Those qualified for the tax benefit, but manufacturers can’t count them until they’re actually delivered. However, even with that, Q4 will be lower due to Q3 robbing some sales.
I don’t think shaming is really the cause of the general Tesla sales decrease. Instead, it’s that Musk = Tesla in many people’s minds and he’s alienated pretty much all those of the Democratic party. I read a few years ago that around 60% of Tesla purchasers were Democrats. So it should not be at all surprising that their sales are cratering. I’m surprised they haven’t fallen faster.
Chinese EVs are effectively not allowed in the US but when they are they will probably take over unless they are tarriffed into oblivion. Tesla is supposed to have a budget model in 2027.
I’m not sure. Australia doesn’t tariff chinese EVs. Looking at BYD’s Australian website, their cars run about 20-40k USD out the door. That’s pretty good, and I think their Seal model (which is equivalent to the Tesla model 3) is about 33k vs about 43k for the tesla model 3.
However, Tesla still makes up about 50% of the Ev market in Australia, while BYD only makes up 15%.
You have to enter a postcode to see prices, so here is a list of Sydney postcodes. I’ve just been using the postcode 2000.
Also 1.51 Australian dollars = $1 USD
I’m not sure if Tesla is coasting on name recognition or what, but they still make up half of EV sales in Australia which doesn’t tariff Chinese EVs.
The New York Times article (gift link) on this ridiculous idea says, “Tesla’s board sees the plan as a way to motivate him as he transforms the company from primarily selling electric cars to making robots and self-driving taxis.” So his existing ownership of (Googling) roughly 14% of the company doesn’t motivate him?
For the last 3 years (2023-2025) Tesla sales have stalled at a little under 2 million cars a year. The rapid growth in sales ended in 2023. They went from 100k sales in 2017, to 400k sales in 2020, to almost 2 million in 2023, but it hasn’t grown since.
Also in China, people are abandoning Tesla in favor of Chinese made EVs. In nations where Chinese EVs are available, there is also a risk of Chinese EVs cutting into market share. Also pretty much every mature car company has EVs now, and they do not have the stench of fascism on them.
As far as self driving, I thought that didn’t go over well in Austin. Other companies have superior self driving. And other companies have bipedal robots too.
Sorry for the triple post but here are some of the metrics that Tesla has to meet to get the full bonus (cut and paste from Google)
To receive his full $1 trillion bonus, Elon Musk must achieve several performance milestones, including delivering a total of 20 million vehicles by 2035, along with other goals like boosting Tesla’s valuation to $8.6 trillion, and selling one million robotaxis and one million AI robots. The 20 million car target represents an average of only 1.2 million cars per year, a pace well below Tesla’s 2024 sales
Something’s wrong with their math. Assuming the incentive is 20 million car sales between now and 2035, that should be 2 million cars per year. Perhaps the incentive is for the total Tesla sales since the company started, which would probably make their math correct, but I don’t see why the incentive would be structured that way.
At any rate, there was a recent report that Musk’s political involvement cost Tesla 1 million car sales between Oct 2022 (when he bought Twitter) and April 2025. I posted a link in another thread, but am too lazy to look it up again.
The Tesla board members who voted to reward Musk are very rich people because the value of Tesla stock in their possession is grotesquely inflated. They all know this, buy they’re also afraid - for good reason - that the moment they show even the slightest lack of faith in Elmo, the bubble will burst and they’ll lose everything. So they’re ride-or-die, all the way.
Of course, they all know the bubble will burst at some point, but given the choice between losing billions now and losing billions later, they’ll always choose later. Après nous, le déluge.
Exactly correct. As long as the stock has such a high value they get tremendous financial benefits even without selling. For example they can use it to borrow against. This cycle is well known: buy, borrow, die.