Hundreds of Teslas Pile Up in the Parking Lot of a Shopping Mall Soon To Be Demolished

The parking lot of the shopping mall, located right outside St. Louis, Missouri, got the attention of the residents who have been seeing the high number of Teslas that seem to have been abandoned there. And cars keep arriving there.

The place is starting to look like a Tesla farm. The amazing sight prompted people to ask themselves if Tesla is actually going through a demand problem and those are vehicles still waiting to be purchased.

A Tesla service center, located in the vicinity of the mall, claims that its lot is unable to handle the growing inventory. Cybertrucks, Model S and Model X examples are the most common on the lot. The aerial footage shows 58 Cybertrucks. For many of the locals, this was where they saw the electric pickup truck for the very first time.

Local news station, Fox 2, investigated the issue. According to the report, there are more than 400 Teslas parked in the parking lot of the mall that is on the verge of being closed down, with all shops already out of operation.

The service shop that parked the vehicles there is three miles from the mall and has chosen this location because there is no spare room to park them in their own yard.

Tim Lowe, senior Vice President of the Staenberg Group, the parent company of the shopping mall, confirmed that Tesla is renting the space. He explains that one of the users of the parking lot is Tesla, who has a dealership in the area but does not have the capacity to park all the vehicles that they are bringing in.

The service center can only host about 135 cars, including customer cars. Residents say that they have become used to seeing Tesla cars parked at the mall, but their number has grown over the past few weeks.

There are speculations, however, that Tesla uses the shopping mall parking lot to deposit the excess cars that have not been sold yet. Last year, a report regarding over 3,000 new Tesla-badged cars parked at a former airport near Berlin surfaced. It eventually turned out that the Teslas parked the Model Ys produced in Grunheide at that location, were not subject to a demand issue. They were all intended for export to Taiwan, a state that does not receive the EVs produced in the neighboring country, China.

However, the excess inventory might be an issue for Tesla, considering that the automaker has recently fired 10 percent of its workers at the Giga Texas in Austin, where the Cybertruck and the Model Y roll off the production line. Tesla also informed workers there that their shifts would be shorter.

Tesla is marching with the workforce cutting. The company also fired its entire Supercharger team earlier this week. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla manufactured an excess of 46,561 cars, which represents around 10.7 percent of its total production. The carmaker had an excess of around 2 percent for the entire 2023.

The local Tesla shop will have to find another place to store its inventory. The Chesterfield Mall is scheduled for demolition this upcoming fall.

Tesla's inventory hits all-time high 
Elon Musk has been rejecting the idea of a demand problem for Tesla for months. In fact, he describes the demand for the Tesla-branded models as "infinite." But we all know how much the Tesla CEO is to be trusted.

The price cuts that the automaker has been coming up with did not seem to have the effect it was hoping for and failed to unclog the inventory. This led to an all-time high inventory.

To counteract the production excess, Tesla is firing 10 percent of its global workforce, citing duplication of roles. This means that approximately 14,000 are bracing for sacking.