Today, Tesla (TSLA) released its Q3 2021 delivery and production numbers – confirming it achieved again new records.
The automaker managed to deliver 241,300 electric vehicles during the last quarter.
Earlier this month, we reported on CEO Elon Musk telling employees in a company-wide call that “‘this is the craziest month of deliveries Tesla (TSLA) will ever have.”
The CEO noted that production issues due to supply chain constraints led to Tesla delaying deliveries and its service teams having to add parts to vehicles produced earlier in the quarter.
The automaker’s business model usually leads to more deliveries at the end of each quarter, but these production issues made the problem even bigger this quarter.
Just a few days ago, during the last week of the quarter, Musk said that “this will be Tesla’s most intense delivery week ever”.
During those end-of-quarter delivery waves, Tesla can sometimes deliver tens of thousands of vehicles, which make or break the company’s entire quarter.
Tesla Q3 2021 delivery and production results
It looks like this quarter’s delivery wave was successful as Tesla reported record deliveries of 241,300 electric cars in Q3 2021.
That’s a new record – beating the previous one of 201,250 deliveries achieved just the previous quarter (Q2 2021).
It’s actually significantly more than Tesla produced in Q3 despite production also achieving new records:
| Production | Deliveries | Subject to operating lease accounting | |
| Model S/X | 8,941 | 9,275 | 20% |
| Model 3/Y | 228,882 | 232,025 | 6% |
| Total | 237,823 | 241,300 | 7% |
Tesla produced 237,823 vehicles compared to 206,421 vehicles during the previous quarter.
Expectations were high on Wall Street. A poll of analysts showed that industry watchers were expecting 222,700 vehicle deliveries from Tesla in Q3 2021 on average.
Therefore, Tesla significantly beat those expectations.
Finally, Tesla also shows a significant ramp-up of Model S production with almost 9,000 units compared to just 2,340 units the previous quarter when it only just started production of the new version of its flagship electric sedan.
Tesla is expected to add new Model X production to the mix during this quarter.
Between that and new Model Y production at Gigafactory Texas and Berlin expected to come online by the end of the year, Tesla should exit 2021 with an annual production rate of over 1 million electric vehicles.
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