In this blog: What was it like to wait for years to get the same old Russian car!
There were three cars on our street when I was a kid. They were Russian. Actually, it was still the Soviet Union back then. Why only three? Because it was damn hard to get a car back then. Real hard...
Being too small I obviously wasn't on the market for a car. That didn't change the fact that most of the people at the time had no choice but to way for years to get behind the wheel of Lada, Volga, Moskvitch or probably Skoda. It was the longest car queue ever. It was taking ages.
You put your reservation down not by giving your email and thousand bucks in a couple of minutes. You wait a lot to even get a chance to get into the queue. No camps or tents to get yourself ahead of "competition". It was different than that.
And sometimes it took 5 or 8 years to get a car. There was no design changes meanwhile so no gain no loss :). Just the same old vehicle you saw upfront.
This was also true in other Eastern European countries. Maybe not as hard as in Bulgaria, but still there was not like getting yourself Mercedes or Chevy on the fly.
And look what happened now. There's another car queue forming and it will stretch way farther than March 31, 2016. This time it's the other way around. No Tesla stores in Eastern Europe, no queues. They were where there was no car queues before. Sure, we're all in the online queue and will be waiting patiently to get our Model 3, but things have changed.
We could also get into the queues should we have Tesla stores in Eastern Europe. But we don't (save for some small exceptions). Not very likely the same people who had to wait for Lada 40-something years ago – it's 2016 now, not 1973.
Tesla Model 3 took the world by storm. No one has even slightest expectation it will hit more than 320k reservations in just one week. And they will probably get to half a million this or next month.
We may have had car queues before, but this one is going to really change it all. Just all!
