A ship carrying “well over” 4000 new Teslas is reportedly set to dock in NSW before Christmas, which would be the largest Tesla shipment ever to come to Australia.
The news comes from established Tesla shipping tracker VedaPrime, which claims 12 ships have arrived carrying Teslas during the fourth quarter of this year.
A 13th was scheduled to arrive but now won’t dock until the first quarter of 2023.
MSC Immacolata, carrying Teslas and no other vehicles, is en route to Port Kembla after a stop in Brisbane and is set to dock on December 21.
The shipping tracker also notes the 4000+ vehicles on board the MSC Immacolata beats the entire first year of Model 3s shipped to Australia in just one shipment.
It’s unclear when customer deliveries of this shipment will begin, or how many vehicles were on the other 11 ships which docked in Australia this quarter.
17,328 Tesla sales have been recorded in VFACTS this year, consisting of 9071 Model 3 sedans and 8257 Model Y SUVs.
Tesla said earlier this year it was looking to more evenly spread out its deliveries over a quarter, and its monthly sales figures in the second half of this year have certainly been more consistent.
Instead of see-sawing from a sizable number of sales to virtually none in the following month, Tesla recorded 2196 sales in November (1805 of which were Model Ys), plus 1109 in October, and 5969 in September.
The latter was its highest-volume month in 2022, the first year it has reported sales in VFACTS; it started doing so in March.
Though 2022 has already proved to be Tesla’s best year for sales in Australia, the company has had to contend with COVID-19 lockdowns in China – where Australian-market Model 3 and Model Ys are built – that have interrupted supply chains and forced it to briefly close its Shanghai plant.
Tesla said in a release of its second-quarter financial and production results that it was “focused on a record-breaking second half of 2022” in terms of vehicle production.
Tesla Inc. Chair Robyn Denholm, an Australian, also said in July she “wouldn’t be surprised” if the number of Teslas on Australian roads doubled by the end of the year, quoting a figure of 26,500 of the brand’s vehicles already on local roads.
To double its existing fleet by year’s end, it would need to sell more than 30,000 vehicles this year – still a bit of a reach, with 17,328 sales recorded to the end of November.
Tesla’s Shanghai plant can produce over 750,000 cars annually, making it the highest-capacity Tesla plant in the world.
