Hey everybody Rob Maurer here welcome back I hope everybody is having a great holiday season thank you for the flexibility on scheduling as of course the holidays are going on and I've got a lot of things to wrap up with other work before the end of the year so appreciate that but we've got a lot of catch up on here so let's jump right into it
Tesla on day to day down 3.2% closing at $253.18 a NASDAQ down about well I guess three one hundredths of a percent today so pretty much flat we did see a couple of days out of our performance for Tesla prior to this we're actually now with a drop today right around where we left off on Friday so not too much movement but we do have quite a bit of news again to catch up on.
Most exciting of that news I think is that Tesla has actually started to roll out FSD beta version 12.1 to more employees Tesla scope is saying that this has gone to quote unquote wave one which they say includes 15,000 plus personally owned Tesla employee vehicles so this would be a pretty massive expansion over version 12.0 presumably that went to I think just a very select group of Tesla employees. Elon did comment on this as well saying that version 12 is already on a lot of cars but given that it is a completely new architecture they're doing a lot of extra testing he said it works very well in California but needs more training for heavy heavy precipitation areas of course a lot of areas fall in that category but Tesla is going to be over fit for California in terms of the training data at least for a little bit and as I get more training data and feed that into version 12 which of course is the big update to N10 neural networks hopefully that will improve things in other regions as well. So very excited for this you know we we'd heard some targets from Tesla I don't know you know these were official targets or anything but we'd heard some rumors that Tesla was targeting end of the year for version 12 to be released this going to a broader group of employees makes it look like we are very close to that point at least.
I think Tesla's scope had previously mentioned that they were now targeting in January maybe a couple of weeks ago so with this hopefully this testing goes well and maybe we end up seeing version 12 on customer cars within the next you know month or two. That would be really exciting of course with the huge update being you know N10 neural network zero with version 12 and I think we're all really excited to see the progress and see how things progress even from that point we shouldn't expect version 12 to be a flip of the switch immediately but hopefully it's the right architecture that can allow Tesla to continue to progress very rapidly from that point.
So very excited about that update on version 12. We also got some good news on China insured vehicle numbers so the strength has continued with the week of December 18th through the 24th yielding 18,500 insured vehicles for Tesla in China. This is the second best of the year after last week had already been the second best of the year so this topped it a bit. This put the quarter up to 156,700 vehicles through 12 weeks. That's up 17% Q3 of 10% to Q2 up 28% to Q1 at this point in the quarter. It's actually pretty much in on par with the record from Q2 for total quarter depends if you're looking at actually a quarterly figure or 13 week figure usually we're comparing week over week numbers here so it's about 3000 short of that 13 week figure from Q2 but if we have another week of this caliber in the final week of the quarter then we could be looking at a plus 10% quarter above the previous record. So really exciting to see that strength continue. Hopefully we'll see another week of this as we close out the quarter.
Now as we do that of course we do have the delivery and production report coming soon. We're going to do a bit of an abridged version of expectations here for this report. This report should come out on most likely Tuesday morning if Tesla's previous cadence is anything to go by. We'll watch out for that report on Tuesday morning. But as we can see here these are my expectations for production so we've got Q4 down here. Of course with China it's a little bit easier because we already have figures for October and November. So looking at those figures plus what we might do in December if we just assume similar production rates as November. We've actually got an extra day there so December could even be a larger number than what we saw in November. Could put the total quarter up to about 267,000 just out of gigashang high. Then if we look at the other factories we should have a little bit less downtime Berlin and Texas both had some downtime in the third quarter. We haven't really heard as many reports of that this quarter so I'm assuming there's going to be an increase for both of these factories. I have it as more significant in Texas.
For Lynn, I've got at about 50,000 which is just below 4000 per week accounting for maybe some downtime in there that's about what the production run rate would be. This would match with reports that we had heard previously that Tesla had sort of dropped production down after peaking at a higher rate of course which does fit with of course data that we had previously seen in prior quarters.
So my expectations are still relatively low for Berlin relative to what its ultimate capacity could be but at this time it seems like Tesla's slow playing it a little bit. They've said we've heard reports that maybe that relates to shifts and things like that.
Then for Texas there was downtime presumably for production upgrades in the third quarter. Hopefully we're seeing a higher yield from that factory this quarter. I've got production there at a little bit less than 5000 per week. Again maybe some downtime in quarter would give us about 60,000 from that factory.
Between the two I'm at about 110,000 and then if we hop out of three months again these are just estimates based on how these all fit together in each quarter. But I'm showing a slight decline as I assume Tesla is not going quite as hard on model S and X production. Remember we had those reports from Panasonic that production was being lowered for 18, 650 cells which go to the S and the X and we saw a big drop in production for the S and the X and Q3. So with those couple of changes I'm expecting another drop in S and X production to around 12,500 this quarter.
And then I expect model three Tesla probably just not going quite as hard as they usually would as presumably were not too far off from a highland update in the US as well. So expecting Fremont to drop a little bit I wouldn't be surprised if it dropped even a little bit more than this.
But altogether that's yielding about 509,000 vehicles produced which would be by far of course a record for production would be up 18% quarter over quarter but of course downtime less quarter and 16% year over year. That would put production well above 1.8 million for the year and then if we look at deliveries this is not my forecast so I've noted that here just to be clear.
But if Tesla tries to get to their original guidance of 1.8 million vehicles per year or for 2023 rather they need about 476,000 in Q4 so just put that number in here so you guys can see what that looks like. That'd be up 9% quarter over quarter, 17% year over year.
There's plenty of inventory to go around if Tesla's anywhere close to this production number. As we can see coming into the quarter Tesla had about 16 days of inventory a little over 90,000 vehicles in inventory. Most of the preceding quarters have been inventory increasing quarters so those are in red here. The drawdown quarters would be in green so inventory did draw down a little bit last quarter but not quite as much as I had expected at that time which means there's still plenty of inventory around for this delivery number to come closer to the production number or even potentially exceeded. I don't think anyone expects that but there's certainly a possibility.
Right now on deliveries I think the analyst consensus is just a bit above this right around the lower 480,000 range so we don't have the analyst company compiled. The company compiled analyst consensus yet. We'll keep an eye out for that but the expectations are for Tesla to just get a little bit above that 1.8 million guidance for the year. So we'll keep an eye out on that. Again that should happen on Tuesday morning and we'll try to have our normal reaction to that as well.
We did have an update from Piper Sandler talking about this too so just to kind of quickly show their numbers. For production they're at 515,000 vehicles. You can see the split between factories there Shanghai and other so a little bit lower than me on Shanghai a little bit higher on other and they're quite a bit higher on deliveries but I don't think they've updated this estimate for a while and they do say that the production from other factories and the delivery number is a little bit more difficult to forecast this quarter of course so they're a little bit less confident in the delivery figure here.
They view that as being anywhere from a range of I think 470,000 at the low to maybe 510,000 at the high. So gives you an idea från Piper Sandler what they're thinking for this quarter. Oh 15, 515 up there.
All right we do have a few other rumors here to report on so the first one coming from Bloomberg they are saying that according to sources people familiar with the matter Tesla is preparing to roll out an updated version of the Model Y probably not too surprising following the highland updates for the Model 3. I think we all kind of expect that we've heard possible code names of Juniper for this update but they say Tesla is currently conducting preparation work and that mass production of an updated Model Y from Shanghai could start as soon as mid 2024. They also talked about how there's going to be a little bit of downtime early in the year in 2024 for Chinese New Year that should be expected that happens for Tesla every year but they say that that would be for a partial upgrade. I don't know if that would relate to Juniper and there would need to be more downtime after that they're not going to complete the transition if there is a transition at that time but something to be aware of of course as always when we head into Q1. So keep an eye on that Tesla did comment apparently in China saying that this information or this report is not true. We've heard comments like that before it's tough to put a whole lot of weight into them again they could be talking about one specific piece of information in the report which could largely be true they could still deny it with that kind of language so we'll see I think again widely expected that this update for the Model Y similar to highland would probably happen at some point at least for Shanghai next year.
Alright also in the sort of rumor category we've got an update on India seems like we've got a lot of these but this is the latest one. So the report here is that Tesla's points to enter its car manufacturing plant in Gujarat with the official announcement expected during the forthcoming vibrant Gujarat summit in January 2024 according to your top sources. So we'll keep an eye out for that of course next month this would seem to be a little bit of an inverse of what we most recently talked about where India had seemed to step back a little bit from some of the provisions that would maybe reduce tariffs on EVs that were imported which would allow Tesla to kind of get their business established before really investing which would make a lot of sense. So we'll see there wasn't more official comments on this from one of the ministers of this state saying that Tesla has Tesla officials have visited Gujarat but have visited an indication suggest a preference for the state as location of their first factory in the country. Our team is in ongoing communication with Tesla officials and we remain hopeful of an announcement in this regard soon. So that's a little bit you know less strong language than what this sort of unofficial report would be just saying that they're hopeful that an announcement is happening at some point and they'd think that there's a preference for this state. So we'll see again more news on that hopefully in January when this event does happen.
We've also got a rumor on potentially hardware 5 so Elon has mentioned before that you know hardware 4 is going to be an improvement over hardware 3 hardware 5 someday will be an improvement over hardware 4. So there's a report out of I can't remember where this one is Gizmo China saying that Tesla has confirmed its participation in TSMC's 3 nanometer process chip designs for the upcoming year. So they say this is scheduled for 2024 and that's really all that we have from this report. That to me would be a little bit soon. If you go back and you look at reports on hardware 4 that was also the case with hardware 4 we had reports that Tesla was working with you know various different providers to build these chips for Tesla and I think they originally I'll probably get it wrong but my memory is that there were reports that this would happen a year or two sooner than we've actually now seen it implemented. I would imagine that's probably going to end up being the case for any of these reports on hardware 5 too. Obviously we've just now seen the transition over to hardware 4 and I think we're actually still waiting on it for the US produced model 3. We'll have to keep track of but without the hardware 4 transition even complete or recently complete it would be surprising to see this transition happen so fast to the next generation. I guess that would be probably 2025 at the earliest maybe 2026 but for it to be on presumably TSMC's latest process and I don't stay quite up to date on that but if not the latest one of the most recent would mean good things for just the capabilities of that ship in general. So not too surprising but we'll keep an eye on that.
We've also got a report from Bloomberg that Uber is looking to quote unquote team up with Elon Musk and Tesla with Tesla to enter Japan. Team up with Tesla to enter Japan's taxi market. If I can get through this it's been a bit I got to shake off the rust but they say that Uber would initially roll out 30 Tesla Model Y's increasing to 100 electric cars in 2024. Sounds like Japan is maybe easing some restrictions on ride sharing companies which would allow Uber to get a little bit of a foot in the door but obviously pretty small in terms of the overall scope or scale of the vehicle fleet that they would be working with Tesla on here.
As we've seen Tesla and Uber have partnered in other ways and throughout various different periods of time most recently we talked about how there is a promotion going on for Uber drivers in the United States to receive an additional discount on Tesla vehicles before the end of the year. So I won't be surprised if this is a accurate report, an accurate report.
So we've also got a couple updates on a cyber truck. I think I actually need to pull one up here. The order tracking order tracker that we've talked about from the cyber truck owners club forums has increased significantly so more orders have been more reservation holders have been allowed to order from Tesla. When we left this off it was in the 200s now we're up to 527 orders in this tracker. Of course that's going to increase as more people become aware of it. We've talked about it here. People have mentioned it on X and things like that. So more awareness of this is going to drive the number up but it does look like Tesla's continued to invite a pretty significant number of people which have now placed orders for the cyber truck as well. So good to see those numbers continue to increase.
Another nice thing we've got a kind of a quick pull from heat map which has asked respondents. They pulled a hundred or sorry they pulled a thousand people which they say are across all 50 states in the US. They say the margin of error here is about 3% or so on the survey. So they ask respondents whether Elon Musk made them more or less likely to buy or lease a Tesla. You can see the results in February that's 20 or sorry 31% said they would be more likely to buy a Tesla. 36% said they would be less likely and then you can see how those have changed since February to early November. So that dropped to 27% which said less likely, pretty significant drop and increased to 35% saying Elon Musk made them more likely. And of note, if the percentages flip here where you've got 35% saying more likely 27% saying less likely, obviously that leans more in favor of the more likely side of the bucket. And then of course in the middle you've got 38% saying no impact. So nice to see that. Not sure how meaningful this is but it also be nice to see kind of a comparison to last year of course. But certainly a positive at least I'll take it. Notably this was before the post from Elon on X that resulted in a lot of advertising advertisers to pause on X.
So maybe that would change this a little bit but it does also show that sentiment is subjected to change and can change over time which I think is important to remember as well. Speaking of sentiment, Tesla's been doing more PR efforts, public relations efforts like we had talked about last week. This one Tesla has again refuted a Reuters article. I think the post that they had previously also refuted a Reuters article. We had talked about this one. This was basically where Reuters had seemingly gotten access to some service logs and dug through those service logs to try to find the most interesting things they could find. They also kind of interlaced customer anecdotes with that. So Tesla fights back. It's a lot of stuff that we talked about. They also share a little bit more that we didn't have information about like one of the anecdotes that was shared in the Reuters article represented the customer side of the story. Of course didn't get tested side of the story. Not the Tesla is necessarily going to comment but that side of the story was not shared. Anyway, Tesla says that the customer represents this as a failed component but actually in reality it was a component that was damaged during a crash. Reuters had said that this was a brand new vehicle. It had very low mileage but there's still the possibility of getting in a crash of course with low mileage. So Tesla just adding a lot of context. It's nice to see them providing this type of information because again, pieces like that we don't necessarily have. We can speculate that this would likely be the case but for Tesla to kind of bring some additional facts is always nice to see as well.
Elon also did a little bit of this too. There was a report from the Daily Mail that a Tesla robot had attacked an engineer. This was from a couple of years ago. I think it was a situation with just a KUKA robot, you know, a normal robot that Tesla would use for manufacturing. Injuries happen in manufacturing. It's something that Tesla posts about in their impact report about the decline in that year for year which is always good.
But Elon commented on this saying, you know, you can see just kind of the thumbnails here suggesting that this is a Tesla Optimus, Tesla Bot attack. Some other publications did something similar. Elon says, truly shameful of the media to dredge up an injury from two years ago due to a simple industrial KUKA robot arm found in all factories and imply that it is due to Optimus now. So again, pushing back a little bit. This one is quite a bit more ridiculous than of course the report from Reuters. I think anyone that has any sense could see that this is not the case since Optimus is not currently in a state that probably is capable of attacking people. Nevertheless, nice to see some clarification there from Elon.
And then another interesting post from Elon on X, Tesla economics shared a mid-journey, I assume here, probably mid-journey version six, rendering of or a render rather of Tesla vehicle saying that $25,000 compact Tesla vehicle put the nail in the coffin of legacy automakers. Elon commented saying good design. It's pretty interesting. You wouldn't necessarily think this looks like a $25,000 car or something that could be a $25,000 car with sort of the goalwing doors here. But it is actually not too far off of what we had previously seen in the Walter Isaacson biography of this robot tax concept, which had more of the bull probably butterfly style wings, butterfly style wing doors as opposed to what we're seeing here. So really not all that different, maybe not outlandish in terms of where we'd seen a concept previously from Tesla. So kind of interesting to see Elon's comments on that.
All right, and the last couple of things for today, Tesla, sorry, an interesting comment on the last video from Friday, we've talked of course a lot about the efforts of unionized. I'm really struggling today with the words guys. I appreciate the patience. All right, so Sweden, we've talked a lot about the unionization efforts in Sweden. I get that one, get tripped up on that a lot. But the unionization efforts in Sweden, we got an interesting comment here on the last video that Tesla found a little bit of a way around what had been a ruling in a court that did not allow Tesla or rather continue to allow the post office to not deliver Tesla license plates. I think we got that right. So Tesla's apparently found a way around this according to this comments. I haven't been able to verify this, but I think it's probably accurate. Apparently by changing the ownership to the customer right after the order, they can send a replacement plate directly to the owner. The replacement plate will be sent to them and they bring the plate then when they pick up the car from Tesla. If they don't have the plate yet, Tesla can then do a temporary plate while the customer waits for that plate.
So it sounds like Tesla's figured out a workaround for this. If anyone can validate that, that would be amazing, but just thought that was an interesting update that I wanted to pass along. And then Xiaomi has unveiled what they expect to be their first EV. So the SU seven kind of interesting, obviously a big name in consumer electronics. So this will be their, you know, first adventure into electric vehicles. Apparently, this is going to come out in the next few months. It's a pretty high performance vehicle. Apparently is going to be able to do zero to 60 in 2.8 seconds. It's going to have just over 100 kilowatt hour battery pack and 800 kilometers of range on the CLTC test cycle. So that is of course going to be a little bit different than the EPA test cycle. That'd be 500 miles of range on the CLTC test cycle. If we're talking EPA, not sure where that puts it probably in the 400ish range, probably more towards the low end, but obviously a pretty significant amount of range on this vehicle.
So I don't think they've announced pricing details sounds like that'll come in the next few months, but something interesting to keep an eye on there. And then lastly, just a quick look at the calendar. So of course, next Monday, we will have New Year's Day. So the markets will be closed. The NASDAQ will be closed that day. This is the next week. It's going to be the next week. But that'll be when we, and of course, more wrap up the year and get the Q4 delivery and production report likely on Tuesday. That will likely be the next episode.
Again, I've got a lot of stuff to take care of this week. So I'm going to be off again tomorrow, but we'll certainly keep an eye out for those delivering production numbers and regroup once we have those.