Almost as expected, Tesla already reported the production and delivery figures in the fourth quarter of last year on this Sunday afternoon according to German time – but they were even better than even the most optimistic observers had expected. According to the information, Tesla delivered exactly 308,600 electric cars and produced 305,840 units in Q4 2021. Both are new record values and also let the numbers for the whole of 2021 rise to more than 900,000 each.
Strong Tesla numbers from China and the USA
In advance, Tesla had published a compilation of analyst forecasts for the last quarter of 2021, according to a fund manager, according to the Banks expected an average of 266,000 Tesla deliveries. That would have been another new record after the 241,300 deliveries in Q3 2021. Observers on Twitter had even more confidence in Tesla, especially since the surprisingly high number of 70,000 Tesla sales was reported from China just before New Year’s Eve.
But with the actually achieved 308,600 deliveries in Q4 2021, Tesla itself clearly exceeded expectations of possibly just over 300,000. This means that production is likely to have been higher than expected not only in China, but also at the parent plant in Fremont – there have recently been faint doubts about the extent of both, because the parking spaces in front of the factories looked unusually empty on some days. In addition, contrary to his custom, CEO Elon Musk called internally in December not to deliver cars at any cost in 2021.
Production in 2021 at 0.92 million electric cars
The increase of 28 percent compared to the previous quarter and 71 percent compared to Q4 2020 results in a total of 936,172 deliveries of Tesla electric cars for 2021. This corresponds to an increase of a whopping 87 percent compared to the whole of 2020 – there had Tesla at the beginning of 2021 modest average growth of 50 percent per year over a longer period of time as a goal. Tesla production totaled 305,840 electric cars in Q4 2021 and 930,422 in all of 2021, also around 82 percent more than in 2020.
The majority of this increase is likely to be due to the Gigafactory in China, which has been producing Model 3 since autumn 2020 and Model Y for European exports since summer 2021. The production of Model S and Model X in Fremont also increased noticeably from a combined total of around 9,000 in Q3 2021 to 13,109 in the last quarter. However, it remained well below the around 22,500 units that Tesla named as capacity for Model S and Model X per quarter at the end of 2019.