Tesla Delivers 95,200 Cars In Q2, Crushes Wall Street Estimates

Official 2nd quarter production and delivery numbers for Tesla are out. According to a news release from the company, it produced 14,417 Model X and Model S vehicles and delivered 17,650 of them. For Model 3s, the numbers are 72,531 produced and 77,500 delivered. Totals, in case you don’t have your Radio Shack calculator handy, are 87,048 cars produced and 95,200 delivered.

You may recall that Tesla had an enormous number of cars in transit at the end of the first quarter. Professional stock analysts looked at the Q1 figures, saw only the number of cars delivered, and went into a tizzy. One predicted the stock could soon close below $32 per share! Many others said the company was on the knife edge of financial disaster. Why they failed to pick up on the number of cars in transit is a great mystery, but when you hate something with every fiber of your being, sometimes your judgment gets clouded.

As Zachary wrote recently, “There’s an interesting thing that happens every quarter. Once solid estimates for Tesla’s quarterly production and delivery numbers are in, short sellers and critics jump to the next quarter and typically claim that delivery will fall off tremendously because pent-up consumer demand has been exhausted and sustainable new demand is going to be much more limited.” A commenter shared Wall Street estimates for Tesla deliveries at the end of the quarter, after expert analysts and crystal ball owners gradually increased their numbers over the quarter. Of those estimates, 8 had delivery estimates between 84,000 and 88,000, 3 had delivery estimates between 88,900 and 91,124, and only one overestimated Tesla’s Q2 deliveries (at 97,000).

I'm confused. We were told for months that Tesla demand had dropped off a cliff.

Were we misled?

— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) July 2, 2019

In its announcement, Tesla addressed the demand issue. “We made significant progress streamlining our global logistics and delivery operations at higher volumes, enabling cost efficiencies and improvements to our working capital position. Orders generated during the quarter exceeded our deliveries, thus we are entering Q3 with an increase in our order backlog. We believe we are well positioned to continue growing total production and deliveries in Q3.”

Of course the Tesla short sellers won’t believe a word of it and will continue their gloom and doom scenario while Tesla continues to mop the floor with the competition. Did horse traders and buggy manufacturers fight this hard to deny the automobile would ever be successful? Probably.

The company also announced it is changing the way it handles vehicles in transit going forward. “Customer vehicles in transit at the end of the quarter were over 7,400. Due to the order-to-VIN matching process we described in our Q1 2019 Shareholder Letter, which we extended to Model S and Model X in Q2 to improve process efficiency, this metric has become less relevant. As a result, we do not plan to disclose the customer vehicles in transit metric going forward.”

If that seems confusing to you (it does to me, for sure), CleanTechnica contributor Paul Fosse explains it in terms even I can understand: “They are moving from build-to-order to build-to-plan and using that to say vehicles in transit is less relevant since they aren’t transiting someone’s car to them but just shipping inventory closer to where cars will be matched to customers.”

Elon Musk got in hot water with the SEC recently for saying Tesla would produce more than 400,000 cars this year. What he meant to say was that the company would be able to hit that production rate by the end of the year. With 87,048 cars produced in the 2nd quarter and demand remaining strong, there is every reason to believe that prediction will turn out to be conservative. Go Tesla!