Tesla Customer Orders Now ~2× Production Capacity, Slight Price Increases Coming

At the start of Tesla’s Q4 2022 and full-year 2022 conference call for shareholders today, CEO Elon Musk started off with some opening remarks. In those opening remarks, he commented that the top concern investors have had recently is about demand. Many shareholders and fans have been worried about dropping consumer demand — or, at least, consumer demand that is lower than Tesla’s production capacity.

However, as it turns out, Musk says that order rates have been huge and orders have been approximately 2× Tesla’s current production capacity. Whether that will be sustained at 2× is not clear, but that’s apparently the situation at the moment.

“Demand far exceeds production, and we actually are making some small price increases as a result,” Elon Musk added a little later in the call when responding to the first shareholder question.

As far as price increases, these follow large price cuts Tesla recently implemented, and I think had not been mentioned or made public yet before now. Stay tuned to see how prices are modified again in coming days. As has been explained before, Tesla engages in various — sometimes frequent — price cuts and price increases in order to fine tune the supply–demand balance and try to land on a reasonable, preferred ratio that doesn’t lead to long wait times for consumers.