Hey everybody Rob Maurer here, happy Friday, today we are going to be going through expectations for Tesla's Q3 delivery and production report which we should get early next week, we'll talk about the timing of that in a second as well, and then we do just have a few quick updates to go through before then for the news today. Thankfully a pretty quiet day though, Tesla up 1.6% on the day to close the week at $250.22 while the NASDAQ up 1 10th for percent on the day.
As we had talked about we did get the core, or the PCE report today. The report did come in a little bit lower than expectations as did the headline result month over month. Year over year numbers came in in line with expectations as we can see with the chart from Bloomberg here. So overall, probably a pretty good reading from the PCE report, I don't want to spend a ton of time on it today, but with the report coming in generally a little bit lighter than expected, the expectations for interest rates to remain paused for the November meeting for the Fed did increase just a bit from where they were at yesterday and certainly from a week ago. That being said for December and January expectations, those largely stayed the same as they were yesterday. So a little bit better in terms of the expectations from the result of the PCE report, and we'll keep an eye on the next report relating to inflation will probably be in a couple of weeks with CPI.
Now, kind of the other big thing in the auto industry today, the UAW has expanded their strike. Kind of interesting tactics that they're taking here. Of course, we know that they're striking all three of the big three. But last week, they kind of spared a forward from expansion saying that forward had brought better terms to the negotiating table. And they were pleased with the progress there this week that are employing the same tactic again. But they're expanding their strike on forward this week. So I guess not happy with the progress from forward since then, continuing to expand with General Motors. And then they're actually sparing a stellantis this time from an expanded strike. So for similar reasons, just saying that they made progress with their proposal. So kind of interesting to see how they're putting them all against each other and working these sequential expansions. But this adds 7,000 workers to the 18,000 UAW workers that were previously on strike. So 25,000 in total, which is about 17% of the UAW workforce for the big three. So we'll keep an eye on that. I think this is going to continue for a while and probably will continue to employ these similar tactics in the coming weeks. But we'll see.
Now specifically to Tesla, just got a quick update here on Giga Texas from Joe Tagmire. So obviously they've just kind of restarted production, Joe was saying that there's 400 plus model wise in the testing a lot today. So good to see some production seemingly spool back up there. And then kind of some interesting shots of some frames here or some, you know, body and whites that are a little bit painted. That seemed to have maybe some testing happening with the paints. There's a couple of different silvers that Joe called out. Silvers are grays and obviously we're seeing some different shades there. So it doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot, but could mean something at some point. So something to keep an eye on there with what's whatever's going on with paint. Obviously we've seen Tesla make a couple adjustments with ultra red and obviously the Giga Berlin colors recently as well.
And then just the last quick news update for today, Electric is reporting that Tesla has sort of quietly held something called an installer day for their energy products. This one specifically was held in Sydney, Australia last week. They learned about this from a post on LinkedIn. And they've also heard that Tesla held a similar installer day in the US earlier this summer. So electric had previously reported that Tesla was moving a little bit away from first party installations doing it themselves into third party contractors helping with that workload. So this seems to be a continuation of that strategy and trying to get those partners probably better up to speed or better collaboration between between the two. So interesting to see that shift, but I think with that shift, definitely a good move to do things like this.
All right, so that's most of the news. Let's move into delivery expectations. I'll hop over to Excel here. Just give me one second on that.
好的,那就是大部分的新闻了。我们来谈谈交付期望吧。我现在切换到Excel上。请稍等一下。
Alright. And like I said yesterday, we're not going to spend, you know, probably as much time on this as we normally would, because this is again, a quarter where the the meaningfulness of the numbers is lower because of the downtime that we know is coming that Tesla told us to expect that we have seen in China and in Texas specifically. So because of those production downtime periods, this quarter lets us see how well Tesla is ramping less, you know, less well than we normally would.
So poor phrasing on that, but we just get a little bit less insight this quarter because of the downtime. So with that, it's a number that I'm a little bit less interested in than in a normal quarter, where we could see, you know, how, how well Berlin is progressing, how well Texas is progressing, Shanghai, etc. We just don't get as much insight. Really the big question right now is how Texas responds the downtime that we saw in September, how Shanghai responds the downtime that we saw for the updates of Model three, which really we can't learn a whole lot from from these numbers.
So, you know, I've got it all displayed here, we're not going to go kind of line by line, but at the end of the day, my my production forecast is right around 430,000 units. You can see that that would be down 10% quarter over quarter, still up 17% year over year. You can see along the top here how that breaks down by factory. We'll start with Shanghai because we obviously have the best insight there in terms of the information that we get throughout the quarter. So we know that July production was right around 80,000. We know that August was right around 80,000. I'm expecting that to drop in September. If we look between the Model three and the Model Y over here, you can see the headers there. I'm expecting a big drop in Model three production as Tesla transitions over. We may still have seen a little bit of production, probably not any for the old version, like we did in August, significant production there for the Model three, kind of right up until this retooling or restart for the upgrade happened.
But then we've also seen at least hundreds of vehicles destined for the port in the Wuwaf livers. So Tesla does seem to be already producing at least a decent amount of the new Model three. So for now, I've kind of just put that at 5,000 or so. And then for the Model Y, I'm assuming that Tesla just kind of kept them or maintain their daily rate that we saw in July and August. Although if they had to take some workers off of that to help support the transition of the Model three, I could definitely see that being a possibility, which could lead to the 62,000 I have reflected here being potentially a little bit too high. So that's probably more of a best case number for Shanghai.
For Berlin in Texas, keep in mind that the history here, these are just estimates as well. So we don't necessarily know. We had a pretty good idea back in Q one because of some information that Tesla had shared. So I feel pretty pretty good about those Q two is a little bit more opaque. And then as we go into Q three, I've put some notes down here.
So for Berlin, we did have reports in June. So as we headed headed into Q three, that there were going to be shift reductions. And that definitely seemed to be the case. And then there were reports in August of lower production, actually falling below potentially even below 4,000 per week. So throughout the quarter, plus, you know, any additional downtime that maybe we're not aware of, the average that I've gotten here is a little bit below 4,000 per week. Of course, you've got a, you know, around 13 weeks in the quarter. So I'm at around 3700. I believe this works out to you, just trying to, you know, be cautious based on a couple of different reports that we heard throughout the quarter of of lower production. And just sort of the time period in Europe right now.
So again, I think this is probably if anything a little bit on the higher end. And then for Texas, here, you know, obviously we've seen this, the shutdowns, which seem to be occurring for most of September, we also had some reporting on 4680. We saw the were, you know, the removal of the 4680 model Y from the design studio in this quarter. Now Tesla could have stopped production on that they could have switched production on that over to the 2170 version and kind of maintained, you know, four or 5,000 rate heading into September before that shutdown. But I'm not entirely convinced that that was the case.
So I guess trying to be a little bit more conservative with Texas and just assume that there wasn't too much of a ramp up in terms of that weekly rate. We've never heard for Berlin or Texas that Tesla surpassed 5,000 per week.
Obviously we talked about the reports for Berlin even falling back below that. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar changes in Texas to as Tesla probably once they hit that peak, trying to, especially when we're, you know, the period of time that we're in right now with high interest rates and things like that, Tesla probably trying to focus a little bit more on cost control rather than kind of ramping volume at all costs.
So I think that's kind of what we're seeing in both factories plus with Texas, obviously that downtime. And then we did actually have a report in July, the four shutdown as well, which was only, you know, reported to be about five days, we never know exactly how long those are going to be, but that was kind of the report at that time.
So you've got basically September, and then a week in July, lowering this number. So that's where I'm at for Berlin, in Texas and Shanghai, Fremont, also a little bit more opaque in general.
We didn't, I don't think we had any reports of major shutdowns if if I'm wrong on that, feel free to correct me in the comments today. We did have throughout the quarter though, some various reports about different construction, permitting that Tesla is sought for different upgrades.
So a little bit unclear, maybe there has been some down times for some downtime for some changeovers and production there as well, but a little bit less transparency to what we have certainly in Texas and Shanghai with those reports.
So for Fremont, I'm assuming that Tesla has lowered model three production based off of the upcoming changes for for Highland, even without, you know, converting Fremont at this point in time, they're probably cognizant of the impact of this update on demand for model three.
And yes, they can continue to lower prices in inventory and continue to move these vehicles. There's still great cars, but there's also, you know, some, going to be some impact of people wanting to kind of delay that and maybe wait for that update if they can.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla had just kind of took that opportunity to, you know, again, maybe not push following production as much as they normally would and maybe focus similarly on cost control.
So I do have, sorry, I didn't have the right section on the screen, but I do have model three production, declining a little bit sequentially, and then model Y pretty much staying the same on a daily daily rate. I think this is about 90. Yeah, 99% of of last quarter.
Again, just assuming Tesla's probably not quite as hard to volume this quarter. So all of those adding up to the 430,000, and then sort of the other general note that we had this quarter is that Tesla announced between the will they announced on September 16 that sometime in the last week, they had produced their five millionth car ever.
So we talked a bit about that at the time and how we'd come back to this. Essentially, I won't walk through all the math because it's becomes a little bit complicated. And there's a gray area because that there there is this weak window where it could have happened in.
But essentially going into the quarter from the announcement that Tesla had originally produced their one millionth car on March 1, you can take the number from there and you can look at, okay, what they produce in March, according to my estimates, which we don't know for sure, plus what that they produce in Q two, which we do know for sure.
That gets you to about 4.65 million to start the quarter for Q three. So then you assume somewhere between, you know, the start of the quarter and September's 10th through the 16th sometime between that they produce 350,000 vehicles.
And then you kind of extrapolate each factory's daily rate, excluding Texas, excluding to an extent, the model three and Shanghai. And then what that ramps out to two for the rest of the quarter.
So again, don't want to go through all that because it's a little bit intricate and really no need. But ultimately, that netted me out right around here.
This is a little actually a little bit lower than I had initially gotten going factory by factory. So lowered it a little bit based off of this announcement from Tesla.
这实际上比我最初逐个工厂获得的数据稍微低一些。因此,根据特斯拉的公告,我把它稍微降低了一点。
So with that being the case, again, there's a little bit of a gray area here based on we don't necessarily know exactly what March was we don't necessarily know exactly what fell into these first two months here.
But in general, that kind of put me put the production numbers as they came in month by month, this quarter in a pretty good spot that fit pretty well with this, assuming that that number was hit sometime then under this forecast around September 13th.
So sort of midpointing around that, which maybe puts a 10,000 unit airbar. So on this, so sort of fit pretty well with where I was at, again, a little bit lower. But I think in general fits with what Tesla announced and fits with the other hard information that we have from Shanghai. So that's production. Again, not necessarily something I care about down 10% quarter over quarter, 17% increase year over year. But most importantly, will be the exit rate, which we don't really get any information on from these numbers.
So hopefully, when we get into October and we can start to get a feel for how Shanghai is ramping up, that'll give us a much better idea. And then also Texas as well, after these production upgrades that we seem to have had this quarter.
All right, and then for deliveries, as always, you know, I usually say that I don't spend a ton of time on that mostly looking at production in terms of my forecast, but nevertheless, people like to compare deliveries. I meant just below 445,000 just kind of taking a guess here at inventory. As we can see over the last five quarters in a row, Tesla's inventory is actually grown. So I have the days of inventory included over here and then just a rough calculation for the amount of inventory based off of that days of inventory number that Tesla gives us. So you can see it's obviously been steadily increasing during this period.
I have a little bit of a decline in inventory this quarter. So Tesla actually delivering more vehicles than they sold, which should make sense given the production downtime that we have, especially because that's a little bit more focused in the, you know, the back part of the quarter, which would naturally lead to inventory draw down during that period specifically.
Now, how much of this Tesla's going to do? Definitely an open question. There is plenty of inventory that Tesla could, you know, exceed production by more than this 15,000 unit level that I've got in here. But looking back historically, there have been other quarters where we've had scenarios like this where Tesla's had downtime. And the number that I'm projecting here would actually be by far the biggest amount of inventory drain, at least going back to the first quarter of 2017.
Prior to this 8,300 was kind of the biggest number we saw for inventory drain back in Q2 2019. And so I guess 8,600 here and then in Q2 in 2020 as well. So 15,000, it's almost more than double it's close to double the biggest inventory drawdown that we have seen. So even though there is more inventory available, this would still be kind of getting into unprecedented territory from from that perspective.
So although there is that inventory available, I wouldn't even be surprised if it was a little bit a little bit lower of a spread than what I've got forecast here. That though would take Tesla down to about 14 days of inventory from 16. That'll be affected a little bit by the calculation from the lower delivery figure as well. If this summer is accurate, that would be a 5% decline quarter of a quarter, which Tesla told us on the Q2 call that we should be expecting. And then a 29% increase from Q3 last year. And of course, we saw big progress in Q4. So hopefully we'll see that repeat this year. But that's where I'm at.
And then analyst consensus, the company compiled estimate was shared today. And that came out to be 454,800 vehicles. I do think that's still a little bit higher than what the true analyst expectation is. There's going to be analysts that are sort of inputted into that number that are contributing to that number. And they probably haven't updated their forecast since we have a little bit more information on Shanghai and Texas. So I think those that have updated, most of them are probably below this figure. And those more recent updates are going to be a better gauge on what the street is actually expecting. But of course, these numbers are what's going to be judged in terms of the headlines when we do get the report.
So obviously, I'm a little bit below that, certainly expecting that to be a quote unquote miss. But again, the importance of that, I think, you know, is relatively minor. And I think Wall Street probably realizes that though, might also find the occasion one that they could take advantage of. So we'll see on that. But those are, you know, my thoughts in terms of the consensus.
And then kind of finally here, just in terms of timing, I'm going to expect this by Tesla's own standards that they, you know, their self regulation that they can post this within three days at the end of the quarter. So that's three business days as we have once seen before.
So that could technically be all the way through the end of day on Wednesday, since the quarter will end this weekend. But usually they get it out on the second calendar day of the next quarter. So we should be looking for this on Monday, most likely, probably before market open. That would be my best guess.
If we don't get it, then maybe after hours Monday or before market on Tuesday would probably be the next most likely times. But we'll keep an eye out for it on Monday morning.
All right, I think that is it for today then. So as always, thank you for listening. Thank you for listening. Make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications. You can also find me on X at Tesla podcast. And we'll probably see you on Monday morning for the next episode of Tessel Daily. Thank you.