Tesla (TSLA) has released its third-quarter delivery and production results, confirming that it delivered a record number of electric cars.
Expectations were kind of all over the place this quarter.
Just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street consensus from Tesla analysts was just over 120,000 deliveries, but the expectations rose to roughly 140,000 deliveries over the last week of the quarter.
Today, Tesla released its delivery and production results, confirming the production of more than 145,000 vehicles and the delivery of almost 140,000 vehicles.
Tesla is still only breaking down deliveries and production between Model S/X and Model 3/Y instead of by every vehicle program like most other automakers:
| Production | Deliveries | Subject to lease accounting | |
| Model S/X | 16,992 | 15,200 | 13% |
| Model 3/Y | 128,044 | 124,100 | 7% |
| Total | 145,036 | 139,300 | 7% |
The total number of deliveries is a massive quarter-to-quarter jump compared to the 90,000 vehicles Tesla delivered last quarter.
It’s also a new all-time delivery record for Tesla — beating its Q4 2019 deliveries of 112,000 electric vehicles.
Production is also up from 82,000 vehicles last quarter as the shutdown of Fremont factory was still affecting production capacity.
Tesla now seems to have fully recovered its production capacity from pre-pandemic and is adding some more.
In its quarterly delivery and production number release, Tesla doesn’t break down production by factory, but the information should be released during its Q3 earnings later this month.
Tesla has also confirmed that new vehicle inventory has declined in terms of days of sales last quarter:
In terms of days of sales, new vehicle inventory declined further in Q3 as we continue to improve our delivery efficiency.
Tesla’s stock (TSLA) is down 4% in pre-market trading, but it can’t really be attributed to the delivery results since it was down by more than 5% earlier as the broader market fell on the news that President Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID-19.
Electrek’s Take
This is a truly impressive result especially when compared to the performance of other automakers.
While the auto industry is recovering remarkably fast from the pandemic, there’s no other automaker like Tesla who is not only recovering but also increasing sales significantly.
Tesla delivered 97,000 vehicles in Q3 2019. That’s a 43 year-over-year increase. Incredible..
It now seems like the right way to interpret Elon’s email that record deliveries for the quarter were achievable 10 days before the end of the quarter and the subsequent congratulation to Tesla employees meant that the goal was achieved last weekend.
As we reported earlier this week, Tesla achieved a record delivery volume during its end-of-quarter push.
It looks like Tesla achieved the goal with four or five more days of deliveries and with the new record pace of daily deliveries, they were able to add ~27,000 cars.
It’s actually not the first time that Tesla had to deliver ~30,000 cars during its end-of-the-quarter, but in this case, it looks like Tesla might have delivered 60,000 cars during the last two weeks of the quarter.
I can’t wait to get more data from Europe and China for September to get a better idea of how it played out.
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