After a week-long hold, Tesla has restarted Model S deliveries, but the automaker never ended up explaining the reason behind the hold to customers buying the new electric vehicle.

As we reported last week, many Tesla Model S buyers reported that their vehicles arrived from Fremont factory to their local delivery center, but their local sales advisors were telling them that they couldn’t deliver the new electric cars.

Many of them said that there was a delivery hold on the new version of the Model S and many different reasons were given to buyers about why they couldn’t take delivery.

Now a week later, several of the same buyers who reported deliveries on hold are now able to pick up their cars.

However, Tesla has not explained the reason behind the hold.

A source familiar with the matter confirmed to Electrek that there was no official “containment hold” on the Model S, which means that it wasn’t actually waiting for a missing part or a software update.

Electrek’s Take

This was strange.

If there was no containment hold on the car, it means that Tesla was most likely making sure that something was OK. Maybe there was a defect scare.

The fact that buyers were being told a bunch of different things by the sales advisor makes me think that Tesla simply wasn’t communicating anything about the hold even to its own sales staff.

Some of them were giving different generic reasons for the hold, like further “inspection” or “waiting for a software update”, as they didn’t have a good reason for the customers not the pick up their cars.

Obviously, that’s not good. but it’s not entirely new from Tesla. The automaker has been known to leave its sales staff in the dark when it doesn’t want any information to leak.

Now buyers are happy enough to get their deliveries that they are not asking too many questions about the reasons behind this week-long hold for some.

We will probably never know.


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