Tesla Press Release Predicts Sales Decline

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Tesla did something yesterday that no one at CleanTechnica’s palatial global headquarters ever remembers it doing in the past. On the press releases page of its website, it published quarterly and year-end sales predictions by several financial analysts, including Daiwa, DB, Wedbush, OpCo, Canaccord, Baird, Wolfe, Exane, GS, RBC, Evercore ISI, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Jefferies, Needham & Co, HSBC, Cantor Fitzgerald, and William Blair.

Then it did something really weird. It said, “Tesla does not endorse any information, recommendations, or conclusions made by the analysts.” Make of that what you will.

The gist of this is that the estimated deliveries in 2025 are 1,640,752 — down 8 percent from last year — while in 2026 the estimate is for 1,750,243 cars sold, with 2,010,459 deliveries expected in 2027, 2,350,451 in 2028, and 3,019,90 in 2029. Estimates for the energy storage side of the business are 45.9 GWh this year, 63.9 GWh next year, then 87.7 GWh in 2027, 112.5 GWh in 2028, and 141.8 GWh in 2029.

Writing for Bloomberg, Craig Trudell said the consensus numbers for this year were well below Bloomberg’s own estimate. Tesla puts the expected deliveries for Q4 at 422,850 cars. Bloomberg estimates that number at 440,907 vehicles.

Trudell writes, “While Tesla’s investor relations team has compiled sales estimates and shared averages selectively with analysts and investors for years, the company hasn’t published the figures in the past.”

Gary Black, co-founder of Future Fund Advisors, wrote on X. “This is highly unusual. Obviously, someone at TSLA wanted the IR-derived consensus to be distributed as widely as possible,” leading him to speculate that Tesla’s Q4 deliveries are likely to be more in the range of 420,000 vehicles.

Tesla is on course for its second consecutive drop in annual vehicle sales, with the company compiling an average estimate of 1.6 million deliveries, down more than 8 percent from a year earlier.

Its estimates for the next three years are also lower than averages compiled by Bloomberg. Trudell notes that sales of Tesla automobiles began falling after the political antics of Elon Musk during the last presidential campaign and in the early months of the new administration.

The Musk Derangement Effect

In October, four researchers at Yale University — Kenneth Gillingham, Matthew Kotchen, James Levinsohn, and Barry Nalebuff — published a study that examined the effects of Musk’s political activities on Tesla sales. Below is the abstract from that study, which is 29 pages long. Readers are encouraged to click the link above to view the entire report.

“We study how Elon Musk’s polarizing and partisan actions have impacted Tesla vehicle sales in the United States. Using county-level, monthly data on new vehicle registrations, we leverage how changes in vehicle sales over time diverge across counties with differing shares of Democratic and Republican voters. Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67–83% higher (emphasis added), equivalent to 1–1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers’ electric and hybrid vehicles 17–22% because of substitution, and undermined California’s progress in meeting its zero-emissions vehicle target.”

In their conclusion to the study, which had not been peer reviewed, the authors wrote, “This study highlights just how impactful a CEO’s partisan actions can be. We show that Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and CEO of the most valuable automaker by market capitalization, had a dramatic effect on Tesla sales due to his politically partisan activities unrelated to Tesla’s core business.”

All of which begs the question, what does Tesla plan to do about its CEO, who appears to be actively suppressing the sale of its cars and also failing to develop a plan to introduce new models? BYD introduced at least 9 new models in 2025. Tesla has not introduced a new model in almost 5 years and has no intention of doing so, apparently. Chatter about new factories in Mexico and India has faded completely away.

What seems clear is that Musk has put all his chips on robotaxis, humanoid robots, and AI. The car business is now in his rearview mirror and has been for a while. All of which has the nattering nabobs at CleanTechnica headquarters muttering dark thoughts about the future of the company and wondering when the Tesla calliope will crash to the ground.