The latest update on Tesla's global electric car order backlog and wait times shows that the decline continues towards potentially the lowest level so far this year.
According to Troy Teslike, which provides very interesting Tesla stats and forecasts, the estimated order backlog as of September 7, 2022 is about 381,000 cars (globally), which is about 33,000 or 8% less than 414,000 on August 31.
The numbers are based on carefully tracked Tesla-related stats (production volume, average wait times), as shown in the attached tweet.
A drop of 8% in just a week is a pretty significant change in the supply/demand balance, which is now at a similar level as it was in early January 2022.
The number of 381,000 cars, compared to Tesla's manufacturing capacity, is equivalent to about 93 days of production - down from 102 at the end of August. It means that it's now lower than in November 2021 (97 days).
According to Troy Teslike, the change is associated mostly with increased manufacturing capacity in China, which allowed Tesla to significantly decrease wait times to just a few weeks.
"Hi everybody. Tesla's order backlog was 381,000 units on Sep 7, equal to 93 days of global production. The drop happened in China where the wait times for new orders have been getting shorter for a while."
If we check the details, it turns out that the situation in California is not changing that much. The estimated order backlog actually increased from over 204,000 to over 208,000, but due to a higher production rate, the average wait time decreased from 131 days to 125 days.
In a separate post, Troy Teslike notes that Tesla came across some challenges in China, where production is at a near record/record rate.
Overall, the balance between supply and demand is expected to improve even more, especially once the two new plants (in Germany and in Texas) increase production by an order of magnitude.
Hopefully, Tesla will be able to gradually reduce the wait times to 4-8 weeks (or 28-56 days), which would be much better for buyers.
With just several days left until the end of the quarter, Tesla is expected to set a new quarterly record of EV deliveries, at 358,000 (analyst consensus) to 366,000 (Troy Teslike forecast). It would be more than 100,000 over and more than a 50% increase year-over-year.
