Tesla has been building innovative and industry-leading battery-powered cars for about a decade, starting with the Roadster, and then the Model S and Model X. The company unveiled the Model 3 (their first mass-market electric car with 220 miles of range, priced at “$35,000″), in early 2017 and hundreds of thousands of people put down a $1000 deposit within a few days. Overall, the number of these pre-orders total about half a million! It was impressive for a car most people have not driven or even seen.

The company also has had optimistic timeframes for producing and shipping these vehicle: they had originally estimated production rates of 5000 cars/week by the end of 2017 and 10,000 cars/week(!) in 2018. That’s Civic or Camry levels. These have since been delayed due to reports of “production hell” in scaling up mass production for the vehicles. Given the unprecedented demand and production challenges as Tesla transitions from niche automaker to mass-market production, I thought it would be worthwhile to track the sales of Model 3s as they are built and shipped to customers with the Model 3 Sales Tracker. Average sales price has been far above the $35,000 price initially announced. Production has reportedly passed 5000 cars/week intermittently, if not continuously, in the summer of 2018.

The graph will be updated as new data comes out on the sales of the Model 3 (using the estimates from InsideEVs.com). If you click on legend you can toggle on and off specific data, such as the number of pre-orders and see how the total sales (i.e. shipped to customers) compares with those initial orders. The dashboard at the top also shows the monthly production rates (average and the latest) and the number of months it will take to fill all the preorders at these rates (spoiler: it’s a long time). As a result, it looks like many of those pre-orders will be waiting into 2019 and maybe even 2020 and beyond before they get their Model 3.

This will be a fascinating story to watch over the next few years. Hopefully, they will work out their manufacturing issues quickly and can make good on their vision to lead themselves, other automakers and consumers to affordable zero-emission electric vehicles.

Bloomberg also has their own Model 3 Tracker here: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

It appears that their estimate is a bit higher than that of insideEVs. In the next few months we’ll see how their estimates jibe and whether to update our data. There’s lots of interest in this transition that Tesla is undertaking.



Data and Tools: This chart uses the Javascript plot.ly engine and monthly sales data from InsideEVs.com.