Tesla (TSLA) achieved record production in June – exiting the year’s first half – setting the automaker up for an impressive second half of the 2022.
This weekend, Tesla released its Q2 2022 production and delivery results. It confirmed its first quarterly setback in deliveries in more than two years due to its factory shutdown in Shanghai.
However, there was a silver lining in Tesla’s results:
June 2022 was the highest vehicle production month in Tesla’s history.
The automaker didn’t confirm how many vehicles it produced during the month of June, but we estimate it to be around 120,000 electric vehicles.
If Tesla manages to maintain, and most likely increase this production rate with massive investment into production ramps in Gigafactory Berlin, Gigafactory Texas, and Gigafactory Shanghai, it will set the automaker up for an impressive second half of 2022.
Goldman Sachs wrote about the results in a note to clients this weekend:
However, we believe that the record production in June is a sign that Shanghai is ramping back up well and that the company made progress recently at its Berlin and Austin factories.
Electrek recently reported that production significantly ramped up at Gigafactory Texas at the end of June.
Goldman Sachs has lowered its Tesla delivery estimate for the full year of 2022 to 1.401 million units, which is still very close to Tesla’s rough guideline of roughly 50% increase year-over-year.
Electrek’s Take
Unless there’s another unforeseen event like the Shanghai lockdowns, I think Tesla is going to have a truly impressive second half of 2022.
If it was to only maintain the rate it had in June, it would likely produce just over 700,000 units for a total of over 1.2 million units for the year. However, I think we are going to see them achieve a significant ramp-up at most factories, – especially Berlin and Texas – for closer to 900,000 to 1 million vehicles during the second half.
It’s not going to be easy, but Tesla has been preparing its supply chain for this kind of volume for years and now it has the installations to do it. The automaker needs to work through its bottlenecks at its facilities to support that capacity.
The difficult part appears to still be 4680 battery cell production as Tesla won’t benefit from supply from partnering manufacturers, like Panasonic, for around another year. Once that supply starts, we are likely to see another important growth phase for Tesla’s production.
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