Tesla reported its 3rd quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers earlier today. That allowed us to update various spreadsheets and create updated charts of Tesla’s long-term delivery trends. Some of the charts below use Tesla’s official figures. However, Tesla doesn’t fully break out sales by models (and also doesn’t break out sales by country or region), so I have used my own estimates for how sales were split between the Model 3 & Model Y (which Tesla combines in reporting) and Model S & Model X (which Tesla also combines in reporting). I also glanced at Troy Teslike’s estimates to make sure mine seemed to be in line with his. Interactive versions of these charts and one more can be viewed over on CleanTechnica Pro.
The first chart we have to look at here (above) is simply’s Tesla’s total quarterly vehicle deliveries going back to Q3 2012. (Yes, Q3 2012 is on there — it’s just so small of a number (321 vehicles) that it’s imperceptible on this chart.) Clearly, the production and sales ramp in the second half of 2018 is the first big, noticeable bump in Tesla’s output. The thing that often gets me when I look closely at this chart and write these articles is that I recall many Tesla critics and skeptics claiming that all of those deliveries were from a years-long order backlog and that Tesla sales would then collapse in Q4 2018 … and then in Q1 2019 … and then Tesla would never higher sales month again and would go bankrupt. As we can see, though, Tesla then had a solid three quarters in 2019, dropped a bit during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020, and then has been on an almost consistently steady and steep rise since then. The “demand cliff” that was the talk of the town in 2018 and early 2019 is long gone. Tesla has jumped to a higher mountain.
This second chart is almost the same chart. It just splits the bars according to estimated model sales. This is the first chart or graph showing how much the Model 3 and Model Y dominate Tesla’s production and sales.
These two line graphs visualize the same thing as the first two bar charts, just using a line graph design instead for a different way of looking at the data. From this view, though, you see the rise of the Model Y above even the Model 3 and far above the Model S and Model X in recent quarters. With more than 200,000 deliveries in the 3rd quarter, many are wondering if the Model Y can become the best selling vehicle model in the world — from any brand and in any class.
An overall chart of Tesla’s cumulative vehicle deliveries shows that Tesla has now passed 3.2 million cumulative deliveries. The chart is almost a perfect example of exponential sales growth. It’s beginning to look like a skateboard ramp or gigantic, epic Hawaii wave.
This next chart stacks cumulative sales of the Model 3 and Model Y. It shows how the Model 3 accounts for the strong base of that cumulative growth, but also how quickly the Model Y has been making up ground and aiming to reach the same cumulative total as the Model 3, before passing it up and never looking back.
These last two charts show cumulative sales of the Model 3 and Model Y individually.
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