Tesla (TSLA) announced that it achieved both record production and deliveries during the last quarter of 2021.
The automaker produced “more than 305,000 electric vehicles and delivered of over 308,000 electric vehicles during Q4 2021.
Sunday morning, the automaker decided to release its production and delivery numbers for the fourth quarter of the year:
“AUSTIN, Texas, January 2, 2022 – In the fourth quarter, we achieved production of more than 305,000 vehicles and deliveries of over 308,000 vehicles. In 2021, we delivered over 936,000 vehicles.”
This is a massive quarter-over-quarter increase considering Tesla produced 237,000 vehicles during the third quarter.
Most of the increase came from Model 3 and Model Y production, which Tesla still doesn’t differentiate in its report:
| Production | Deliveries | Subject to operating lease accounting | |
| Model S/X | 13,109 | 11,750 | 17% |
| Model 3/Y | 292,731 | 296,850 | 5% |
| Total | 305,840 | 308,600 | 5% |
Deliveries came in way above the Wal Street consensus of about 265,000 deliveries in Q4.
But more importantly, these results give Tesla an annualized production rate of over 1.2 million vehicles, which is unprecedented for producing electric vehicles.
Since these are the fourth quarter results, we now have Tesla’s full 2021year delivery and production numbers.
| Production | Deliveries | |
| Model S/X | 24,390 | 24,964 |
| Model 3/Y | 906,032 | 911,208 |
| Total | 930,422 | 936,172 |
With the significant beat on deliveries in Q4, Tesla is finishing the year with 30,000 more deliveries than most estimates.
Electrek’s Take
Another incredible quarterly performance by Tesla. Congrats to everyone involved.
The most impressive part is undoubtedly achieving a run rate of 1.2 million vehicles and doing it without even having started production at Gigafactory Berlin or Gigafactory Texas.
As I started in my article about Tesla in 2022, this year is again all going to be about growth for Tesla and I believe exiting 2022 with a run rate of 2 million electric vehicles would be a great goal.
But I thought Tesla might exit 2021 with a run rate of 1 million to 1.1 million vehicles.
Now it looks even more achievable, but it’s still going to be a difficult task.
Let’s say there is room to add capacity for 200,000 vehicles at Shanghai and Fremont this year, it means that both Gigafactory Berlin and Texas each need to reach a production capacity of 300,000 vehicles by the end of the year.
To be clear, I am not talking about each producing 300,000 vehicles in 2022, but exiting the year at a production rate of 300,000 vehicles per year.
That requires a fairly smooth production rate at both plants, which is going to be hard to do, but achievable in my opinion especially since Shanghai got up to speed very quickly.
The other story is in the mix of cars. Model S/X accounted for only about 2.5% of Tesla’s sales for the year. Obviously the switch to the new models had some downtime, but the mix is overwhelmingly the smaller cars. That means that Tesla is almost entirely selling the Model 3/Y which are both based on a singular vehicle platform.
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