I'm not sure from the article, but it sounds as though Tesla had 15,000 2013 orders by Q3 2012. Then, during Q4 2012, they added 6,000 orders for 2013, and had 1500 people unable to pay their 2013 down payment, which would leave their 2013 orders at 19,500. This is 500 cars short of Tesla's projected 20,000. If these 500 were all Roadsters, wouldn't the projected 2013 sales shortfall be around $5 million?

It's odd that they report so many people placing orders, then balking at the down payment. It's an odd item to be reporting, I don't know if other auto manufacturers report this. Maybe they should require the down payment at an earlier point in their checkout process, to remove these superfluous tire-kickers from the corporate statistics? It's got to be embarrassing to announce that ~8% of your customers decided to cancel at the last moment.

Isn't this normal in that business? People back out of car purchases all the time. Cold feet, financing falls through, better deal elsewhere, etc. I don't know what percentage is business as usual, but 8% doesn't seem high.

I do agree that it's an odd thing to report.

That's because it's the dealers who handle down payments for most auto manufacturers (in North America, at least). There's an arm's length relationship between the dealers and manufacturers. Tesla sells its own cars and would therefore have direct access to this data.

I could be wrong, but if those include people who just put down $5k to hold their spot in line years before the car was released, then 8% isn't surprising at all.

I know at least one person who decided not to go through with the purchase for reasons that have nothing to do with Tesla or the ability to pay the down payment.

But in that article, they mention 1500 cancellations, while Musk is only attributing "a few hundred" to the NYT article. That makes it sound like he's compensating for the baseline cancellations they were having at the time.