- A disused shopping center parking lot has become a storage facility for unsold Tesla EVs.
- “Dozens upon dozens” of Teslas, mostly Cybetrucks, are sitting in front of a shuttered Bed Bath & Beyond in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
- The city’s planning head wants them out.
The parking lot of a shuttered Bed Bath & Beyond store in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills has become the resting place for “dozens upon dozens” of unsold Tesla EVs, a new report says. The growing number of electric vehicles sitting in the parking lot has attracted the attention of the local planning commission, which wants the electric cars out of there, according to Crain’s Detroit Business.
Most of the inventory EVs are Cybertrucks, for which demand has cooled dramatically in recent months, despite it being crowned America’s best-selling electric pickup last year. A few Model 3s and Model Ys can also be spotted among the unsold cars sitting in the former shopping center’s parking lot.
Tesla Cybertruck Long Range
Photo by: Tesla
The city’s director of planning and community development said in a statement that the landlord of the property has “been notified that storage of vehicles is not a permitted use” of the land, and that “the enforcement process is being followed and takes time.”
The issue first came into view in an Instagram post from two weeks ago, where several unregistered Cybertrucks were filmed sitting in the parking lot.
Tesla Cybertruck sales have fallen off a cliff in the first quarter of this year, with the American EV maker delivering between roughly 6,400 and 7,100 units in the first three months. That’s a huge drop compared to the previous quarter, when Tesla sold approximately 13,000 units. (Though automakers tend to sell more in the last quarter of the year than the first quarter of a new year, the fall-off is still dramatic). This predicament cleared the way for the Ford F-150 Lightning to retake the crown as the country’s best-selling battery-powered pickup.
The situation in Detroit’s suburb isn’t new to Tesla. America’s best-selling electric car maker has been known to use private parking lots and even unused land to store excess inventory for nearby stores. Car dealerships often do this, too. In the Farmington Hills case, Tesla has a store just one mile away from the disused Bed Bath & Beyond parking lot, in the neighboring West Bloomfield Township.
The new store opened late last year in a former Barnes & Noble space, according to Crain’s Detroit Business, and is one of just a handful of Tesla stores in the state of Michigan. That’s because the automaker was not allowed to run its own stores in Michigan, as the state barred direct-to-consumer sales to protect its dealers. That changed after Tesla won a lawsuit it brought in 2016 to overturn the ban.
Now, Tesla stores can operate in the state. They just can’t fill random parking lots with unsold Cybertrucks, apparently.
38
