Tesla Factory Store Uses Diesel Generators to Recharge Slow-moving Model 3 Inventory

Let’s say you manage one of the soon-to-be-closed Tesla factory-owned stores and, for whatever reason, you have dozens of brand new Model 3 EVs sitting unsold on your lot. What are you going to do if one of them has a discharged battery? As car dealers learned a long time ago in the gasoline era, batteries won’t keep a charge forever and cars sitting for a long time sometimes need a boost to their batteries.

That’s true whether it’s a conventional 12 volt lead-acid battery for an ICE-powered vehicle’s electrical system or it’s the lithium-ion battery pack that powers a EV. That’s why car dealerships for conventional vehicles have battery tenders, heavy duty chargers that can be wheeled around the lot to whichever car might have a dead starter battery.

Of course, to recharge an EV’s battery, you’re gonna need a bigger charger.

After Tesla recently announced that it’ll will be moving all sales online and stop selling cars at their factory owned showrooms, PlainSite.org, a website that bills itself as “the law in plain sight, and news too,” checked out a couple of factory stores in the San Francisco area. Both the San Francisco and Burlingame locations were open, for both sales and service, and PlainSite tweeted out photos of both stores.

At the Burlingame, CA Tesla showroom and service center, though, PlainSite noticed dozens of unsold Model 3s filling their lot. Considering hundreds of thousands of customers gave Tesla deposits on Model 3s and considering those people waited years for mass production of the Model 3 to begin, it’s surprising a factory store has that much inventory. Sure, traditional car dealers often have hundreds of unsold vehicles in stock, but those dealers aren’t selling what is probably the most anticipated new sedan in decades.

Even more embarrassing to Tesla would be it’s oh-so-green public image getting besmirched by the use of fossil fuels, and that’s exactly what happened. PlainSite’s reporter also noticed a Tesla store employee trying to charge some unsold Model 3s whose batteries apparently discharged while waiting for their forever home, only he wasn’t wheeling around a commercial 12V battery charger. He was jockeying cars to a couple of Tesla charging stations, still mounted on wooden pallets, each of them hooked up to its own dedicated 300 kVA diesel-powered generator sitting on its own flatbed trailer.

It’s not easy being green.

[Images: Aaron Greenspan/PlainSite, via Twitter]