Let’s get the biggest matter out of the way right off the bat: no one outside of Tesla really has a clue as to how many Model 3s were delivered in the US in each month of Q2. Yes, we have a Model 3 delivery total from Tesla for the quarter as a whole, but the company doesn’t break that down by month or region. For a while, the slowly growing ramp allowed us to estimate without too much difficulty, but a few things changed in May and June.
It has been widely presumed that Tesla did what it could to postpone its 200,000th US delivery till the 3rd quarter of the year (July, to be specific), since that would mean that a lot more customers would be able to take advantage of the federal tax credit. But it seems no one outside of Tesla really knows how many historical sales the company has had in the US. And the number of Model 3s or other vehicles Tesla would need to hold or send abroad to not go beyond 199,999 in June is thus completely uncertain. Tesla delivered 456 Model 3s in Canada in May, and it’s expected that the company sent a lot more in June — but we don’t have a solid guess for what “a lot more” means.
So, what did I do? I took Tesla’s Q2 delivery numbers for the Model 3 and subtracted a rough estimate of Canadian deliveries. For the monthly split, I almost decided to keep my May estimate of 9,000 and assume that the remaining low figure I had for June was the result of 10,000+ cars being “in transit” and a large number of cars going to Canada. However, that seemed a bit extreme and I decided to adjust my May estimate to 7,600, which put the US total for June at 4,063.
The Tesla Model S and Model X feel easier to estimate. Thanks to Jose Pontes of EV Volumes (and CleanTechnica), I’m lucky to receive European Tesla delivery numbers and Chinese estimates in time to produce this report. So, I subtract those numbers plus estimates for remaining countries (like Canada, Australia, the UAE, Jordan, etc.) in order to come up with quarterly Model S and Model X estimates for the US. I normally don’t feel a need to adjust monthly numbers after receiving quarterly figures from Tesla and Jose, but I did this month. June showed as too strong of month for the Model S and Model X in the US, in my opinion, so I went back and increased my estimates for April and May Model S and Model X sales.
In the end, the Tesla Model 3, Tesla Model X, and Tesla Model S took the top three spots, respectively. The only other plug-in model to see over 2K sales in June was the Toyota Prius Prime, which landed 2,237 sales. The Nissan LEAF, Chevy Volt, and Chevy Bolt had not much more than 1,000 each. That puts Tesla’s target to stabilize Model 3 production at 5,000 per week and then grow to 6,000 per week into some interesting perspective, doesn’t it?
