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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I will happily be wrong about this, but isn't a lead time of a year for a "mass market" vehicle a bit of an ask. Last time I bought a car the "lead time" was a week.

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Well, in this case its just the pre-orders being so insanely high that there is a huge backlog. And the pre-orders are so high, because there is basically no competition to the Model 3.

But if you order a car with a custom configuration 2-4 months are quite usual, and even the big car manufacturers sometimes cannot match demand. The Golf 5 Variant had 11 months of delivery times for a while (VW had not made a Golf Variant for some years at that point of time).

I bought a car 2 months ago, and if you wanted to change even the simpler thing the delivery time went to 1+ month. This was for the best selling brand of cars in Spain that delivers almost 500.000 cars a year.

Seat?

It really depends what you order, a colleague of mine had a build to order Mercedes as a company car and had to wait 6 months until he could pick it up in Sindelfingen.

It really does depend, yeah. I've been eyeing the Volvo S90 since they came out, so I went to their concept store in Stockholm around Christmas time last year and put together a configuration that seemed nice. Estimated delivery date of the 2017 model I built would have been sometime this fall, I think they said 9 months. I imagine the 2018 model is backed up even more.

Toyota does it in one week.

Even if you customize it?

Any time I've bought a new car I've had some optional extras and that has meant a delivery time of at least two months (VW or Skoda), through to three months for an Audi or four months for a BMW.

This is why I'm buying a Chevy Bolt this weekend. My current lease is up and the Bolt is here right now. No reservations and wait lists. The Model 3 looks great, but the process to get one seems geared only people that really like Tesla, not someone like me that doesn't really care about cars.

The charging network is the real selling point over the Bolt. Well, looks too but that's subjective.

The supercharger network is impressive, for sure. But here in the Northeast there are enough CCS DC Fast charging stations available for use and more on the way, making the couple of times I do 200+ mile road trips each year not a big deal. 99% of the time I will be using a Level 2 EVSE at home, just like the Tesla folks will. Appearance-wise, I just don't care much because I've never been into sports cars. I think the Bolt is cute and the hatchback style makes it a good family car which is exactly what I was looking for. For those that like sexy sports cars and wouldn't be caught dead in a car that might as well come with those stick family stickers on the rear windshield, Tesla is the clear winner.

Luckily that's a self-driving problem.

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