Tesla Q4 2021 Vehicle Production and Deliveries | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Q4 2021 Vehicle Production and Deliveries

ir.tesla.com

Some context: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/02/tesla-tsla-q4-2021-vehicle-d...

They handily beat delivery expectations.

“Tesla deliveries amounted to 308,600 electric cars in the fourth quarter and full-year deliveries amounted to 936,172 vehicles.”

“According to a consensus compiled by FactSet, Wall Street analysts had anticipated Tesla deliveries of 267,000 in the fourth quarter and 897,000 for all of 2021.”

Almost hit 1 million vehicles/year. Should easily hit 2 million/year with Austin and Berlin coming online next quarter (Austin is already validating the manufacturing lines). Go Tesla Go.

Also the 300k cars produced in the last quarter means, that with the current factories they are already operating at 1.2 million cars/year capacity. A very strong position.

Tesla's investor relations department leaks these sandbagged estimates to the press at the end of every quarter so that they can beat them. It's an old game.

That's a ridiculous assessment.

do you have any way to back your statement? otherwise it’s just dust in the wind

The interesting thing with Tesla is that they are supply limited at the moment. Demand for outpaces their supply for the foreseeable future.

Competition has the same problem, I guess.

I m wondering, Is this also true if we only look at EVs?

Yes, look at Mercedes and Hyundai numbers.

Demand is outpacing supply for almost every auto manufacturer right now.

If they increased prices, they would stop being supply-limited.

They seem keep doing just that.

They tried about 30 times in 2021. What actually happens is quite interesting.

Ironically, when they increase the price, it encourages more reservations as consumers seek to lock in the current price of an appreciating value.

I own a 2013 S85, and a 2018 LR 3. I'm looking to get a new X in 2022 and letting go of the other two.

My 2 cents, biggest pros of Tesla ownership is the tech, I'm constantly using AP and the FSD Beta, and the biggest cons being fit and finish, Tesla's do not have the fit and finish matching their price tags.

I've had a P3D. If I get another Tesla it will be because of the charging network. No other reason. The competition is producing cars that have normal car features that work. I want normal wipers, or at least traditional rain-sensing that works. I want CarPlay. Comfortable seats, dash screen (in front of the driver), normal door handles, HUD, analog controls for certain things, etc. The regular manufacturers have built up a huge amount of experience in those areas and until Tesla steps it up the rest of their tech isn't going to make me into a repeat customer. Especially when they do dumb things like remove the radar and double down on trying to make the cheap cameras do even more tasks inadequately. Traditional manufacturers have lane keeping and adaptive cruise too. "FSD" doesn't tempt me in the slightest.

There is tendency to suppress this in discussions, but Model 3 sucks in so many ways - everything rattles, even a empty coffee cup in the holder. The car is good as long as I drive on a smooth road. The seats are not very comfortable, the car is absolutely stripped of any artistic detail. On the other hand, AP rocks(invaluable in high traffic commutes like bay area), and I don’t think other cars do it just as confidently. And it keeps updating. The steering is extremely precise and handles like a champ in corners. It feels like we have a to choose between traditional comfort and tech, which sucks. It’s almost like it is a specialist car like a subaru wrx

I had relatively good experience in mine for rattles -- just the usual dash rattle from something to do with the HVAC. But I only owned it 18 months, and most cars are really solid for the first few years anyway.

I had really great luck early on with AP but ended up not using it much towards the end of my ownership experience because my wife didn't want me using it on road trips -- too many panic braking events on our usual route. Something changed in the algorithms, they may have worked that out by now.

> we have a to choose between traditional comfort and tech, which sucks

100% agree. Choosing any car comes with some amount of give & take, but right now with EVs there seems to be a major subset of features you have to give up depending on which option you go with.

My dream daily driver would be if the Model Y got the driver screen and analog(ish) knob that Ford put on the Mach E, and a pair of Recaro seats. And CarPlay, ha! I'd buy that today. But if I were looking right now for something in that segment I'd probably end up with a Mach E and I'd just deal with the less convenient road-trip charging (99% of the time I charge at home anyway).

Interesting. I have 95,000 miles on a 2018 Model 3. No rattles. The maintenance has been a windshield, underbody cover for the rear wheels (got torn when I hit abou 6" of standing water), and one bad SW update that required a hard system reset that put the car back to factory settings (had to re-configure Homelink, audio, etc).

Otherwise, it's been a fantastic experience. Incredibly fun to drive.

> maintenance has been..

Nitpick, but the things you listed aren’t maintenance items. That would be like new tires or fluid changes that you’d expect on most any car.

Sounds relatively problem-free though.

Oh, Right. I’ve used up three sets of tires.

BTW, the car came with 310 mile range. Tesla upgraded that to 325 after about a year.

Now, range is 290.

Tech has a higher barrier to entry than the comfort elements. If it wants, Tesla can easily have the interior look like the traditional car, but instead it does away with the clutter of cars that came before it. Other carmakers on the other hand have a lot of years to catch up in with the tech, charging network and autopilot/fsd.

I own a 3 LR and a performance Y, and both cars are great to drive. The seats are comfy to me. I do agree Tesla could have used better quality components in the interior for the price of the car but what you are paying for is the tech. Not sure if I would pay more for a better looking interior, and I think that’s the audience Tesla targets.

Almost no American car does anyway.

Fit and finish have really improved over the years IMO. 2021 3/y fit and finish are as good as any similarly priced fossil vehicle, if you like the minimalistic interior.

Also notice that the Chinese-built 3 have much better build quality and finish than California-built ones.

That seems to be the consensus. They aren’t the car a car enthusiast would want but a commuter would love.

While the Bull case has not been proven for Tesla, The Bear case is laughably bad at this point.

The possibility massive overvaluations across tech shouldn’t be totally discounted. Yeah, you might miss out doubling your money in the next five years if you sit out but you could also avoid halving your money in the next 30 years.

It all depends on what kind of investor you are and where you are in your financial planning. At some point growth stocks have to stop being growth stocks.

> At some point growth stocks have to stop being growth stocks.

Debatable. AMZN would like to have a word

Last downturn for tech, AMZN dropped over 80%

Laughably bad? Ford sold just about as much, if not more, F150s in 2021 and that’s just one of their models. Taken into even the slightest context Tesla could seem massively overvalued- and I say that as someone who likes their product.

I keep seeing this a Tesla vs. Ford qualitative comparison, so here is a more quantitative comparison:

Ford's 2020 Q4 report [0] indicates a sales rate of ~2M cars / yr. The entire Ford truck brand sold around 1.1 M trucks [0] that year (2020) and 1.2 the year before (2019). Fordauthority.com (who may or may not be authoritative...) says that Ford is/was running slightly worse sales this year than last year [1]. However I don't think Ford has published their numbers for 2021 yet.

Personal Opinion: Given Tesla's ramp of ~70%/yr, is it not absurd to think that Tesla will pass Ford's truck sales numbers within the next year and all of Ford's sales numbers within the next 2-3 years. (This is assuming lack of innovation on Ford's part. If Ford innovates with e-trucks then it will probably take a lot longer for Tesla to catch up)

[0]: https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...

[1]: https://fordauthority.com/2021/10/ford-motor-company-sales-n...

Valuation is forward looking and taking into account future growth as well with gigafactories coming online. Plenty of people had the same valuation argument and comparing sales vs other automakers 2 years ago but look where the company and valuations are now

Ford is also years behind in battery and fsd tech. That being said, they need to match / best expectations handily to retain these valuations

That such an terrible comparison. I mean seriously, the whole car industry is transitioning fundamentally both in terms of EV and in terms of technology including self driving.

Just looking at past sales numbers and ignoring these transition is insane.

Transitioning millions of vehicles to EV is an incredibly hard task and has massive cost and massive constraints do to battery, battery materials and chip availability.

I'm not gone say Tesla is not 'overvalued' but just saying F-150 sells a lot therefore Tesla is overvalued is bad argument.

I agree. My response is to indicate that it isn’t laughably bad to be bearish on Tesla. Read the comment.

The Bull case is pretty straightforward. There are ~80-100M cars produced every year. Tesla's market cap is ~40% of the total automotive industry. So either they have to 40x their production to match their current market cap or drastically eat into another industry. People like to propose two different possibilities - self driving and energy. Personally, I think self driving will be a race to the bottom. As soon as one person figures it out, they might have one year before others are able to do it. Aside from that, I think it is pretty clear that Tesla is going to lose that race regardless as the money in self driving is having an autonomous fleet. Waymo doesn't need to make the cars or have gigafactories.

As for being the energy provider of the future, as much as people love to hate energy companies, Chevron is not going to roll over so easily. They love oil because it makes money. As soon as it stops making money, they are much better positioned to transform their infrastructure into charging stations than Tesla is to bootstrap that side of their business.

At this point, it is obvious Tesla will be a profitable car company moving forward but I still think they are more likely to end up as another Mercedes-Benz (Daimler market cap is 80B) than eating the automotive industry plus another industry.

10 years ago, you could have said that the existing auto industry was better positioned to electrify their existing vehicles than Tesla is to bootstrap their own electric cars out of nothing - but here we are.

It seems like more an issue of desire than ability though right? The existing auto makers were not making any effort so it feels weird to make a comparison.

Not that they’re making an effort they’ve proven they can make electric cars. The only thing they’re missing imo is the ubiquitous supercharger network.

Pretty much every exponential curve in reality is really a sigmoid. So extrapolating on exponential growth works until it doesn't.

You'll understand the Bull case if you calculate the revenue growth rates of Tesla vs. incumbents.

The question isn't whether there's a bull case for tesla, there obviously is. The question is the bear case which the GP laid out pretty clearly.

Tesla might grow to eclipse the existing auto industry! Certainly the story of "incumbent industries fail to adapt to changing conditions" is a common one but "industry supports several equally sized competitors" is as well.

I just said it above, extrapolating from past exponential performance works until it doesn't and reality implies that it will stop working at some point.

> So either they have to 40x their production to match their current market cap or drastically eat into another industry

They can also justify a higher market cap through higher margins. The challenge with that is that other automakers are showing they can also build electric cars, so there's competition that will drive down margins. It also looks like Ford is beating them to the truck market (and with a truck truck people actually want).

The Bull case should also be that Tesla is lead by Elon Musk and that his companies have generally done, really, really well. He makes the right investments at the right time to continue growing often when most people don't see it yet.

Tesla literally started to work on is in-house battery and battery manufacturing plans years and years ago. When most manufactures didn't even consider having a dedicated battery partner. They even have in-house materials manufactures where they make their own cathode and might even make their own lithium hydroxide. This looks like a brilliant bet right now, in comparison Ford only now realized that they need a dedicated battery manufacturing partnership (something Tesla had in 2014). The margin lost on a battery if you buy it is significant, and that is outside of the chance to make it cheaper and better integrated.

I trust that Musk and Tesla are internally already looking at what the next thing is they need to continue their growth. Grid Energy is only starting to really go of now and will look quite good over time, they just started a new factory fully dedicated to grid storage. Tesla is also not bound to cars, electrification will go to aviation next, as they continue to improve batteries at some point the density will hit a point it simply makes sense to look into aviation and Tesla is a great position to do that at some point.

In my opinion just saying car market size is X therefore Tesla can't be more then Y is a false analysis.

> Waymo doesn't need to make the cars or have gigafactories.

Yes, they just need relay on partners who want them to pay as much as possible and are not fully integrated in what Waymo actually needs.

Waymo has no clear way to profitability, Tesla even without Full-Self Driving can make lot of money selling driver assistance.

> As for being the energy provider of the future, as much as people love to hate energy companies, Chevron is not going to roll over so easily. They love oil because it makes money. As soon as it stops making money, they are much better positioned to transform their infrastructure into charging stations than Tesla is to bootstrap that side of their business.

This makes little sense. First of all, charging is a lost leader, you don't really make money. Its a huge investment and maybe at some distant point in the future you make money. And charging and gas are simply different and have different requirements, and you don't need as many.

Chevron has no expertise in high power electronics needed and all the software required to make it a great experience for costumers.

If that would happen they would need to invest many billions now, and even then, this is something Tesla would welcome as its a good argument and makes their cars more attractive, not less. Tesla can not build ever EV charger in the world.

The bear case is that Tesla merely becomes the worlds number 1 electric car manufacturer but does not become the worlds only electric car manufacturer.

Right now Tesla's market cap is about 10x that of Ford, on a third to half the revenue (2021 numbers aren't available, I'm estimating based on Q1/2/3).

Tesla was about 2x as profitable as ford in q3 2021, but that varies a lot quarter-to-quarter. It was generally around 10% though.

Instead of car companies, consider a similarly sized company in market cap, Meta. Meta has 85 billion in revenue and a 30% (!) profit margin.

For Tesla to grow into its cap it needs to massively increase both its scale and its profitability. It'd need to more than double its revenue while also doubling its margins. New sources of revenue for tesla are going to be moving downmarket, which makes profit margins hard in a manufacturing business. Tesla has nice cars but it has a lot of competitors with deep sales teams and manufacturing excellence (consider other comments in this thread: Tesla cars have bad fit and finish for how expensive they are and lack a lot of standard features).

Tesla is clearly going to continue to be a big car manufacturer but its current valuation requires that it become staggeringly gigantic.

These cases are not static. As the stock price goes up, you have to reevaluate both of these in regards to the new price. Certainty the old Bear case from a couple of years ago has been crushed.

Remember when people said they could never make 5k Model 3s a weak and would never figure out mass manufacturing?

However since then the Stock price went up quite a bit.

As a long time investor I still believe in a Bull case, but its certainty harder to justify.

What is puzzling to me, is that despite beating delivery expectations (meaning they did make and deliver more cars than planned), the delivery of my model X I'm in the line for did get pushed back from January to February. Something doesn't make sense...

> Something doesn't make sense

How so? 96% of deliveries are 3/Y, Tesla probably delivered less than 1K X's this quarter since they're still ramping production of the refresh S/X.

A month or two of delays for the X production is negligible.

And we have stories of people being told that a vehicle was "found" that matched their reservation, so they could get their vehicle.

What that really meant was someone else had rejected delivery of that specific vehicle.

But Tesla wanted "delivery acceptance" if you wanted a chance to look over that vehicle.

They're like everyone else, push hard to make the numbers, screw the QA.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/rtr21m/buying_a_...

> What that really meant was someone else had rejected delivery of that specific vehicle.

Do you think they should scrap the vehicle if the original buyer rejects it? Of course they will deliver it to a different customer.

> They're like everyone else, push hard to make the numbers, screw the QA.

That's the usual Tesla FUD - If they don't make the numbers - busted growth story. If they do - their QA sucks.

Eh, their QA absolutely does suck. That’s not FUD at this point.

Their quality and QA has improved significantly over the last 2 years and is on par with the industry, if not better in some areas.

Don't believe everything you read on /r/realtesla.

Or that somebody canceled the vehicle for other reasons. To suggest all of those are because of QA issues is nonsense.

And their QA is not the issue because of deliveries, the most growth in deliveries has been in China where QA is considered very good.

they are often rejected because 2,000 dads have posted youtube videos about how to reject delivery because of millimeters that can be adjusted at any time

Or because the windshield isn't actually attached to the vehicle in any permanent manner.

Or the roof separates.

Or there is a solid clunking at 27mph.

Let's not pretend that legions of otherwise-Tesla-lovin' folks are out in the delivery yard with a pair of calipers.

Oh, and about those adjustments - just go to Tesla Motor Club forums for story after story, with photo evidence, of panel alignment being _worse_ after you've waited 2 months for the service center to get you in and "fix" it.

Wondering how recall of half of the millions vehicles will affect their production in 2022.

It won't. The recall is relatively minor (reverse cam wire harness protection/positioning and hood attachment mechanism adjustment) and can be quickly fixed with mobile service. Additionally the root cause on the assembly line was fixed over a year ago.

So they knew about it for a year before doing the recall…

No. General design and manufacturing improvements often fix collateral issues.

Recall is insignificant and likely fixable by mobile service.

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