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.
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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.
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