I'm guessing the Q1 delivered Model S number is closer to 4500 than 5000, given the first week off in January. Also, I saw the owner of a high 7000 VIN with multi-coat red in another thread here saying he is waiting for the delivery button to appear. Once again, just because there are VINs in the 8000s being delivered does not mean that all of the VINs prior to that number have been delivered.
No it doesn't, which is why I only looked backwards to January and February so I could include the outliers.
By March 1st there had already been a solid 3,000 deliveries and the increase in delivered cars (which shadows production) was already visible and shifting the trendline. This data was with VIN's in the 6,000 range and the outliers were visible and accounted for. Those 3,000+ deliveries included 1,300+ deliveries in January (low because they took a week off) and 1,700 in February.
In early March the pace of deliveries increased relative to the previous trend, and we have anecdotal evidence that Tesla increased production to 500+ cars per week at that point. We are a month away from that data now, and the outliers are accounted for.
So there are at least three lines of evidence suggesting you are wrong. The one that you address (the inaccuracy of estimating current deliveries based on VIN number) points to 5,000+ deliveries by the end of the quarter, but is inaccurate for the reasons you state. In a few weeks the outliers in that data will resolve and it will become more reliable.
But the delivery data pointing to an acceleration in deliveries at the beginning of March is solid and the trend line it established supports the current delivery data. The 500+ car per week production rate in March is also solid. We have supplier reports from February which foreshadowed it, personal observations from folks on the factory tour reading messages congratulating the staff for the new production rate, and blog posts from Tesla itself boasting of it.
3,000+ cars were already delivered by March 1st. That is as close to a factual statement as we can make without an official announcement from Tesla. Tesla would have had another 400-500 cars being processed for delivery at that point. At a 400 unit/week production rate they would have produced another 1,600+ cars in March and ended the month with ~4,600-4,700 delivered cars and another 400-500 cars in process.
However, at the actual production rate of 500 cars (which began in late February) they would have delivered a minimum of 2,000 additional cars by the end of the quarter, with another 500+ in process.
Here is what George Blankenship wrote on March 21st -
During the past three weeks we have averaged MORE than 500 Model S DELIVERIES per week, and it looks like we’ll be setting another record this week.
Again, 3000+ cars were delivered by March 1st. You can see the acceleration that week, which would correspond to the first week of the three that Blankenship is referring to. He refers to another record for deliveries anticipated for the week he wrote the blog. If you do the math, Tesla would have delivered 4,500+ cars by the end of that week. They still would have had a full week still remaining in March, at a time when they are flowing 500+ deliveries per week.
Every line of evidence points strongly towards Tesla delivering more than 5,000 cars in Q1 and your concern only addresses one of those lines of evidence.
Here is one more line of evidence. Accounting for the week off in January, Tesla spent 7 weeks at a 400 unit/week rate and by the end of March would have spent another 5 weeks at a 500 unit/week rate. That is 5,300+ vehicles based on public reporting, with the only assumption being that Tesla continued at the 500 unit rate for the week following Blankenship's announcement. Because of the + in every week, I find reports of 5,400 total units in Q1 to be highly credible.
There were several hundred units in transit at the end of Q4 last year. I can see the delivery spike that they created at the beginning of January, and simple physics dictates that they existed. That is 5,600-5,800 cars available for delivery in Q1. At a minimum 500 of those will likely still be in transit at the end of the quarter, which leaves us with 5,100-5,300 cars likely to be delivered. 5,000 is a very conservative number and 4,500 just is not credible.
