Tesla's Deliveries Are Down Sharply. Is it Time to Worry?

Globe and Mail

02-04-2025

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported Wednesday that it delivered just over 336,000 electric vehicles worldwide in the first quarter of 2025, a number that fell well short of most Wall Street estimates.
The news followed a quarter in which Tesla's stock fell 36%, its worst quarterly performance since 2022, as protests and boycotts in the U.S. and Europe drove potential EV buyers to look elsewhere.
Tesla's stock moves can sometimes seem disconnected from the company's underlying fundamentals. But lately, those fundamentals really do seem to be slipping.
Tesla deliveries were down sharply and there's no silver lining visible
Tesla said it delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter, and that it produced 362,615 -- about 7.7% more than it delivered.
That deliveries total was roughly 14% below Wall Street estimates. Analysts polled by Bloomberg had expected deliveries of a bit over 390,000. (Earlier estimates, in January, had forecast first-quarter deliveries of more than 460,000, Bloomberg noted.)
Tesla's first-quarter deliveries were also down about 13% from a year earlier and down 32% from the fourth quarter of 2024.
But that wasn't all the bad news.
Tesla breaks deliveries numbers into two groups: One for Models 3 and Y, and one for "other models", including the older Models S and X and -- significantly -- the Cybertruck.
Model 3/Y deliveries were down 12% year over year. But deliveries of "other models" were down 46% from the fourth quarter of 2024, suggesting that sales of the company's controversial pickup truck may have stalled.
In a brief statement, Tesla said that the changeover of the Model Y's production lines -- to produce an updated version of the vehicle -- "led to the loss of several weeks of production in Q1".
That might help to explain why Tesla produced 16.3% fewer vehicles than it did in the first quarter of 2024. But it doesn't fully explain the drop in deliveries.
The decline in Tesla deliveries is probably all about Elon
To say the least, CEO Elon Musk's dabbling in politics has not been popular with potential EV buyers in the U.S. and Europe.
In the first quarter, Tesla was hit by waves of protests, boycotts, and even some vandalism of its cars and facilities, all motivated by the spending cuts that Musk has been ordering as part of President Donald Trump's second administration.
His comments on European politics haven't helped. Across 15 European markets, Tesla's share of the market for EVs declined from 17.9% a year ago to just 9.3% in the first quarter of 2024, according to data from EU-EVs.com.
Still, there might be other reasons to own Tesla now. Ardent Tesla bulls have argued for years that there's much more to the company than EVs, though to date that "much more" -- including robotaxis and humanoid robots -- has seemed to amount more to promises than products. Musk's visions around those new businesses might yet pay off, though both face stiff competition and are likely to suffer from the same political pressures hurting Tesla sales.
Additionally, Politico reported today that Musk might soon have a less active role in the government, returning to his businesses. The market cheered that news, reversing the stock's course from a dip of more than 6% to a gain of more than 5%.
But at least for the moment, it seems clear that Tesla-the-car-company is no longer in growth mode. That should be a worry given the company's enormous valuation premium relative to other mature automakers (its price-to-sales ratio is more than 10 times that of legacy automakers Ford and General Motors and roughly four times that of fellow EV maker Rivian). Invest carefully.
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