I will preface the following with the disclaimer that the numbers I present below are a mix of fact, estimates, and some wild ass guesses. Please completely disregard the accuracy of any of the following and make your own decisions based on your own research.
Most of Europe's deliveries for December are in, at least, the likely large volume countries. We stand at an estimated 2,266 with UK being the estimate. UK SMMT has 225 in the other category and I removed 75 to come up with 150. That removal level is about consistent with other months.
GoodCarBadCar.net has a Q4 estimate of 4,650 for U.S. deliveries and provides RL Polk data for October and November in Canada. InsideEV's estimates 6,000. In my modeling of previous quarters, InsideEVs is usually about 8-10% too high in 2014. I chose to model 5,500 for the U.S. and 238 for Canada. In the last month of Q3, Canada had 194 sales, so I used 175 to guess for December, 2014. That means North America at 5,738 cars for the quarter which would be a new record.
Japan had a nice 137 deliveries. I took the Australia deliveries spreadsheet, counted the confirmed deliveries, and multiplied by 4 and chose 70 for Australia in December. For China, Tesla imported 4,344 vehicles by November. Assuming Tesla imported a flat number of cars in December and about the same as other last month of the quarter months, we're looking at 800 which means 5144 imports. I model that 20% of the last month of a quarter's imports don't get delivered, which means 1,751 deliveries for the quarter (down slightly from Q3) and 4,984 for the year. As usual, I have no real data for Hong Kong and model it in earlier quarters based on it being the last territory and basically subtract from the totals that Tesla provides. As a result, I have them modeled at 475 deliveries in Q4. If I am really wrong there, it is probably noise with estimates in other territories (U.S. in particular).
So before I state the modeled total, I must say that we have zero credible information from U.S. I looked into buying data sources, and at this point, I believe no one has truly credible U.S. data. As the U.S. represents a huge portion of Tesla's sales, this is a significant variable. Also, China deliveries lag imports and so that delay always adds a significant variance. I have zero real information on Hong Kong. Australia at this point is a wild ass guess but based on some real info. Further, I am not yet done doing a check on my model based on the regional information and ASP's as reported in Tesla's 10-Q in previous quarters.
At the moment, it looks to me that Tesla delivered 10,529 vehicles in Q4, 32,354 for the year, which is a miss of 650 vehicles. Of course, this is probably plus or minus 1,000 vehicles.
Some takeaways - it is possible that given the real data so far, Tesla did hit the 33,000 target. It is also very possible that they hit close enough to deliveries that the increased ASP from the P85D will cover the shortfall. Also, it is not abnormal for Tesla to provide additional information at or near a quarterly call that completely negates a slight miss in deliveries. Finally, we do not know how much the market as a whole has baked in for its expectations of Tesla's Q4 performance. At $210 or so, in my mind the street is expecting a miss of some sort.
