Slow production of Tesla's Model 3 sedan leaves customers at the bottom of the 455,000- person reservation list facing a three-year wait for their new cars.
That leaves an opening for other EV makers, such as Chevy, to woo away Tesla customers. But it's not an opening Chevy plans on openly exploiting, the company said.
"It's not in the cards," Steve Majoros, marketing director of Chevrolet cars and crossovers, told Automotive News last week.
On paper, the Bolt EV and Model 3 are similar in terms of performance and price. However, Tesla has created a cult following that had customers making down payments on the car even before its unveiling.
And it would be nearly impossible for a competitor to identify those wait-list customers without offering a broad incentive for those who prove they were on the list. Tesla, for privacy and competitive reasons, wouldn't share that list.
Like all first adopters, most Tesla reservation holders know what they're getting into when they drop a $1,000 deposit on a car sight unseen.
When Tesla unveiled the Model 3, 180,000 people paid a deposit to reserve their spot in line, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, though the car wouldn't be delivered for more than a year — and, in most cases, has yet to be delivered.
However, with the sleek exterior characteristic of the Model S and Model X and a spartan interior consisting of just a center console touch screen, the Model 3 is somewhat prevented from requiring any major redesigns in the near future, said Mike Ramsey, an analyst at consultancy Gartner Research.
"This model is very simple," Ramsey said. "It will stick around for quite a while with the way it looks. It has an exterior design that ages well."
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