There is a dark side to this, at least in the short term. While it made 18,345 EVs in the second quarter, that last-minute rush left it shipping 14,370 of them. If you'd plunked down cash for a Model S or Model X early this year, there was a real chance that it was still sitting in a boat or truck as summer began. In tandem with earlier orders, there were 5,150 cars still on their way -- almost twice as many as at the start of 2016.

The figures underscore the challenges Tesla faces as it shoots for its goal of building 500,000 cars a year by 2018. Even with the help of its battery-making Gigafactory, it still faces a lot of risks: it has to not only scale its production to fulfill a massive amount of Model 3 demand, but find a way to get all those cars to customers in a timely fashion. It doesn't want to see a repeat of this last quarter's setbacks on a much larger scale, as that would amount to tens of thousands of annoyed customers twiddling their thumbs.