Tesla Sales Forecasts for Q2: 440,000–450,000 Deliveries

The end of the second quarter is drawing near, and for many electric vehicle followers, this means questions and discussions regarding Tesla’s quarterly sales. Tesla is still far and away the top selling in the pure battery-electric vehicle market, and in a top tier of two along with BYD if you look more broadly at plugin vehicle sales. Even as other automakers get serious about electric vehicles and sell more and more of them, Tesla is king of the hill and drives the market forward more than any other company. Tesla sold (read: delivered) 422,875 vehicles in the first quarter of 2023 (and produced 440,808). It is climbing closer to an annual run rate of 2 million! How much closer will the second quarter bring the company?

One of the best Tesla production and sales trackers in the world is Troy Teslike. He has a system of estimating production and sales routinely throughout the quarter, and his end-of-quarter forecasts are often quite close to reality. He also includes the stock market analysts consensus for comparison purposes. Let’s take a look at what he’s putting out there for Q2 2023 so far.

My production estimate was as follows on 23 June. The next and final update on Twitter will be on 30 June. pic.twitter.com/7e7wItKGYV

— Troy Teslike (@TroyTeslike) June 25, 2023

Hi everybody. I will tweet my final estimate for Tesla's Q2 2023 production & deliveries on 30 June and then we will find out the actual numbers on 2nd July.

This was my error rate in the past. There is a public page here https://t.co/iUfM6vPKFY with more information and charts. pic.twitter.com/yLKUcgnjHx

— Troy Teslike (@TroyTeslike) June 25, 2023

Just pulling out the big numbers from there, here’s what we’ve got:

• Tesla sales forecast from Troy (Q2): 441,000
• Tesla sales forecast from Tesla stock market analysts, combined consensus (Q2): 448,000
• Tesla production forecast from Troy (Q2): 470,399

We’re just a handful of days away from finding out Tesla’s actual Q2 numbers, but history would tell us that they won’t be too far off of these estimates. What are your thoughts and your estimates?

Looking back one year, you can see that Tesla delivered nearly 255,000 vehicles in Q2 2022. Going from that to 444,000 or so, that would be an increase of about 74% — a huge step up. What might be a concern is that Tesla is seemingly producing more and more compared to what it is delivering, and I may come back to that in another article tomorrow, but it should be noted that as overall volumes go up, one would expect higher volumes of inventory in a single day or week as well.

As far as specific models, the Tesla Model Y seems to be pulling away from the rest of the pack. Troy’s projection for Q2 is that far more than twice as many Model Ys will be delivered than Model 3s, and the Model S & X are negligible at this point on a unit volume basis. The Model Y is also on track to being the best selling vehicle model (of any kind or any brand) in 2023. However, one must also ask: how much higher can it go? The one thing about becoming king of the hill is that … one can only go down from there. (In terms of ranking, of course, not unit sales.)

To get up to half a million deliveries a quarter, I’m thinking Tesla needs to get the Cybertruck to market. The Model Y, especially with a lower price, and a refreshed Model 3 may be able to climb to half a million sales a quarter on their own (or with the modest support of the Model S and Model X), but it’s hard to see Tesla not stagnating a bit at some point in the coming year without a strong influx of sales from the Cybertruck, and later on a lower-cost, smaller Tesla.