Tesla Missed Its Quarterly Delivery Target Again

Photo: Patrick Pleul/picture alliance (Getty Images)

Don’t get me wrong, Tesla is still dominating the electric vehicle market, but control is quickly slipping. The Austin, Texas-based automaker handed over fewer vehicles than analysts expected during the third quarter of 2024 as more compelling competition comes online in China and Europe. It doesn’t help that most of Tesla’s lineup is ancient. All of these factors together mean the company is at risk of its first-ever annual sales decline.

Tesla Had A Very Interesting Week

It’s not all bad news for Tesla, though. It announced that Q3 deliveries actually rose 6.4 percent from July to September to 462,890 vehicles. That makes it the first quarter of growth this year. However – and this is a big however – that figure fell short of estimates put forth by analysts of about 470,000 vehicles, according to Reuters.

Now, Tesla is in jeopardy of delivering fewer cars in 2024 than it did in 2023. In fact, it would need to deliver a record-breaking 516,344 vehicles in the fourth quarter to just maintain its 2023 delivery level at 1.81 million vehicles, Reuters reports. Listen, I’m not a betting man, but I just do not see this happening. None of this is terribly shocking. I mean, Tesla has controlled such a large part of the EV pie for so long, that sort of market domination is pretty impossible to keep up – especially as other automakers put out more and more compelling products and people begin to shy away from EVs in general.

In total, Tesla says built 469,796 vehicles in the third quarter of 2024. The vast majority of them were Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers – 443,668 (439,975 were delivered) of them, to be exact. The other 26,128 (22,915 were delivered) were split among the Model S sedan, Model X crossover and the Cybertruck. Annoyingly, Tesla doesn’t break down its production numbers any further than that.

This news comes about a week before what could be the most important day Tesla has had in a really long time – the (theoretical) reveal of its Robotaxi thing on October 10. Depending on how that all goes, Tesla will either be set up for success or continue to fall closer and closer to the rest of the competition as the year goes on. Tesla will also be releasing its full Q3 financial report on October 23, so we’ll get even more answers then.