This week Tesla Inc. will announce how many cars it built and sold for the quarter. It’s always a day of suspense for investors, especially after a tumultuous 2018 in which production tripled while still managing to fall short of dramatic targets set by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk. This time around there could be another surprise.
An experimental tool built by Bloomberg to track the rollout of Tesla’s Model 3 electric car suggests next week’s production total could approach 80,000 cars, far higher than the average analyst estimate of 64,400, according to research firm Visible Alpha. The gap between Bloomberg’s projection and the Wall Street consensus is more than $800 million worth of Model 3 cars.
The Bloomberg tracker relies on two sets of vehicles identification numbers: those Tesla registers in batches with the U.S. government prior to production and those submitted by new owners to Bloomberg after delivery. There’s been a flood of new VINs as Tesla rushes to deliver the car across multiple continents for the first time. Submissions have been notably frequent from Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. A new lower-priced edition of the of the Model 3—the $37,500 Standard Range Plus—has finished strong in the U.S. There’s little known about the launch in China.
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