Thanks, but my question, and the post I was responding to, were about QOQ deliveries in the UK. Your response is about YOY.
Q1 2023 13,355
Q4 2022 22,404
In the post I responded to,
@Todd Burch estimated 4,203 for Q1 2023. He obviously underestimated March deliveries; it seems like the wave was still in effect for the UK.
Judging from the Q1 numbers by model, and the comment by
@thx1139, the answer to my question is that UK vehicles (Right Hand Drive) all come from Shanghai, and the Model 3 line there was shut down for part of Q1 (retooling and/or holiday?).
Does that make sense?
Also, there is a seasonality issue in the UK due to semi-annual model year changes in early April.
Hopefully all these factors mean Q2 should be a good quarter in the UK.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to make an accurate prediction of UK deliveries in March. I have no business doing that, as I'm not doing any research or trying to reason explanations for anything. I don't even have a spreadsheet set up
.
In that post I was just trying to roughly estimate Europe Q1 deliveries as a whole--just saying that based on the Jan/Feb deliveries, if we assume 40% of UK's numbers get delivered in March, they would total 4203. Purpose of the whole discussion was to try to estimate how Europe's Q1 numbers compared to Q4 without paying too much attention to any one country in particular. As you pointed out, Model 3 line in Shanghai was down for a bit, and after resuming those cars need to get shipped to Europe, so it's not surprising that the UK missed out on many Model 3 deliveries in Q1.
I think all this discussion about "Country A had great sales!" (aka Norway or Portugal or Spain in Q1) and "demand in Country B plummeted" (aka UK or Germany) are overblown. Bulls (of which I am one) incorrectly use this info to pump TSLA, and bears use it to suppress TSLA. As much as I hate bears arguing that demand is dead when January Model 3 sales plummet in Croatia, I cringe just as much when people say "Tesla outsold everything in March!" (of couse it did, that's when the bulk of shipments from Shanghai arrive).
Truth is, they're both wrong--at least until the wave is truly flattened for real.
Most of the the variation in a given country has little to do with demand and everything to do with everything else:
The reality is that, quarter-to-quarter and even month-to-month, shipments from Factory A get distributed to different places for a myriad of reasons (logistics, local incentives/expiration of incentives, production schedules of left-hand-drive vs. right-hand-drive vehicles, etc). So we see alternating peaks and valleys in a specific country, but if you zoom out and look at the quarter as a whole (all regions) you see steady growth. Personally, that's what I care about most. How many cars are sold in the country of Hoochieland in Q1 vs. Q4 mean nothing to me. Sure, it's nice to see improvements--but it doesn't really mean anything or provide any insight to the larger picture.
Q1 has grown over Q4. That's excellent, as almost everyone else has seen a Q4-> Q1 drop (even Tesla often sees this). Tesla's growth is a little bit slower now compared to what it could be, but that's because of the world macroeconomic environment's uncertainty and high interest rates...not because people suddenly don't like Teslas.
People who claim UK demand has plummeted, for example, are looking at the data with blinders on. As you point out (and I agree), UK probably has a high percentage of Model 3 deliveries compared to other models, so the Shanghai Model 3 line shutdown in Q1 (and the need to ship them to the UK from Shanghai) affected deliveries in Q1. Probably had very little to do with UK demand.
It's the big picture that matters.