Elon Musk tells Tesla staff to cut cost of deliveries to help ensure customers' cars arrive on time, amid shipping delays, report says

CNBC reported that Musk urged staff to focus on cutting the cost of delivering electric vehicles to customers.
In a company-wide email sent to all staff and transcribed by CNBC, Musk said that the company's focus this quarter should be on minimizing cost of deliveries rather than spending a lot on expedite fees.
It said that "historically, we sprint like crazy at the end of the quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop in the first few weeks of the next quarter."

The company did not respond to the request for comment.
It's common for the company to rush to deliver cars by the end of the quarter. The company asked employees to deliver 30,000 cars in the last 15 days of the quarter, according to Insider's Graham Rapier.
Musk has acknowledged that the delivery problem islogistics hell.

Delivery delays can be months-long. Customers of the Model S and Model Y complained that they were waiting up to four months to receive their cars.
The EV maker bought its own auto-hauling trucking capacity in an effort to deliver cars more quickly and improve its logistics systems, Insider's Rachel Premack reported.

There is a nationwide shipping crisis caused by COVID-19 disruptions and a severe labor shortage. Shipping costs have gone up.

In Friday's email, Musk lamented the fact that, over a six-month period, he wouldn't have delivered any extra cars but "would have spent a lot of money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter."

The email said that this is the right time to start reducing the size of the wave in favor of a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries.