Tesla sold 418k cars in Q4 which is 16% fewer than Q4 last year and a bit lower than the consensus estimate of 422k. This is slightly mitigated by a lot of extra cars sold in Q3 just before the tax incentive went away. They sold 1.79M cars in 2024 and 1.64M in 2025 so a 9% decrease year to year.
Their energy storage business did much better than expected. I don’t think that’s a major percentage of their overall revenue.
Of course it’s largely about margins. We will know that on Jan 28th. The stock is down 1.8% at the moment.
in 2022, about 10 million EVs were sold globally. in 2025 it was closer to 20 million.
tesla meanwhile has seen their sales flatline the last 3 years. sales peaked in 2023 and have been slowly declining. at about 1.6 million a year.
the % of EVs that are tesla keeps going down. in theory, by 2030 the world may be buying 30-40 million EVs a year but tesla will still only be about 1.5 million of those.
BYD officially outsold tesla in 2025, and BYD stock is worth $12 a share with a market cap of 120 billion.
teslas self driving debut in austin was a disaster.
their bipedal robots are controlled by human operators to give the illusion that they are more advanced than they really are.
I think that’s an overstatement but it certainly wasn’t a smooth start. They are doing well enough now. During the big power outage in SF, the Waymos were dead in the water and the Robos still worked.
The FSD is doing very well and is already getting approval in the EU countries. That is a big source of revenue and shouldn’t be ignored.
The robots are objectively ridiculous.
I doubt that Tesla cars will ever be as niche as you suppose. The Y was still the top selling car in 2025. That said, if the next Administration allows Chinese EVs to be sold here, it’s going to be a tough road ahead.
Tesla announced their results and slightly beat quarterly estimates but the big shocker is that they are killing the Model S (sports car) and Model X (minivan) so that the Fremont factory can build Optimus Robots. In fairness, they (along with the Cybertruck) were only 3% of their deliveries last year but this is still surprising to me. There will be a hiring boost, not layoffs, in Fremont in the short term.
2025 was their first annual decline ever. Shares are down 2.5% at the moment while the overall market is down 0.7%.
It came as the company’s financial disclosures painted a stark picture of the troubles facing its EV business, which saw sales decline for the second year in a row in 2025.
Tesla beat Wall Street’s expectations, but reported its first-ever decline in annual revenue and said profits fell by 46% last year, while revenue from car sales fell by 11% year-over-year in the last quarter.
That CNBC article says, “Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.” It also mentions that the Fremont factory will be able to produce a million robots annually. So what is the market for these robots? Where are they going to sell that many?
Regarding the Optimus robots, it’s not at all clear to me that there’s that much there. I’m no expert but from what I can tell, Boston Dynamics has demonstrated similar robots for a long time, as did Honda with the Asimo robot. Meanwhile Tesla has three vehicle models that aren’t selling all that much and, from what I’ve read, aren’t as nice as those from other companies.
In short, I have no idea why the company’s market cap is as high as it is.
It’s not like FSD had all that much there, either, but that didn’t stop Musk from pitching it year after year for his billions. He just has to keep generating hype, pivoting from one thing to another, to always stay just one step ahead of reality. Dreamers like him need not be bothered by pesky little things like the ability to actually deliver.
I mentioned Boston Dynamics; the company was bought by Hyundai five years ago for about a billion dollars. Prior to that, it was owned by Softbank, and a division of Google before that. They’ve been developing similar robots for a long time, and yet the company seems to have bounced from owner to owner. And Tesla plans to make a million of their robots each year?
The main problem with humanoid robots like Optimus is the difficulty of duplicating the human hand. Not in looks, that’s easy. But all the things hands can do are impossible to duplicate with the current state of the art, or for that matter, the foreseeable state of the art.
This subject probably deserves its own thread. In fact, I bet there’s already one out there.
Killing the S/X models makes sense as it’s a 14-year-old platform. That’s ancient in car years. What’s insane is not having a replacement in the works. The 3/Y have been recently refreshed but as noted, sales are dropping. The Cybertruck is a disaster, the Roadster 2.0 is vaporware, the Cybercab relies on technology that doesn’t yet exist, and Optimus is a pipe dream. xAI is a mediocre chatbot.
Now that Tesla has shown people don’t want their EVs, and their self driving isn’t working, they need a new idea to pitch to shareholders saying ‘the company will be making trillions in revenue in 5 years with new technology X’ but technology X that will generate trillions in revenue keeps changing when Musk can’t produce a competitive product.
What happens when the dozen other companies working on bipedal robots end up selling more robots than tesla? What happens when people prefer not to buy a Tesla robot due to Musks ties to fascism? If/when I buy a bipedal robot, I’m not buying one from Tesla.
Not only that, but bipedal robots are going to be widespread when they happen. As a result of the competition, the margins may be minor since there is so much competition. It could be like buying a flat screen TV. Everyone has one, but the margins are tiny because a dozen companies are constantly trying to undercut each other. Its not like Zenith has a corner on the flat screen TV market and can charge huge amounts for an inferior product. If they try to do that, one of the dozen other companies will undercut them.
When that happens, they’ll pivot to yet another ‘new technology X’ that Musk will use to con shareholders into overvaluing the stock by saying ‘in 5 years, we will make trillions with new technology X’.
Meanwhile other companies will produce more and better versions of ‘new technology X’ and those companies will have a market cap of 100 billion while Tesla has a market cap of 2 trillion.
According to a chart in Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings report showing cumulative robotaxi miles, the fleet has traveled approximately 500,000 miles as of November 2025. That works out to roughly one crash every 55,000 miles.
For comparison, human drivers in the United States average approximately one police-reported crash every 500,000 miles, according to NHTSA data.
That means Tesla’s robotaxis are crashing at a rate 9 times higher than the average human driver.
However, that figure doesn’t include non-police-reported incidents. When adding those, or rather an estimate of those, humans are closer to 200,000 miles between crashes, which is still a lot better than Tesla’s robotaxi in Austin.
Waymo is supposedly safer than a human driver by comparison.