Tesla deliveries

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Tesla Q2 2025 sales dropped more than 13% year over year

Tesla sold 384,122 electric vehicles during the months of April, May, and June of this year. That’s a double-digit decline compared to the same three months of last year—itself no peach of a quarter for a car company with a stratospheric valuation based on the supposition of eternal sales growth.

The automaker faces a number of problems that are getting in the way of that perpetual growth. In some regions, CEO Elon Musk’s right-wing politics have driven away customers in droves. Another issue is the company’s small, infrequently updated model lineup, which is a problem even in parts of the world that care little about US politics.

Most Tesla sales are of the Model 3 midsize electric sedan and the Model Y, its electric crossover. For Q2 2025, Tesla sold 373,728 of the Models 3 and Y across North America, Europe, China, and its other markets. But that’s an 11.5 percent decrease compared to the 422,405 Models 3 and Y that Tesla sold in Q2 2024, a quarter that itself saw a year-on-year decline.

The rest of Tesla’s sales are a mix of the increasingly elderly Model S sedan and Model X SUV, as well as the US-only Cybertruck. Here, the decline is far more severe—with just 10,394 sold, that’s a 22.5 percent decrease on Q2 2024. Tesla does not break these numbers out with more granularity, so it’s unclear just how few Cybertrucks were among that, but it does bring to mind Musk’s claims that Tesla would sell between 250,000 and 500,000 Cybertrucks a year.

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Tesla posts disappointing production and sales numbers for Q2 2024

line goes up —

Sales fell by 5 percent, with production cut by more.

Tesla Inc. vehicles in a parking lot after arriving at a port in Yokohama, Japan, on Monday, May 10, 2021.

Enlarge / For some time now, Tesla has produced more cars than it has sold. This past quarter, that changed.

Toru Hanai/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Tesla published its quarterly production and delivery numbers yesterday afternoon, and anyone hoping that the last three months have marked a return to growth will be disappointed. For Q2 2024, the automaker built 418,831 electric vehicles, a 14.4 percent decrease on Q2 2023. The drop in sales wasn’t quite as bad—in Q2 2024 Tesla sold 443,956 EVs, a 4.8 percent decline, year on year.

After several boom years, even the hype-generating powers of Tesla CEO Elon Musk weren’t able to stave off the realities of a small and stagnant product line and a brutal price war, particularly in China. The first quarter of 2024 saw Tesla’s deliveries fall by 8.5 percent, the first time this number hadn’t gone up since 2020.

Later in April, we saw the effect on Tesla’s balance sheet. Profits fell by more than half, and profit margins slumped to just 5.5 percent, barely half the industry average.

In fact, there’s evidence that Musk’s vast reach through social media may be directly harming the Tesla brand at this point. A poll of more than 7,500 New York Times readers, collected earlier this year, revealed that many had a problem being associated with Tesla and Musk, with one comparing driving a Tesla to “a giant red MAGA hat.”

There may be a bright spot in the production and delivery numbers. Tesla delivered 422,405 Models 3 and Y between April and June, but it only built 386,576 at its factories in the US, Germany, and China. For many quarters, Tesla has been building more cars than it has delivered, raising questions and inspiring open source satellite image analysts to go looking for inventory from space. Now, perhaps, the automaker is clearing some of that excess inventory and matching production to more realistic expectations of demand.

In a brief text note to investors, Tesla notes that its solar energy and storage division had a bumper quarter, deploying 9.4 GWh of energy storage. This could see the division contribute up to 20 percent of Tesla’s total revenues for the quarter.

Musk’s reaction to the decline in Tesla’s automotive sales business has been to pivot. Perhaps bored of the realities of a low-margin industry surrounded by cutthroat rivals, the erratic CEO now says the future of the company will be humanoid robots, based on annual projections that bear little to no resemblance to objective reality as we know it.

Tesla investors obviously don’t mind; the company’s share price has risen by more than 8 percent since the market opened at 9: 30 am.

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