The China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) announced last week that Tesla had sold 71,704 Model 3 and Model Y cars in October. Today the CPCA has revealed the majority of those cars were exported to other markets, as is expected with October being the first month of the quarter.
According to the organization’s figures Tesla exported 54,504 vehicles during the 31 day month, more than half of the country’s total vehicle exports in October.
The high volume of exports from Tesla is a new record for the Texas-based automaker, beating their previous export record of 42,463 vehicles set just the month before in September.
The October results dwarfed those from other automakers, with the next closest competitor being SAIC, which exported 18,688 vehicles last month.
The numbers drop off considerably from there with the bottom 8 automakers accounting for a total of just 8,666 units exported.
With the more than 54,000 exports that means Tesla delivered 17,200 cars in China in October. Critics will want you to believe this is yet another sign of demand in China falling off a cliff, even though this has been disproven many times before, even by CEO Elon Musk himself.
Last year Musk outlined Giga’s Shanghai’s production cycles, explaining that the factory focusses its efforts in the first half of a quarter on exporting newly produced vehicles to other markets like Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.
As a result domestic sales in China are always lower in the first month of a quarter, before rebounding in the second half the quarter as Tesla shifts to delivering cars within China.
This is all because of Tesla announcing Giga Shanghai as their primary vehicle export hub in their Q2 2021 shareholder deck.
Tesla China sets new export record on near-record 76,965 sales in August: CPCA
