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Sales of new Tesla electric vehicles rose for the first quarter of 2023, according to sales and production figures released by the EV maker on Sunday. For the three months between the start of the year and the end of March, Tesla delivered 422,875 EVs; in 2022 they managed 310,048 deliveries during Q1.
That represents a 36 percent increase year on year for the EV company and a 4 percent increase from Q4 2022.
As expected, the vast majority of its sales were split between the Models 3 and Y—Tesla does not break out details any further, nor does it report by regions. In Q1 2023 it delivered 412,180 Models 3 and Y, 5 percent of which were leased.
The recent price cuts may have helped shift some metal—despite some yo-yoing up and down, a Model Y is $11,000 cheaper today than at the start of the year.
A counterpoint to that argument can be found by looking at how the aging Models S and X are doing. The answer? Not great. Substantial price cuts in January and March do not appear to have moved the needle (at least not in the right direction), and Tesla delivered almost 50 percent fewer of these EVs—just 10,695—for the first quarter of this year than the first three months of last year.
In fact, Tesla was left with almost as many Models S and X on hand as it could sell, building 19,437 for Q1 2023. A similar number of Models 3 and Y were built but left unsold as well. This is becoming a growing problem for Tesla. In Q1 2022, it sold 5,000 more EVs than it built. In Q1 2023, it built 18,000 more EVs than it could sell, which we can add to the 56,000 unsold EVs it reported at the end of 2022.
In presenting its 2022 financial results, Tesla said it expects to grow sales by 50 percent and will sell 1.8 million cars this year, although CEO Elon Musk has been more ambitious. But in order to achieve those goals, the company will need to ramp sales much higher for the rest of the year if it doesn’t want to disappoint investors yet again.
