Tesla’s April sales figures for Giga Shanghai have been reported by the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA), and the automaker is off to a flying start for the second quarter of the year.
According to the CPCA Tesla sold an estimated 75,842 new Model 3 and Model Y cars built at Giga Shanghai in April. This is the automaker’s wholesale figure and includes both domestic deliveries and cars shipped off for export to other markets, some of which are going to Canada for the first time. The breakdown between domestic deliveries and exports should be released by the CPCA next week, but when looking at insurance data, which is a proxy for sales in the country, local deliveries should come in at around 41,000 units.
While April’s wholesale figure is a 15% drop from the 88,869 vehicles that were sold in the previous month, it is still a positive sign for Tesla as it was their second best month in 2023, and when looking at the factory’s historical figures, it was the best first month of a quarter in their history. If this pace continues Tesla could easily surpass the 201,000 sales in the fourth quarter of last year and set a new quarterly sales record at Giga Shanghai.
The signs are also positive when you look at Tesla’s sales volume so far in 2023 compared to the same time periods in previous years. With April’s 75,842 sales Tesla China has now accumulated over 305,000 sales in the first four months of the year. That dwarfs the nearly 184,000 vehicles Tesla sold from Giga Shanghai in the first four months of 2022, although those figures were heavily impacted by April’s COVID lockdown in China which resulted in just 2,000 sales.
Tesla’s sales figures for May should be interesting to see, as the automaker has increased prices across their entire lineup this month. For the Model 3 and Model Y there was a modest ¥2,000, or about $390 CAD/$290 USD increase to start the month, while just today the automaker also increased the price of the Model S and Model X by ¥19,000, or about $3,700 CAD or $2,750 USD.
