Tesla just did something it has never done before.
The company posted its own delivery expectations for the
fourth quarter directly to its investor relations website.
For years, Tesla has compiled a consensus of Wall Street analyst
estimates, but only shared that data privately through emails to
a select list of analysts and major investors.
And on Monday, it published the numbers for everyone to see.
The median expectation is 4/23/99 vehicles.
For quarter 4/20/25, the average is 4/22, 8:50.
That would represent a 15% drop from the same quarter of last
year. That is not a good number, and
the fact that Tesla is putting it out there in public ahead of
the actual result tells you something about what they expect
the actual results to look like. And why would a company that is
supposed to be all about growth announce in advance that it is
about to post a big decline? Now, the answer has to do with
the end of the federal EV tax credit, a record third quarter
that pulled the man forward in a narrative that Tesla wants to
control. This is a defensive move.
We're going to walk through what these numbers actually mean, why
Tesla released them on their own and what it says about what the
company is doing and where they're headed.
And we'll get right into that after this very short break.
Now, Tesla is expected to report its Q4 delivery results by the
end of this week. And if the company hits the
consensus it published, full year 2025 deliveries will come
in at approximately 1.64 million vehicles.
That is an 8.3% decline from 2024, when Tesla delivered 1.79
million cars. It would mark the second
consecutive year of declining deliveries for the electric
automaker. In 2024, deliveries fell about
1%. This year, the drop accelerates.
That's a problem for companies whose valuation depends on
growth. Tesla trades at roughly 200
times forward earnings. The stock is up about 14% this
year, and those numbers do not normally go together with
falling sales. Now, the fourth quarter was
always going to be difficult. The $7500 federal EV tax credit
expired on September 30th, 2025 and under the Inflation
Reduction Act, the credit had been applied directly at the
point of sale, which made it even more attractive than the
old rebate structure. Going from that to nothing was
guaranteed to hurt the demand for a Tesla, and in the third
quarter buyers rushed to lock in the credit before it
disappeared. Tesla delivered a record 497,000
vehicles in Q3. That's about 75,000 more than
the Q4 consensus. In a lot of those Q4 sales got
pulled forward into Q3. That created a vacuum in Q4 the
Tesla is now trying to fill. Now, Tesla new Q4 was going to
be a rough one, Elon Musk said so on the July earnings call, he
warned shareholders of potentially rough quarters in
Q42025Q12026 and Q22026. And what he did not say was that
Tesla would publish its own lowered expectations ahead of
the actual numbers. That's the unusual part.
And by releasing the consensus itself, Tesla is trying to
anchor the conversation. If the company delivers 425,000
vehicles, that'll look like a beat against the 422A50
benchmark. Without the official
publication, the same number might have been framed as a miss
if anyone claimed 440-5000 was the target.
Now Bloomberg's consensus, which is compiled differently, sits
AT4404405000 sold, and that's 22,000 higher than Tesla's
posted figure. The gap matters because it
determines whether headlines say beat or miss.
Now, I've been digging through our analytics of the show and
notice that 37% of you are following this channel.
For you, I'm forever grateful the other 63% of you haven't hit
the follower subscribe button. I've been an independent
journalist covering Elon Musk Space Flight tech for the last
six years, and I'll continue for the next 10.
And all I ask from you is one second of your time and hit the
follow or subscribe button on the platform you're watching or
listening on right now. I'm extremely grateful for you
and blessed to have you in this community.
So thank you very much for that. Now, the underlying demand
picture is worse than the quarterly number suggests.
In November, Tesla's U.S. sales dropped to approximately 39,800
vehicles, according to estimates from Cox Automotive.
That's a 23% decline from November 2024.
There's also Tesla's lowest monthly U.S. sales volume since
January 2022. This happened despite Tesla's
best efforts to stimulate demand.
After the tax credit expired, the company launched new
standard versions of the Model 3 and Model Y priced about $5000
lower than the previous base models.
The cheaper variants were supposed to offset the loss of
the $7500 credit. They did not.
Cox reported that the standard versions mostly cannibalized
sales of the premium versions rather than expanding the
market. And Tesla is pulling every lever
that it has. The company is offering 0%
financing on the standard. Model Y is unusually steep
promotion for a model that only began deliveries weeks ago.
Tesla is also offering zero down leases and free upgrades on
inventory vehicles. These are roughly the most
aggressive end of quarter incentives the company has ever
offered. If the demand was there, they
would not be offering 0%. Financing and inventory levels
tell the same story. At the end of Q3, Tesla had
about 40 days of supply on dealer lots.
By November, the number climbed to 149 days, a 42% increase year
over year. Vehicles that were built to meet
pre exploration demand are now sitting unsold in lots.
Now, the US is not Tesla's only problem.
Sales have been declining in Europe, where the company faces
intense competition from Chinese EV makers offering newer, better
and more affordable models. In California, the largest EV
market in the country, Tesla's registrations fell 11.6% in
2024, even as the overall EV market grew slightly.
And if you remove Tesla from the equation, California's EV market
grew 20%. Tesla's market share dropped
from 60% in 2023 to 52.5% in 2024.
That trend has continued in the 2025 in The backlash against
Musk's political activities has not helped them at all.
Protests against Tesla have been documented at dealerships and
service centers. Musk's role in the Trump
administration, his support for far right political parties in
Europe, and his polarizing public statements have alienated
some potential buyers. So what does Tesla's investor
base see that the sales numbers do not show the answer.
Autonomy. Elon Musk has been pivoting the
company's narrative away from vehicle deliveries and toward
robotaxi's full Self driving software and humanoid robots.
Now we can argue that fundamentals do not matter for a
stock like Tesla, which is a bet on mobility, robotics and AI,
rather than a traditional automaker like Ford or
Chevrolet. Something like that.
Tesla launches robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025, and Elon
Musk has promised millions of autonomous vehicles on the road
just just a few years. He's been making similar
promises for years, though without actually delivering
anything. We know the Austin thing that's
happening right now and some small turnouts for the robo
taxis, but millions of these things in I think he said two
years. I don't see that happening.
We there's no way but investors, they keep buying the story.
The stock trades evaluations that assume future revenue
streams then do not yet exist. Now the the Tesla consensus
published came from 20 sell side analysts.
This includes Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays,
Deutsche Bank, Wedbush and UBS among a lot of others.
Tesla was careful to note that does not endorse any
information, recommendations or conclusions made by these
analysts. That is just a standard legal
language. The important part is that Tesla
chose to host this data and its own website rather than let
third party aggregators control the narrative.
The press release also included energy storage deployment
estimates, and we expect Tesla to deploy 13.4 GW hours of
battery storage systems in Q4 now that that business has been
growing even as vehicle sales decline.
Full year energy storage deployments are projected at
45.9 GW hours for 2025, rising to 63.9 GW hours in 2026 and
87.7 GW hours in 2027. The energy business does not get
as much attention as vehicles, but is becoming a larger part of
Tesla because it's not the first time that Tesla has lost access
to federal EV tax credits. The company hit the 200,000
vehicle cap under the old rules in 2018, which triggered a phase
out that ended the credit entirely by January 2020.
Now Tesla survived that transition.
They're here still, and the difference this time is the
competitive landscape. In 2020, Tesla held a dominant
position in the USEV market with a few serious rivals.
Today, Chevrolet, Ford, others are bringing affordable E VS to
market, and Chinese manufacturers are pushing hard
in Europe and Asia, where Tesla can't compete in.
BYD unveiled technology earlier this year that allows its cars
to charge in just a few minutes. Tesla's line is is aging.
The technology just isn't keeping up.
And Model 3 launched in 2017. The Model Y launched in 2020.
And apart from the Cyber truck, which has struggled to find
mainstream appeal and has been recalled 8 times, Tesla has not
introduced a truly new product in years.
And that brings us back to Q4 delivery consensus.
Tesla published those numbers because it knows the actual
results will be weak, and by setting expectations low, the
company makes it easier to claim a win.
Even if deliveries fall 15% year over year.
The strategy has limits. A second consecutive year of
declining sales is hard to spin as growth, and Tesla deliver
fewer cars in 2025 than it did in 2024 and fewer in 2024 than
it did in 2023. The cheaper standard models have
not reversed the trend. The incentives have not reversed
the trend. Analysts expect sales to recover
in 2026 as the standard versions help test the compete in a post
subsidy market. But the recovery isn't
guaranteed. The question is whether the robo
taxi and AI narrative can sustain the stock price while
the core business shrinks. And for now, investors seem to
believe it can. Tesla stock is up even as
deliveries fall. That bet will eventually be
tested. The numbers test the release
this week suggest the test is getting closer.
Hey, thank you so much for listening today.
I really do appreciate your support.
If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow
button on whatever podcast plat thing on right now, I greatly
appreciate it. It helps out the show
tremendously. And you'll nip and each episode
is about 10 minutes to get you caught up quickly.
And please, if you support the show, evenmore.com/stage Zero
and please take care of yourselves and each other and
I'll see you tomorrow.