Tesla smashes global delivery record with over 95,000 electric cars

Tesla released its Q2 2019 delivery and production numbers today and the company smashed its previous record by almost 5,000 cars.

The stock price (TSLA) has been up by as much as 8% in aftermarket trading after the announcement.

Over the last few weeks, we have been reporting Tesla is within reach of a new record quarter for deliveries, but it had some obstacles to overcome.

We have been tracking deliveries in North America, Tesla’s biggest market, and it seems that Tesla was at least very close to its goal.

However, it wasn’t clear if Tesla could beat its previous record of 90,700 deliveries globally as we were lacking data from other important markets like China.

Today, Tesla released the official global numbers and the company confirmed that it “achieved record production of 87,048 vehicles and record deliveries of approximately 95,200 vehicles globally.”

Here’s the split between the different models:

It’s a significant increase over the results from the previous quarter, which was a rare slump in quarter-to-quarter growth for Tesla.

During the first 3 months of the year, Tesla delivered 50,900 Model 3 vehicles and 12,100 Model S and X vehicles.

That’s a 51% quarter-over-quarter growth and it is even more impressive when compared to the same period last year: 217% year-over-year

Here’s the press release:

Tesla Q2 2019 Vehicle Production & Deliveries

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 2, 2019 – In the second quarter, we achieved record production of 87,048 vehicles and record deliveries of approximately 95,200 vehicles. In addition, we made significant progress streamlining our global logistics and delivery operations at higher volumes, enabling cost efficiencies and improvements to our working capital position.

	Production	Deliveries
Model S/X	14,517	17,650
Model 3	72,531	77,550
Total	87,048	95,200

Orders generated during the quarter exceeded our deliveries, thus we are entering Q3 with an increase in our order backlog. We believe we are well positioned to continue growing total production and deliveries in Q3.

Customer vehicles in transit at the end of the quarter were over 7,400. Due to the order-to-VIN matching process we described in our Q1 2019 Shareholder Letter, which we extended to Model S and Model X in Q2 to improve process efficiency, this metric has become less relevant. As a result, we do not plan to disclose the customer vehicles in transit metric going forward.

Electrek’s Take

Wow, this is impressive.

Based on how hard Tesla was pushing in the US and the fact that it only seemed that Tesla would be “very close” to its goal in North America, I was expecting a light beat, but not 4,000 units over the previous record.

I’d be very curious to see the split per market for those deliveries. I have a feeling that China might have been a surprising factor.

Either way, it shows strong demand for electric vehicles is possible when you have a compelling product like Model 3.