Tesla China's September Deliveries Break Another Record

According to data released recently by the China Passenger Association, Tesla China's September deliveries were 83,135 units, up 8% sequentially while also setting a new record for brand-new monthly deliveries from Tesla's Shanghai plant since it went into production in December 2019. Previously, the record was 78,906 units delivered just in June this year.

The further breakthrough in September deliveries signals that Tesla's Shanghai plant has been rapidly emerging from the impact of the production line upgrade. In July, Tesla suspended most of the production work at the Shanghai plant to upgrade the production line, and sales of the Model Y and Model 3 models, which were previously affected by the shutdown, also fell sharply at one point.

However, with the completion of the upgrade of the Shanghai factory in early August, Tesla China's deliveries have quickly returned to a high level since the beginning of that month, with 76,000 units in August and 83,000 units in September, which is obviously expected to continue to hit the record. For its part, Tesla said that the upgraded China plant's weekly output has increased to 22,000 units from about 17,000 units before June, while its annual capacity has increased from 450,000 units to 750,000 units. For now, the Shanghai plant remains Tesla's highest-capacity superfactory worldwide.

For consumers, the most intuitive change to the Shanghai plant's increased capacity is the shortened delivery cycle of Tesla models. Currently, the estimated lead time for both Model 3 and Model Y production at Tesla's Shanghai facility is in the 1-10 week range, compared to approximately 6-14 weeks previously.

Recently, Tesla officially announced the third quarter 2022 vehicle production and delivery report. The data shows that Tesla produced more than 365,000 vehicles and delivered more than 343,000 vehicles in the third quarter. Based on this data, Tesla's total deliveries for the first three quarters of this year have exceeded 900,000 vehicles. This also means that if Tesla wants to achieve the goal of "50% growth on last year's sales", it needs to deliver more than 450,000 new vehicles in the fourth quarter.

But Tesla does not seem to be worried about this, the reason is that Tesla's Texas factory in the United States and Germany's Berlin plant, have been in the middle of this year to start production line upgrades. Musk said at an analyst meeting last quarter that by the end of 2022, Tesla's global factories could produce 40,000 vehicles per week.

However, at present, the Berlin factory capacity expansion rate is not ideal. In September, Tesla just said through official tweets that the weekly capacity of the Berlin plant reached 2,000 units, which is far from Tesla's previous estimate of 5,000 units per week in the Berlin plant by the end of the year.

In addition, Tesla said in a recent statement: "As our production continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly challenging to ensure the ability to ship vehicles at a reasonable cost during peak logistics periods." The implication is that under the condition of rapid growth in deliveries, Tesla still needs to make further follow-ups in areas such as the construction of logistics systems.

On the other hand, some analysts pointed out that the expected growth of Tesla's production faces the challenges of the global economy, especially the challenge of energy shortage in Germany; and in China, the world's largest electric car market, Tesla also faces the rapid rise of competitors.