This is related to daily reported VINs. Normally reported VINs are clearly low on weekends like you see on the left side. However, recently, this started to change. See the table on the right. I observed the same thing happen at the end of other quarters.
Last quarter, somebody had asked me about days off in Q3. This was my answer, in case you find this interesting:
Here is what I can tell: I look at the VIN chart
here and guess where they are in terms of total units produced so far. Let's say 139,872. Then I subtract past quarters. Production was 94,268 at the end of Q3. That leaves us with 45,604 so far in Q4. Then I look at where the trendline is heading. Let's say 60K produced at the end of Q4.
This quarter, production estimates will be difficult because of the huge gap between 136K-150K. If I'm going to be wrong, I prefer to under-estimate instead of over-estimating. In fact, all my Model 3 prod estimates so far (Q1, Q2, Q3) were lower than actual numbers. This quarter is especially tricky. The Model 3 VIN chart looks more and more messed up thanks to Tesla assigning VINs non-sequentially and adding artificial gaps. This doesn't happen and never happened with S/X.
Then I calculate deliveries. I talked about delivery calculations
here two weeks ago. I keep changing my methods all the time. I run two methods side by side and tweak one of them and then I might change my mind and go back etc. Generally speaking, estimating deliveries is more difficult than estimating production and it doesn't always work out. For example, this was my accuracy in Q3 2018. More details
here.
97.78% Model S + X production
98.77% Model 3 production
88.83% Global Model S deliveries
94.42% Global Model X deliveries
98.63% Global Model 3 deliveries
The accuracy of the first, second and fifth estimate is good, fourth is OK, third is poor.
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