BUSINESS

Tesla Delivered 343,000 Cars in Q3

October 1, 2022

Despite lawsuits, fires, and an ongoing FSD fiasco, American EV brand Tesla delivered a record 343,000 cars in Q3. (!)

Following its usual end-of-quarter push, Tesla confirmed that it had beat both its delivery and its production records by significant margins, with more than 343,000 vehicles delivered out of 365,000 vehicles produced in Q3.

Those numbers sound great, but it’s worth noting that 343,000 is well below Wall Street analysts’ Tesla delivery estimates, which were just north of 360,000 units. “This wasn’t a case of limited supply,” writes Investors’ Ed Carson. “Tesla produced 365,923 vehicles in the latest quarter, more than 22,000 above deliveries.”

That missed target has only fueled speculation that demand for the company’s products in markets like China and Korea (where the company is quickly losing ground to competitors actually sold zero cars in July), has begun to wane. Meanwhile Chinese competitors like BYD sold more than 500,000 plug-in cars last quarter, with NIO and XPeng also meeting industry expectations.

BYD Seal Electric Sedan

“Historically, our delivery volumes have skewed towards the end of each quarter due to regional batch building of cars,” reads Tesla’s official Q3 statement. “As our production volumes continue to grow, it is becoming increasingly challenging to secure vehicle transportation capacity and at a reasonable cost during these peak logistics weeks. In Q3, we began transitioning to a more even regional mix of vehicle builds each week, which led to an increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter. These cars have been ordered and will be delivered to customers upon arrival at their destination.”

The good news, in addition to the records (they don’t ask how, they ask how many) is that Tesla currently has some 20,000 new vehicles in inventory ready to deliver to customers – though how long they’ll have a backlog of those remains to be seen.