Dangerous Transport Forces Tesla to Slow Shipments to Norway
Tesla may have difficulty meeting its shipment target for Norway, the company's third-largest market, due to difficulties with transporting cars by truck from their receiving ports.
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A truck hauling new Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) cars to customers in Norway recently was involved in an accident that resulted in two of the company’s Model S sedans to be crushed. The incident has led CEO Elon Musk to call for a slowdown in deliveries to Norwegian customers.
On a per capita basis, Norway is Tesla’s largest market. It’s very success has presented a problem however. According to a report at Electrek, shipments of new cars to the Norwegian port of Drammen have led to capacity issues. To overcome those issues Tesla has been shipping vehicles to the Swedish port of Gothenburg and then moving the vehicles by truck to their destinations.
According to a report at NRK.no (courtesy of Google Translate), five trucks have been turned back at the border “with serious shortcomings,” including one that had bad brakes on both the tractor and the trailer.
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One truck that was stopped was an older model of the Euro 3 class, a European classification system for vehicle emissions. Euro 3 was the European standard between 1999 and 2005 and is 10-times more polluting than the current Euro 6 standard.
A Tesla spokesperson in Norway said:
We are working to clean up. The bad cargoes will be removed as soon as we find alternatives. We have asked the Norwegian Trucking Federation to help find other suppliers that have capacity for our volume.
An additional headache for Tesla is that it expected to deliver more than 1,000 cars in Norway this month, ahead of closing its first fiscal quarter of the year. Electrek cited registration data that showed Tesla delivered just over 300 vehicles during January and February.
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Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.
He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.
