A lot of mixed signals going on in this subreddit this week. Some exuberance, some lamentation of decayed growth, some simultaneous sentiment that growth is magically back on the table, and frankly a total grab-bag of other assorted takes.

One thing keeps getting missed in the analysis though, and I'll be brief about it — Q3 2023 was a down quarter due to planned factory upgrades and retooling for the launch of Highland, which began China sales in October of 2023. You can go back at Tesla's own Q3 2023 deck which mentions the factory shutdowns several times, or contemporary reporting which also mentioned it.

Looking at the numbers quarter-by-quarter, the aberration is clear. It's hard to stay where Tesla would have ended up had Q3 2023 been a 'clean' quarter, but a linear interpolation (which isn't perfect by any means) between Q2 and Q4 would have expectations for Q3 at around 475k. Instead it missed that by 40,000 units:

• Q1 — 423k 📈
• Q2 — 466k 📈
• Q3 — 435k 📉
• Q4 — 485k 📈

Without that downtime, the 2024 YoY growth would almost certainly evaporate, and compared with the interpolation, Q3 2024's numbers of 463,000 disappoint. There's a good reminder here to always be careful when you do analysis — it isn't enough to simply compare one quarter to another one arbitrarily, or to even take year-over-year figures and call it a day.