Tesla's next big delivery can't be far off

No, we don't. They _delivered_ more cars than expected. We also know they produced slightly more cars than they delivered to customers (25,185 vs 'about 24,500), so apparently they didn't manage to deliver all of them. That's to be expected. The 'about 24,500' delivered will include cars produced in the last weeks of Q2 and will exclude cars produced in the last weeks of Q3, and the latter number is higher (by 30+ %)

So, it seems they can sell every car they produce, and aren't sitting on an inventory. That makes it likely that they sold more cars, too, but that information is missing from the linked-to Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-02/tesla-deli...)

Worst-case, they delivered cars ordered in Q2 and have a backlog of zero orders now. It won't be that bad (likely be a long stretch), but if I were an investor, I would want to know more than just the number of deliveries.

(I also would try and get an estimate as to how many of the 400,000+ pre-orders for the model M would lead to actual sales. That's very tricky, as it would be affected by the qualities of that car)