This morning InsideEVs published their January estimates of how many electric vehicles each manufacturer has sold in the U.S.

Tesla doesn’t not publish monthly sales figures, but rather reports deliveries on a quarterly basis.  So, InsideEVs uses their own method to estimate deliveries:

We never know for sure what the monthly numbers total up to until Tesla’s quarterly (or annual) updates add more clarity. However, we do our best to keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening.

To come to an estimated monthly number, we don’t simply take the quarterly estimate given by Tesla and divide it by 3 and hope it all works out. This is surely not how it works in the real world. We simply report from the data we accumulate ourselves, including first-hand accounts available from the factory and from the community itself.

Historically, while InsideEVs hasn’t been exact on monthly Tesla deliveries in the past, their estimates have been generally in the ballpark and provide useful information.

Most notable, InsideEVs estimates that Tesla has delivered 1,875 Model 3s in January.

According to Q4 2017 delivery figures from Tesla directly, Tesla produced 2,425 Model 3s in Q4 and delivered 1,550.  This means there were approximately 875 Model 3s in transit.

So in addition to the 875 Model 3s in transit, it appears that Tesla has delivered about 1,000 more in January.  And there could be roughly 1000-1500 or more in transit at the end of the month.

If InsideEVs estimates are accurate (which we don’t know until Q1 numbers come out in April), then we can guesstimate what the weekly Model 3 production rate is.  If we assume they sold 1875 Model 3s in January (875 from in-transit at end of December, and 1000 newly produced) and we assume there are 1,500 Model 3s in transit at the end of January, then the total amount of Model 3s produced in January would be 2,500 (or if only 1,000 were in transit at end of January, then that would be 2,000 produced).

We can also assume 4 weeks of production in January since the first several days of the year were probably taken off as holidays and retooling.  So over 4 weeks, Tesla likely produced 2000-2500 Model 3s.  If we take the high side of the estimate, 2500, and divide that by 4, we have an average week production rate of 625.  However, we know that the production rate was slower at the beginning of the month and was increasing toward the end with a goal of reaching 1,000/week the last week of January.

If Tesla did reach 1,000/week by the end of January, then their weekly production numbers could look like this:
January week 1: 300
January week 2: 450
January week 3: 700
January week 4: 1000

We will likely hear more information from Tesla itself next week during their Q4 quarterly earning (Tesla announces Feb 7 as Q4 earnings results date, here’s what to expect).

Updated 10:07am, Feb 1, 2018: It’s been brought to my attention that TMC user dennis had shared that the factory was closed the first week of January, so let’s assume first week only had 2-3 days in it, and then a full 3 weeks.  So, here’s an updated guesstimate on production numbers for January (if total production was 2500):

January week 1 (2-3 days): 150
January week 2: 550
January week 3: 800
January week 4: 1000