Tesla Gigafactory in Texas Now Producing 3,000 Model Y Per Week

Tesla has just hit another production milestone. Tesla Gigafactory Texas has reached a production rate of 3,000 Model Y (Model Ys?) per week. That’s 156,000 Model Y SUVs/crossovers per year from this new factory, but expect the number to keep climbing quickly and end well above 156,000 a year in a year from now.

Giga Texas hits 3k Model Y builds/week.

Congrats, Tesla team! 🤘 pic.twitter.com/uhG03gFyba

— Tesla (@Tesla) December 15, 2022

That 3,000 a week adds onto the much larger volumes coming out of the Tesla Giga Shanghai and Tesla Fremont factories as well as the units coming off of the Tesla Giga Berlin production lines.

Troy Teslike, perhaps the best Tesla production and delivery tracker in the world outside of Tesla, estimates 245,538 Model Y are going to end up being produced in 2022 at the Tesla Fremont factory, 440,868 at Tesla Giga Shanghai, 50,699 at Tesla Giga Berlin, and 36,654 at Tesla Giga Texas. That comes to 737,759 units of the Tesla Model Y produced in 2022.

Hi everybody. Tesla Delivery Estimates for Q4 2022 were as follows on Dec 5:

• My estimate: 428K
• Analyst consensus: 430K

My 428K estimate would mean 42.8% annual growth for the full year. Tesla's target is "just under 50%".

The next update on Twitter will be on Dec 15. pic.twitter.com/hbir5yFWFL

— Troy Teslike (@TroyTeslike) December 13, 2022

Overall, Troy Teslike has Tesla at 1.37 million electric vehicles in 2022. We’ll see.

Just looking at the USA, since that is the market Tesla Giga Texas supplies, we estimate that Tesla sold 57,000 Model Y in the country in the 3rd quarter. 156,000 vehicles from Texas would supply nearly three quarters of demand for the Model Y based on that data. If you look more broadly at the US EV market, aside from the Model 3, there is no model that compares in sales volume. The Chevy Bolt EUV had 14,709 sales in the 3rd quarter, extrapolating to not even 60,000 vehicles a year, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E had 10,414 sales, extrapolating to just over 40,000 vehicles a year.

GM and Ford have been ramping up production and aim to sell more of those models in 2023. Neither of them look likely to reach 156,000 sales a year in the USA in 2023, let alone 200,000+. The Ford Mustang Mach-E is getting a serious bump up to 270,000 units a year by the end of 2023, but that is for global distribution. The Mustang Mach-E is sold in 37 countries, and that number will surely climb in 2023 as well. “The good news for EV advocates is that 8 in 10 Mustang Mach-E customers in the US and 9 in 10 customers in Europe have replaced an internal combustion vehicle with a Mustang Mach-E,” Steve Hanley writes. “Demand in the US is so strong that the cars remain in dealer inventory for only about 10 days before finding a buyer.”

“When we put the pony on this Mustang, we knew we’d have skeptics. What we didn’t quite know then was just how popular this car would become,” said Darren Palmer, vice president for electric vehicles at Ford’s EV division known as Ford Model e. “I love seeing Mustang Mach-E vehicles on the road and talking to customers, and I am seeing more and more of them.”

You might call the Mustang Mach-E the Model Y’s top non-Tesla competitor. Though, in such a young electric vehicle market and with so much consumer demand for electric vehicles, I see them as cooperators in an effort to de-ICE small and midsize SUVs in the United States and beyond. We are far from our end goal on that, but 156,000 more Model Ys a year (or 800,000 if you look globally) and 270,000 more Ford Mustan Mach-Es a year should help!