Tesla produce cars that customers haven’t ordered when thousands of people who have ordered are waiting for their cars, including myself?

There’s literally zero news here. We already knew that the number of Tesla vehicles in transit would increase significantly with the production rate. That will be reflected by much higher inventory at the end of the quarter.

It’s no surprise considering Tesla roughly doubled its overall production rate over a quarter.

When it was making 2,000 cars per week, Tesla was able to use parking lots around the factory as loading areas to ship out the cars.

It had to expand to other lots as the production rate increased and it recently spiked to 7,000 vehicles per week with the recent 5,000 Model 3’s in a week milestone.

Therefore, it’s normal that Tesla has new parking lots for vehicles in transit.

Tesla had already warned that with the production ramp doing better, the delivery process would become the bottleneck and that has an impact on cars in transit since only so many cars can sit in the parking lots at Tesla’s stores awaiting delivery.

The automaker has started to put in place some initiatives to make the delivery process more efficient.

In conclusion, as we discussed yesterday, it’s not a demand issue as the shorts are framing it. If anything, it’s a logistics issue, which was to be expected with the production ramp.

Now could the logistics of the vehicles in transit be better handled? Yes, probably, but it certainly doesn’t mean Tesla is doomed like they are framing it.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Subscribe to Electrek on YouTube for exclusive videos and subscribe to the podcast.