What happens if you die waiting for Tesla Model 3?

NEW YORK: There are more than 300,000 people in line for a Tesla Model 3, and at least one of them is going to die before getting the car. This isn’t an electric-vehicle prophecy, just a sober reading of statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 821.5 deaths in the US per 100,000 people as of 2013, the most recent data available, and the newest car from Tesla Motors isn’t scheduled to begin shipping until late 2017.

That leaves at least 18 months during which one among the hundreds of thousands of Model 3 hopefuls could be found at the supercharger station in the sky. What’s more, owners of Tesla’s pricer Model S sedans have tended to be overwhelmingly male and over the age of 45, according to data from Edmunds.com, so we aren’t exactly speculating about an actuarially invincible cohort here.

A deceased Model 3 buyer will have plopped down a refundable $1,000 deposit to hold a place on Tesla’s waitlist, agreeing to a onepage contract that explicitly blocks transfers to another buyer. A particularly forward-looking person on the Model 3 waitlist might list the reservation in his or her will, but death doesn’t invalidate the terms.

“Anyone could bequeath property or rights to something to another individual,” said Stuart Slotnick, apartnerat Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney with experience in contractual law. “But if you do not have a right to something, because of the contract with Tesla, then you have nothing to bequeath.”