Tesla 2024 Vehicle Production

Historic Tesla Quarterly Vehicle Production and 2024 Estimates

EV sales are increasing each year and 2024 will undoubtedly continue this tread. As interest rates in the US are reduced throughout 2024, the pressure on vehicle sales in general (EV or not) should be relieved.

Each year on The Tesla Life, we attempt to estimate Tesla's global production for the upcoming year. Last year, my estimate for 2023 was 1.93 million. The actual production was 1,845,985, or 1.85 mil. So I was only off by 4%. Of the three hosts/panelists on the show, I was the closest. However, one former panelist, Russel, guessed 1.88 mil and edged me out by 50,000 vehicles. He was only off by 1.5% (impressive). 

I want to beat him (and the other panelists again) this year. So I'm going to crunch the numbers in many ways and come out with a guess at the end of the post.

Contest Rules 

We have to publicly share our guess on January 17th which we generally do live on the show. The guess cannot be a range, you only get one guess (no bull number, bear number; no plus or minus 5%...). You can be as specific as you want (e.g., 2,345,678 vehicles) or round it. Rounded values will be expanded with zeros as needed, so a guess of 2 million is considered 2,000,000. You can use any tools you want to generate the estimate, if you want to ask ChatGPT or Grok, go for it. And the most painful part of all, you don't get to update your guess, no matter what news comes out, no matter what Musk says in the earnings calls; no changes.

Estimates

You can see Tesla's quarterly production data back to Q4 2020 is charted in the graph above. One of the ways I've generated estimates is to simply use the trendline feature in Google Sheets. I plotted the trend as Linear, Exponential, and Polynomial and then added up the quarterly results. This gave me results from 2.22 to 2.39 million for 2024.

The next method I used was to look at the quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) growth. From Q4'20, this has been an average of 10%. Extending this into 2024, resulted in 2.03 mil units for 2024. Our lowest result yet. 

Rather than comparing this quarter to last quarter, a quarter is often compared to the same quarter in the previous year; this is called year-over-year (YoY). Looking back further in time, it's not surprising to see a larger growth value average of 47%. Using this YoY value gave an estimate of 2.71 mil (our highest yet). 

If we look at year-over-year, then we have to look at year-on-year (YOY). 2023 was 35% higher than '22. 35% growth would be 2.49 million. However, 2022 was 47% over '21. The average of these two YOY values is 41%. Using this YOY value gives a value of 2.60 mil. 

Next on our list, we'll look at the great work by James Stephenson on X. As you can see in the log scale chart above, James has chosen 2020 as his anchor year and established a 50% sales growth rate. Our estimation game is about Production, not Sales; so let's make a few tweaks to his model and then extend it into 2024. Doing this yields an estimate of 2.58 million; very close to the YOY result.

Looking Forward

All the estimates that we've made so far are based on looking at historic data and various ways to extrapolate that into the future. Now let's flip that around and see if there are big factors that will impact 2024. We briefly touched on interest rates in the opening. This will impact sales more than production, but there is some connection. If inventories get too high, production lines are taken down for upgrades, parts are not expedited... 

There are expansions of multiple Gigafactories planned or underway in 2024. Berlin and Austin have both been operating long enough to be fully staffed and ramped up to high-volume production. This was not the case in early 2023. Giga Mexico, Giga India or any other new location will not be a factor for 2024's production volume. 

As I'm writing this, news reports are coming out that Giga Berlin will stop most output for two weeks due to Red Sea disruption. Tesla has dealt with supply chain problems in the past, so I don't think this will be too big of a factor. Giga Shanghai is the most important factory for out put considerations. 

Model.Next 

When Tesla's Robotaxi platform comes to market, you can expect a significant increase in production volume. This vehicle will have the fastest raw materials to final vehicle time of any mass production vehicle. With the bulk of the vehicle from a single casting and most of the interior being inserted with the structural battery pack and no paint, these vehicles will be popping out of the factory truckloads at a time. However, I don't expect to see this car until 2025 at the earliest. 

Estimate Summary 

2024 Tesla Vehicle Production Estimates
Estimation Method	Volume Estimate
Linear	2,270,000
Exponential	2,390,000
Poly	2,215,000
QoQ	2,028,427 (Lowest)
YoY	2,714,490 (Highest)
YOY23	2,488,050
YOYAve	2,602,700
JS Method	2,580,544
Average	2,410,901

So I've generated 8 estimates and a mean value of those 8 as a 9th estimate. So which one should I use? Or should I go with something else? There's the joke 2,420,069 if you want to throw some Musk humor into the mix (this isn't that far from our average) or even the press the 2 key and run your finger to the right for 2,345,678. Both of which are within the range of estimates that we've generated.

In the past two years, I've been a little optimistic. Since I was over by 4% last time, let's take that average and reduce it by about 4% for something like 2,314,159. 

Leave your estimate in the comments below.