One of the underappreciated assets of Tesla, even by many bulls, is the degree to which even Tesla under shoots on demand.
What I remember from the Model S + X rollouts, was that part of the design thinking behind Model X was that it would be a necessary second model and body style to get the combined S+X worldwide market to 20k units/year. Then Model S went off and did something like 60-80k units/year by itself. Totally undercalled that. Today, S+X are drifting back to 100k units/year despite the lowest priced model (the short range variants) having been removed from the lineup. That tells me that if Panasonic + Tesla really wanted to, they could expand the cell supply and increase the number of S+X they are selling if they really wanted to (but don't need to).
I remember from the Model 3 first day reservations, reading a story that in the internal pool on the number of reservations they'd get the first day, the craziest internal VP went with 100k. Who could imagine 100k people putting down $1,000 on a car they'd barely or not even seen yet, much yet that many of them would camp out overnight to wait in line to get early in line? My wife and I put in our reservation about 5 minutes before Elon went on stage that evening, and were something like #120k in line. They obviously were too low on the demand for Model 3.
I claim that to this day, we STILL don't know what worldwide demand for Model 3 is - it's still entering new markets. And 3 is the less popular body style - Y is coming this quarter. It's entirely reasonable to expect that the demand for Y will be significantly higher than the demand for 3.
Cybertruck reservations / demand - WAY higher than Elon and Tesla were expecting. Turns out there IS a desire for electric trucks - especially electric trucks with ridiculous specs and that can rough house.
Elon and Tesla do regularly make the point that all of this is in the context of no advertising - that the more vehicles they sell, the more owners they have showing their friends their car, and the more people there are that are explaining about electric life, and how amazing the cars are.
So far, the more they sell, the more demand there is. Clearly this virtuous cycle has to have an end to it. They only end we've seen for any of the cars so far is Roadster, S, and X - and that's because Tesla decided they were close enough to the end of the cycle that they stopped increasing supply as a company decision - not a market demand decision. And without even trying hard (advertising) to see if worldwide demand could be nudged higher.
How much of a thing can you sell, when the more of it that you sell, the more of it people want to buy?
