Q3 report coming
Tesla is expected to announce third-quarter deliveries and outputs early Saturday. It is projected to show that the automaker made a sharp comeback from the slowdown last quarter, when production in Shanghai was hit by COVID-19 control measures.
Brokerage Piper Sandler Project Tesla will deliver 354,000 vehicles in the third quarter. City expects to deliver 369,800 vehicles. Troy Teslike, a Tesla-watcher that tracks production and delivery data, sells 343,779 Model Y compact crossovers and Model 3 sedans.
If Tesla hits or exceeds those analyst forecasts and then makes an internal forecast for the coming quarter as seen by Reuters, the company will have global sales of about 1.4 million vehicles in 2022.
Tesla’s output and delivery were higher in the fourth quarter than in the second quarter of 2018.
Its forecast production of 1.59 million Model Ys and Model 3s during the first three quarters of next year will keep it on track through the end of 2023 with sales of more than 2.1 million EVs.
Including gas-powered car sales, which would make it bigger than Volkswagen’s Audi brand, and close out BMW’s 2.5 million vehicle sales in 2021, the most recent full year of comparable sales.
That output would also come just ahead of forecasts from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who has been bullish on Tesla’s prospects. Ives forecasts deliveries of 2 million EVs in 2023, up from 1.39 million this year.
40,000 units a week
Musk, Tesla’s CEO and product architect, told analysts last quarter that the company had a “good chance” of hitting a global production run rate of 40,000 vehicles a week by the end of 2022. The detailed internal forecast to Reuters would assume Tesla can hit and maintain that production through the first quarter.
The forecast also hinges on a sharp increase in production at Tesla’s new factories in Austin, Texas and Berlin. Production in Austin will reach approximately 101,000 by the end of the third quarter 2023. For Berlin, the same profit would range from 51,000 the next quarter to about 90,000 by the quarter ended September 2023.
Joerg Steinbach, the regional economy minister of Brandenburg, where Tesla has its factory near Berlin, has said Tesla will move to the plant in three shifts by the end of the year.
Sam Fiorani, vice president of global forecasting at Auto Forecast Solutions, which tracks production, said it would come as no surprise to see a big jump in Tesla’s production from plants in Austin and Berlin as they are running below plant capacity. Huh.
“Berlin and Austin are coming into their own next year and that’s where a lot of this volume is coming from,” he said.
But he said his baseline forecast didn’t put Tesla at more than 2 million vehicles for 2023. “We don’t have that level yet,” he said. “That sounds very optimistic.”
Fiorani said: “The industry as a whole is still grappling with supply chain issues.”
Tesla’s forecast also includes the assumption that production in Shanghai, a mega-factory that accounted for more than half of its production in the first half of this year, will shut down during 2023.
Tesla recently upgraded factory capacity. Sources told Reuters earlier this week the plan was to run production at 20,500 vehicles per week for the rest of the year.
Tesla’s projected growth in production also faces economic risks, an issue that Musk himself has raised before. Global growth has slowed sharply, especially in China, the world’s largest EV market, where Tesla faces increasingly growing rivals. German industrial production faces uncertainties in the coming months over the availability of gas to power plants.
In June, Musk told Tesla executives he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy and wanted to cut employees.