Tesla is opening a Megafactory in China

The factory will be able to produce 10,000 Megapacks per year, which are very large batteries used to store utility-scale amounts of electricity.

Tesla operates a Megafactory in California, capable of producing 10,000 Megapack units every year – equivalent to 40 gigawatt-hours of energy storage.

The first quarter also marked the fourth straight quarter that Tesla has produced more vehicles than it has delivered to customers.

Some of that may be due to the ramp up in production at two new factories, one in Texas, the other in Germany, which opened last spring, and a lag between that increased production and sales.

Tesla said there was an increase in the number of its more expensive models, the Model S and Model X, in transit to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as to the Asia Pacific region.

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But it does mean that over the last 12 months Tesla has produced 78,000 more cars than it has sold, suggesting that talk of strong demand by Tesla executives may not be backed up by the numbers.

That 78,000-vehicle excess production is equal to 5 per cent of the cars it has built.

First quarter sales trailed production by 18,000 vehicles, less than the gap in third and fourth quarter of last year, but still equal to 4 per cent of the vehicles it built.